I've spent many hours playing TF2 over the years. (I was a fan of TF, so I bought TF2 full price when it was released.) Occasionally, there will be a technical issue with Steam where it can't access your 'earned' items, so you get a default loadout. In other words the same items you get when you first start playing. And I've got enough experience/skill that I'm able to do quite well, usually scoring in the middle of the pack with that gear. That's my proof that they are doing it right. Experience/skill is not handicapped by not having the latest and greatest.
I really hate to play Spy with the stock loadout... I'm far too used to the Dead Ringer by now, having used it for... er... probably over 300 hours now (I've clocked nearly 800 hours as Spy in the last 4 years). Which is funny, since I originally thought the DR was trash and that I'd never use it.
Most of my other primary loadouts would be fine with stocks, though. The only other ones that might give me problems are Pyro (Degreaser, Flare Gun, Axtinguisher/Homewrecker) and offensive Engineer (Gunslinger is key).
. ..Free players need only buy 1 item from the Mann Co. store to move up. I believe the cheapest item in the game hovers around.25 cents? Maybe 50 cents..It's still exceptionally cheap. Once again the upgrade weapons are accessible through crafting and achievements. Achievements can be done on achievement servers and would speed the play up all together. The argument is hollow because for some reason detractors desperately want to make this a greater ideological argument than it is. Valve made a great game and found the revenue stream propped up by giving it away and selling items there after.
I actually addressed this in another one of my posts. One of the guys in one of my (now former) gaming groups actually gave me Professor Speks when I pointed this out to them; they used the remaining $4.51 on some Indie games on Steam they were interested in.
I agree. Although I have found certain other situations that the Direct Hit is good for: Killing sentries. The DH's extra damage, combined with the fact that sentries don't move...
The Cow Mangler's reduced damage against sentries is a major side effect, as is the slower reload time. Also, the charge shot is basically useless as you do as much damage as it does in two standard rockets... although it is neat seeing enemies catch on fire. The disable buildings mechanic is only useful if you're working with teammates to take out a sentry or are carrying the regular shotgun as well, due to the reduced damage versus buildings. Oh, and if you didn't kill the Engineer, he can repair it faster than you can damage it.
(Side note: The Righteous Bison also shares the 80% less damage against buildings drawback.)
So, is that 12x the revenue at release? Or 12x the revenue compared to when they went free2play which was after the game had been out for years and basically wasn't even for sale anymore?
Actually, it was still in stores, both standalone and as part of The Orange Box. At least they were in Best Buy a year ago (I don't buy that many boxed games any more...).
The paid content doesn't give you a huge advantage over the free content.
So it gives you a minor advantage over the free content?
We're talking about TF2 still, right?
The thing about "paid content" in TF2 is that you can get any of the non-cosmetic items over time, as you get 6-8 random weapons per week. There are also 27 weapons (3 per class) that can be unlocked through achievements. Weapons can also be crafted, but I'll be honest: It's better to wait for a random drop, because 6-8 items a week makes it take a long time to craft even one weapon, let alone multiple.
The major problem with f2p accounts is that there are restrictions on them until you buy your first item from the store. In USD, the cheapest item is $0.49, but Valve has a minimum of $5 for adding funds to your Steam wallet... however, you can use the remaining $4.51 towards anything on Steam, including games.
My problem with freemium even when done "right" or whatever you want to call it is still is unacceptable to me at a fundamental level:
I -do- not want to be confronted with real life purchasing decisions every few minutes while playing games. Period. I don't want to be dropped into a "store" everytime I die. I don't want to be prompted to buy something everytime I start up, and every time I quit, and every time a new level loads.
I've never had a TF2 free account, but from my understanding is that it bugs you once when you start the game with one of the game's characters having a text bubble mentioning it on the main menu. This is the only time the store is mentioned. other than having a button on the main menu for it. This text doesn't appear if you've ever bought anything from the store or bought TF2 itself from a store (or bought the Orange Box from a store or through Steam).
That saod, I don't mind expansion packs. 20 new tracks and 5 new cars for $10 bucks or whatever is perfectly fine. But don't advertise it in the game so that I have to explicitly decline buying it every time I play... and don't break it up into micro-transactions... $1 per track, 1$ per car... I don't want to excert the mental process of deciding is this car worth a buck, is this car worth a buck, is this car worth a buck to me... I just don't.
