Let's remember that while games have been funded on Kickstarter for a long time, the current stream of them didn't really start until these past ten months; and only some as far back as that. We're not going to see the results of a lot of these projects until 2013. Even ones that are scheduled to be done by the end of 2012. If EA misses dates with hundred million dollar games, you can expect one or two guy projects with fifty grand or less to slip, too.
I've backed about 350 crowd-funded projects, over the last couple of years. I track them in a giant spreadsheet with as much info on each as I can, including current status (fulfilled, partially fulfilled, overdue, etc). Several have completed. A few have gone beyond the delivery date, but have maintained regular updates and contact with their backers, and most of the rest are still in-progress.
There's not really enough data to figure it out, right now. The real story will start to come together in another year. Having pledged about $7,000 USD and payed about $2,200 USD, I'm not really worried. Many projects will succeed. A few will fail. Most of those will fail, despite the best of intentions and efforts (if it happens in big titles, it'll happen for little indie projects). Maybe one or two will fail due to nefarious reasons. You can nay-say all you want, but the truth is that none of us really know, for sure (which is part of the reason why I back so many projects and track them on a spread-sheet -- I want to actually know the realities of game-related crowd-funding over the long term; not a bunch of anecdotal stuff).
Also, I sent to RockPaperShotgun weeks ago a very lengthy email that contained access to my spreadsheet as well as a long story of my philosophy of backing projects (I think of it as the poor-man's attempt to be a patron-of-the-arts) and a list of things I've learned that crowd-funding project leaders could take a lesson from, over the backing and observation of hundreds of projects. A lot of that seems like it made its way into that article (or that they've made very similar observations over their backing history).
This guy is from the UK and ran a website that hosted links to some copyrighted stuff. He didn't host the stuff itself. The US wanted him charged and extradited to the US for copyright infringement and the UK played ball pretty much right out of the gate.
In fact, with the whole "boo hoo, we want Amazon and online shops to be taxed" thing going on (supposed in an effort to force people to shop at local brick and mortar -- wich are usually NOT mom and pop stores ANYONE), I'm making more of an effort to buy online than ever before (which was already like 95%). I mean, if I'm going to buy things and be taxed directly either way, I might as well at least get it delivered to my doorstep.
Almost all of my shopping (other than groceries) is done via Amazon. I bet I've spent $30k on them in the last eleven years.
This is going to confuse the hell out of people this holiday season who are already confused enough about Nintendo's consoles as it is. Nintendo has seemingly done a poor job educating consumers, so they're left often still thinking that Wii U is just a thing you buy to add on to the Wii. They don't realize it's a separate console. This is going to compound that confusion.
That said, I'll buy one. Primarily because I'd like to have one to put in my shelf full of collected consoles and I have no idea where my actual Wii is. I haven't touched it since Boom Blox came out in 2008 and when I moved, I packed up everything in boxes and forgot which box I put the Wii in. Three years later, I haven't found it. I haven't even looked. I don't even care. Aside from a very few number of first-party titles, they just didn't offer much appeal to anyone other than maybe my mom.
My PC game collection is around 2,400 titles. My XBOX 360 collection is around 300+ titles. My PS3 collection is around 40 titles. My Wii collection is 18 titles.
Unlike Christians, I've never had a Jewish person come to my door and shove literature down my throat and generally harass me on a regular basis; nor stand out in front of a shopping center with a sign telling me the end of the world is near if I don't "repent" and subscribe to the same goofy magic man in the sky that they do.
Also, you shouldn't need to cry "my religious beliefs!" for something like this to be a valid claim. If that contributes any weight to her complaint, then that's kind of a fucking catastrophe. Kind of like when I see stories about "NUN patted down by TSA!"... because, you know, it's only a violation of valued principals in this country if you're religious (or disabled, very old, very old, or a vet -- in the case of TSA stories).
Except that you do. And if "my goofy magic man in the sky is the reason I can't do this" than ANY belief system should be acceptable for saying you can't do something or must do something.I derive my belief system from logic and from myself. My belief that I have a right to privacy and to not be tracked like cattle is at the very least as valid as someone else's belief that they can never be forced to work one day a week because magic man in sky say "no way".
Has Oprah seriously influenced your life? Other than this story, I can't think of the last time Oprah even came up in my life. She was totally a thing back in like the mid 90s, though.
And I honestly don't give a shit what anyone endorses. What, without the demonstrated contradiction of loving the Surface via an iPad, I'm supposed to think "gosh, this Oprah chick is really sincere about her endorsement!". C'mon.
The annual list of new words from the OED is just a lame promotional bit filled almost entirely with dumb words. Just ignore them and maybe they'll go away.
China has over a billion people. They have an established government and industry. They have labor groups. They have laws. They have politicians. They have activists. They have huge cities with technology and skyscrapers that put anything in America to shame. They are not some bumbling backwater in the sticks, controlled by some skeezy warlord herding children into a fire-prone dark workshop at gunpoint, to make clothing.
If there is such a major issue with work conditions over there, they have the people and means to address it, if they really feel it is such an issue. They don't need me determining how they'll do business and who they'll work for and under what conditions in their company. If this was something like I described above, then that would be a different situation. In this circumstance, there would be plenty of reasonable instances where foreign entities (activists in France, the UK, etc) could freak out over the "horrible treatment" of US employees by US companies in the US that make things they buy overseas. I mean, c'mon.
Every do-gooder busy-body over here in the states won't stop banging on them for supposed "horrid slave-treatment" of their million employees? Then we're gonna replace them with robots and now they have *no* jobs, at all!:D
This reminds me of the time I tried to use Google Latitude, but it seemed to require that you update your location in new locations. Since I live and work at home, it was always "here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here" and Latitude simply didn't grok it.
Long story short: Google discriminates against hermits.
They needed a justification to reverse things. This gave them the opportunity to "reset" things for another couple of years.
It's not dissimilar from how you have reports that "there will be a lot of storms this summer" or "there was ONE fire at ONE oil refinery in the south" and, suddenly, that is justification for gas prices to fucking skyrocket for the season (despite other refineries and despite massive reserves). In other words, not for any logistical reason. Just because "we can".
My spending profile can occasionally be erratic and I completely understand flagging really strange series of purchases (try filling up two tanks of gas and immediately going to the store and buying a pair of Nikes). It becomes a nuisance when we're talking about small purchases with places you've done a lot of business with for years. I shouldn't have to stop everything, because I pulled the trigger on today's $