When TF2 has new weaponry come out, they sell them as sets along with related cosmetic items, if you really want to pay for them. The catch is that they're ridiculously overpriced... and usually they're added to the drop system at the same time they come out. So, unless you really want the cosmetic items, there's little point in buying them.
And don't have me competing with people in the expansion pack cars if they are anything more than just skins.
Remember even "Situationally better" is still better if you get any control over the situation, which of course, unless you are an idiot... you always do.
I believe I've already addressed this point.
But more to the point, the way items are balanced in TF2, a lot of the times they're different rather than strictly better. One of the more controversial items from the Christmas 2011 update was the Spy-cicle.
The Spy-cicle is a melee weapon for the Spy... all Spy melee weapons do instant-kill backstabs. Note: Spies can disguise as enemy players, which becomes important in the description below.
The Spy-cicle prevents the usual death screams from players, but instead makes a freezing sound and leaves an ice statue behind instead of a corpse. It can also be used to prevent fire damage (and makes the extinguishing sound when this happens) for 2 seconds at the expense of the Spy losing the Spy-cicle for 15 seconds.
The thing is that its upsides and downsides are tied together. Sure, I can prevent fire at the expense of being able to instant-kill b
One of the major themes in alternate weapon in TF2 that they aren't necessarily better than the weapons they replace.
There are two weapons in the entire game that have clear upgrades. Those are the Medic's Bonesaw and the Soldier's Shovel.
I'll use the Soldier's Rocket Launchers as an example of weapons that are sidegrades. The rocket launchers are:
Rocket Launcher - 4 Rockets per clip. 20 rockets total. Rockets shoot slowly. Rockets have a good amount of splash area.
Direct Hit - 4 Rockets per clip. 20 rockets total. Rockets shoot quickly. Rockets do 20% higher damage. Rockets mini-crit airborne enemies. Rockets have 70% smaller splash area.
Black Box - 3 Rockets per clip. 20 rockets total, rockets shoot slowly. Rrockets have a good amount of splash area. Player gains 15 health per person hit.
The Liberty Launcher - 3 Rockets per clip. 20 rockets total. Rockets shoot quickly. Rockets have a good amount of splash area.
The Original - Identical to Rocket Launcher, but fires from the center instead of from the right.
Cow Mangler 5000 - 5 Rockets per clip. Unlimited ammo. Slower reload time. Rockets shoot slowly. Rockets have a good amount of splash area. Can not do critical hits. When your clip is full, right-click to shoot a charge shot (takes 3 seconds to fire, during which you move at 1/4 speed) which does mini-crits and sets enemies in its splash range on fire... but uses the entire clip of 5 rockets. All shots do 80% less damage versus buildings, but a charged shot disables buildings for 4 seconds.
Please people stop buying stupid hats and stuff for TF2. Every single time you dump money on that game it's less incentive for valve to spend money on other, one time cash cow, games like HL3 or HL2:EP3. Why should they spend massive resources making a game people only buy once when they can get idiots spending real money on digital hats from now until valve runs out of pixels.
Most (all?) new items these days are community submitted, and the majority of those are cosmetic items. In other words, it's easy money for Valve because they don't even do most of the work.
This is probably a big reason why GoDaddy has started marketing the.co domain. The US can't assert jurisdiction over Columbia's national domain.
Of course, GoDaddy is the registrar that will just cut off your domain just because a big company asked it to, so trusting GoDaddy would be like trusting your enemy with a gun at your head.
2. permission to use the software in spite of copyright and patent protections is a license;
Assuming US law, let me fix that for you:
2. permission to use the software in spite of copyright and patent protections is unnecessary.
Copyrights due to Title 17 S 117 (part a1 for the most part), patents because you don't need a patent license to use goods created by someone else.
As much hate as Congress gets, Title 17 S 117a1's wording is very flexible. For instance, if the instructions for using a program say you have to install it to a hard drive, that copy is "created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner." Same goes for the copy in RAM when you load it.
It does say "and that it is used in no other manner," which, strictly speaking, makes reverse engineering it illegal, but I seem to recall other laws protect that.
The fact that Sony participated assisted said universities with setting up these clusters
They did? Do you have a citation stating that Sony was helping set these clusters up?
The earlier PS3s, all the way up until they introduced the Slim models (and possibly later), were sold by Sony as loss leaders... they intended to recoup that money selling games since they gets license money for every PS3 game produced. Therefore, intentionally selling PS3s in large quantities to places that weren't going to buy games would be just stupid.
Shepherd compared three digital music files, including a Red Hot Chili Peppers song downloaded in the Mastered for iTunes format with a CD version of the same song, and said there were no differences.
That'd be a good thing if there were no differences between the CD version and the audio versions. However, what the article actually says is
After his comparison of the three digital music files, Shepherd says there was a sonic difference between the Mastered for iTunes waveform and the CD waveform. He says the Mastered for iTunes and AAC-encoded files didn't reveal any differences, adding that this proves to him Apple's Mastered for iTunes isn't any different than a standard AAC file from Apple's iTunes store.
In other words, the Mastered for iTunes version is basically identical to the standard AAC version, and both are different from the CD version.
While the others are indeed wrong, if you'd read the linked article (or even the link text), you'd know that badges was correct, since it was linking to the article "Do Online Educational Badges Threaten Conventional Education Models?"
I recall UT2K4 does the same, but authenticates serials by proxy: The clients send their (hashed) keys to the server, the server contacts Epic, checks the key-hash is valid, kicks if not. It is nice enough though that if it can't get a response (quite common at quick lan setups, there may be no internet connection) it'll just let the game continue. You can also quite easily disable it's ability to contact the auth server (It's an INI file edit), but this does also mean you can't advertise on the public metaserver.
Valve's servers do the same thing, but with Steam IDs instead of serial numbers.
Except that Valve's servers don't have the option to disable talking to the master server except via a pirated server.
Then you have games like Team Fortress 2, where you have multiple "master" servers in play... there's the one that authenticates players, the one that authenticates servers, and the one that talks to both clients and servers to control players inventories.
no, it isn't right to use these quotes when Apache 2.2 (which is what is currently available for production) gets destroyed by nginx / lighty in specific tasks by upto 800%.
I think you're right with this, basically the news is that CUPS gets a new lead developer as the former only continues to develop his product for a practically non-existent share of office printers that only accept input in Apples latest proprietary format.
In other words " We are giving the user what they asks us to give them, that can turn it off." This isn't an arms race, it isn't a war, it isn't..well anything of note.
Except Google isn't giving the user what they ask for, they're attempting to make it so every site you visit transmits at least some data to Google for the sake of "convenience," which incidentally is something Facebook, another site well known for its "privacy" does.
Having said that, assuming Safari for iOS has the same settings as Safari for Mac does, you can turn on third-party cookies on in the Safari Preferences under Security. I believe the setting is to set Cookies to "Always" instead of "Only from sites I visit."
However, Google decided that wasn't good enough and wanted it to work despite the browser being set to disable cookies from sites other than the one you're visiting. Which, btw, is a hole in the Same Origin Policy that browsers are enforcing, but apparently not on form submissions.
Google says this mischaracterizes what the code does, claiming it simply enables 'features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalized ads and other content â" such as the ability to âoe+1â things that interest them.'
In other words: "We found the wall inconvenient, so we simply tunneled under it."
Yes, Google, which part of "bypass" do you not understand?
What you're doing now is going to result in an arms race between you and several of the major web browser authors, including, perhaps, your own Chromium project.
What's next in this arms race, the inability for iframes to have forms? The inability for JavaScript to submit forms? The inability for JavaScript to run in iframes?
Yes, although they call it "preparation tax" instead of sales tax where I live, because food items are non-taxable, so they tax it as a service instead.
Only if you're breaking the law. That $30 only gives you a single upgrade.
I don't even need to consult the EULA for that one, since it's a simple copyright violation, but just in case you want to try to use the EULA to weasel out of it...
See: OSX 10.7 Lion EULA (PDF) sections 2.A. or 2.B.i. depending on your acquisition method.
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I've spent many hours playing TF2 over the years. (I was a fan of TF, so I bought TF2 full price when it was released.) Occasionally, there will be a technical issue with Steam where it can't access your 'earned' items, so you get a default loadout. In other words the same items you get when you first start playing. And I've got enough experience/skill that I'm able to do quite well, usually scoring in the middle of the pack with that gear. That's my proof that they are doing it right. Experience/skill is not handicapped by not having the latest and greatest.
I really hate to play Spy with the stock loadout... I'm far too used to the Dead Ringer by now, having used it for... er... probably over 300 hours now (I've clocked nearly 800 hours as Spy in the last 4 years). Which is funny, since I originally thought the DR was trash and that I'd never use it.
Most of my other primary loadouts would be fine with stocks, though. The only other ones that might give me problems are Pyro (Degreaser, Flare Gun, Axtinguisher/Homewrecker) and offensive Engineer (Gunslinger is key).
. . .Free players need only buy 1 item from the Mann Co. store to move up. I believe the cheapest item in the game hovers around .25 cents? Maybe 50 cents..It's still exceptionally cheap. Once again the upgrade weapons are accessible through crafting and achievements. Achievements can be done on achievement servers and would speed the play up all together. The argument is hollow because for some reason detractors desperately want to make this a greater ideological argument than it is. Valve made a great game and found the revenue stream propped up by giving it away and selling items there after.
I actually addressed this in another one of my posts. One of the guys in one of my (now former) gaming groups actually gave me Professor Speks when I pointed this out to them; they used the remaining $4.51 on some Indie games on Steam they were interested in.
(btw, if it wasn't obvious, I still play TF2)
I agree. Although I have found certain other situations that the Direct Hit is good for: Killing sentries. The DH's extra damage, combined with the fact that sentries don't move...
The Cow Mangler's reduced damage against sentries is a major side effect, as is the slower reload time. Also, the charge shot is basically useless as you do as much damage as it does in two standard rockets... although it is neat seeing enemies catch on fire. The disable buildings mechanic is only useful if you're working with teammates to take out a sentry or are carrying the regular shotgun as well, due to the reduced damage versus buildings. Oh, and if you didn't kill the Engineer, he can repair it faster than you can damage it.
(Side note: The Righteous Bison also shares the 80% less damage against buildings drawback.)
So, is that 12x the revenue at release? Or 12x the revenue compared to when they went free2play which was after the game had been out for years and basically wasn't even for sale anymore?
Actually, it was still in stores, both standalone and as part of The Orange Box. At least they were in Best Buy a year ago (I don't buy that many boxed games any more...).
The paid content doesn't give you a huge advantage over the free content.
So it gives you a minor advantage over the free content?
We're talking about TF2 still, right?
The thing about "paid content" in TF2 is that you can get any of the non-cosmetic items over time, as you get 6-8 random weapons per week. There are also 27 weapons (3 per class) that can be unlocked through achievements. Weapons can also be crafted, but I'll be honest: It's better to wait for a random drop, because 6-8 items a week makes it take a long time to craft even one weapon, let alone multiple.
The major problem with f2p accounts is that there are restrictions on them until you buy your first item from the store. In USD, the cheapest item is $0.49, but Valve has a minimum of $5 for adding funds to your Steam wallet... however, you can use the remaining $4.51 towards anything on Steam, including games.
My problem with freemium even when done "right" or whatever you want to call it is still is unacceptable to me at a fundamental level:
I -do- not want to be confronted with real life purchasing decisions every few minutes while playing games. Period. I don't want to be dropped into a "store" everytime I die. I don't want to be prompted to buy something everytime I start up, and every time I quit, and every time a new level loads.
I've never had a TF2 free account, but from my understanding is that it bugs you once when you start the game with one of the game's characters having a text bubble mentioning it on the main menu. This is the only time the store is mentioned. other than having a button on the main menu for it. This text doesn't appear if you've ever bought anything from the store or bought TF2 itself from a store (or bought the Orange Box from a store or through Steam).
That saod, I don't mind expansion packs. 20 new tracks and 5 new cars for $10 bucks or whatever is perfectly fine. But don't advertise it in the game so that I have to explicitly decline buying it every time I play... and don't break it up into micro-transactions... $1 per track, 1$ per car... I don't want to excert the mental process of deciding is this car worth a buck, is this car worth a buck, is this car worth a buck to me... I just don't.
When TF2 has new weaponry come out, they sell them as sets along with related cosmetic items, if you really want to pay for them. The catch is that they're ridiculously overpriced... and usually they're added to the drop system at the same time they come out. So, unless you really want the cosmetic items, there's little point in buying them.
And don't have me competing with people in the expansion pack cars if they are anything more than just skins.
Remember even "Situationally better" is still better if you get any control over the situation, which of course, unless you are an idiot... you always do.
I believe I've already addressed this point.
But more to the point, the way items are balanced in TF2, a lot of the times they're different rather than strictly better. One of the more controversial items from the Christmas 2011 update was the Spy-cicle.
The Spy-cicle is a melee weapon for the Spy... all Spy melee weapons do instant-kill backstabs. Note: Spies can disguise as enemy players, which becomes important in the description below.
The Spy-cicle prevents the usual death screams from players, but instead makes a freezing sound and leaves an ice statue behind instead of a corpse. It can also be used to prevent fire damage (and makes the extinguishing sound when this happens) for 2 seconds at the expense of the Spy losing the Spy-cicle for 15 seconds.
The thing is that its upsides and downsides are tied together. Sure, I can prevent fire at the expense of being able to instant-kill b
One of the major themes in alternate weapon in TF2 that they aren't necessarily better than the weapons they replace.
There are two weapons in the entire game that have clear upgrades. Those are the Medic's Bonesaw and the Soldier's Shovel.
I'll use the Soldier's Rocket Launchers as an example of weapons that are sidegrades. The rocket launchers are:
Rocket Launcher - 4 Rockets per clip. 20 rockets total. Rockets shoot slowly. Rockets have a good amount of splash area.
Direct Hit - 4 Rockets per clip. 20 rockets total. Rockets shoot quickly. Rockets do 20% higher damage. Rockets mini-crit airborne enemies. Rockets have 70% smaller splash area.
Black Box - 3 Rockets per clip. 20 rockets total, rockets shoot slowly. Rrockets have a good amount of splash area. Player gains 15 health per person hit.
The Liberty Launcher - 3 Rockets per clip. 20 rockets total. Rockets shoot quickly. Rockets have a good amount of splash area.
The Original - Identical to Rocket Launcher, but fires from the center instead of from the right.
Cow Mangler 5000 - 5 Rockets per clip. Unlimited ammo. Slower reload time. Rockets shoot slowly. Rockets have a good amount of splash area. Can not do critical hits. When your clip is full, right-click to shoot a charge shot (takes 3 seconds to fire, during which you move at 1/4 speed) which does mini-crits and sets enemies in its splash range on fire... but uses the entire clip of 5 rockets. All shots do 80% less damage versus buildings, but a charged shot disables buildings for 4 seconds.
Please people stop buying stupid hats and stuff for TF2. Every single time you dump money on that game it's less incentive for valve to spend money on other, one time cash cow, games like HL3 or HL2:EP3.
Why should they spend massive resources making a game people only buy once when they can get idiots spending real money on digital hats from now until valve runs out of pixels.
Most (all?) new items these days are community submitted, and the majority of those are cosmetic items. In other words, it's easy money for Valve because they don't even do most of the work.
It takes a long time to get all the items with a 6-8 item cap per week.
Oh, did Valve forget to mention that free players can receive items from trades, but not give items to others?
The UN represents GOVERNMENTS, all of whome are actively oppressing their own people to one degree or another.
Fixed that for you.
This is probably a big reason why GoDaddy has started marketing the .co domain. The US can't assert jurisdiction over Columbia's national domain.
Of course, GoDaddy is the registrar that will just cut off your domain just because a big company asked it to, so trusting GoDaddy would be like trusting your enemy with a gun at your head.
2. permission to use the software in spite of copyright and patent protections is a license;
Assuming US law, let me fix that for you:
2. permission to use the software in spite of copyright and patent protections is unnecessary.
Copyrights due to Title 17 S 117 (part a1 for the most part), patents because you don't need a patent license to use goods created by someone else.
As much hate as Congress gets, Title 17 S 117a1's wording is very flexible. For instance, if the instructions for using a program say you have to install it to a hard drive, that copy is "created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner." Same goes for the copy in RAM when you load it.
It does say "and that it is used in no other manner," which, strictly speaking, makes reverse engineering it illegal, but I seem to recall other laws protect that.
The fact that Sony participated assisted said universities with setting up these clusters
They did? Do you have a citation stating that Sony was helping set these clusters up?
The earlier PS3s, all the way up until they introduced the Slim models (and possibly later), were sold by Sony as loss leaders... they intended to recoup that money selling games since they gets license money for every PS3 game produced. Therefore, intentionally selling PS3s in large quantities to places that weren't going to buy games would be just stupid.
Joel Spolsky has an article about the 1900 Leap Year bug.
From the /. summary:
Shepherd compared three digital music files, including a Red Hot Chili Peppers song downloaded in the Mastered for iTunes format with a CD version of the same song, and said there were no differences.
That'd be a good thing if there were no differences between the CD version and the audio versions. However, what the article actually says is
After his comparison of the three digital music files, Shepherd says there was a sonic difference between the Mastered for iTunes waveform and the CD waveform. He says the Mastered for iTunes and AAC-encoded files didn't reveal any differences, adding that this proves to him Apple's Mastered for iTunes isn't any different than a standard AAC file from Apple's iTunes store.
In other words, the Mastered for iTunes version is basically identical to the standard AAC version, and both are different from the CD version.
badges =/= batches
While the others are indeed wrong, if you'd read the linked article (or even the link text), you'd know that badges was correct, since it was linking to the article "Do Online Educational Badges Threaten Conventional Education Models?"
I recall UT2K4 does the same, but authenticates serials by proxy: The clients send their (hashed) keys to the server, the server contacts Epic, checks the key-hash is valid, kicks if not. It is nice enough though that if it can't get a response (quite common at quick lan setups, there may be no internet connection) it'll just let the game continue. You can also quite easily disable it's ability to contact the auth server (It's an INI file edit), but this does also mean you can't advertise on the public metaserver.
Valve's servers do the same thing, but with Steam IDs instead of serial numbers.
Except that Valve's servers don't have the option to disable talking to the master server except via a pirated server.
Then you have games like Team Fortress 2, where you have multiple "master" servers in play... there's the one that authenticates players, the one that authenticates servers, and the one that talks to both clients and servers to control players inventories.
So, is Games for Windows Live being renamed as well?
What is it now? Games for Windows? Games for Xbox Live? Hell, they already call their phone app My Xbox Live...
no, it isn't right to use these quotes when Apache 2.2 (which is what is currently available for production) gets destroyed by nginx / lighty in specific tasks by upto 800%.
Apache 2.4.1 is the version currently available for production, but don't let pesky things like facts stop you.
I think you're right with this, basically the news is that CUPS gets a new lead developer as the former only continues to develop his product for a practically non-existent share of office printers that only accept input in Apples latest proprietary format.
PDF is an Apple format? Since when?
Printers accept PDF input? Since when?
Or did you mean PostScript, also by Adobe?
In other words " We are giving the user what they asks us to give them, that can turn it off."
This isn't an arms race, it isn't a war, it isn't..well anything of note.
Except Google isn't giving the user what they ask for, they're attempting to make it so every site you visit transmits at least some data to Google for the sake of "convenience," which incidentally is something Facebook, another site well known for its "privacy" does.
Having said that, assuming Safari for iOS has the same settings as Safari for Mac does, you can turn on third-party cookies on in the Safari Preferences under Security. I believe the setting is to set Cookies to "Always" instead of "Only from sites I visit."
However, Google decided that wasn't good enough and wanted it to work despite the browser being set to disable cookies from sites other than the one you're visiting. Which, btw, is a hole in the Same Origin Policy that browsers are enforcing, but apparently not on form submissions.
Google says this mischaracterizes what the code does, claiming it simply enables 'features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalized ads and other content â" such as the ability to âoe+1â things that interest them.'
In other words: "We found the wall inconvenient, so we simply tunneled under it."
Yes, Google, which part of "bypass" do you not understand?
What you're doing now is going to result in an arms race between you and several of the major web browser authors, including, perhaps, your own Chromium project.
What's next in this arms race, the inability for iframes to have forms? The inability for JavaScript to submit forms? The inability for JavaScript to run in iframes?
do they do this in fast food places?
Yes, although they call it "preparation tax" instead of sales tax where I live, because food items are non-taxable, so they tax it as a service instead.
3.1 was an incremental update to 1990's Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions and was by no means new.
Unprofitable in the end, as Apple would sue for bussiness model copyright infringement, even if there is no such thing.
Except that Microsoft has been doing it longer.
See: Windows in the 90s/early 2000s: 3.1 in 93, 95, 98, ME in 2000, XP in 2001... 5 releases in 8 years.
Only if you're breaking the law. That $30 only gives you a single upgrade.
I don't even need to consult the EULA for that one, since it's a simple copyright violation, but just in case you want to try to use the EULA to weasel out of it...
See: OSX 10.7 Lion EULA (PDF) sections 2.A. or 2.B.i. depending on your acquisition method.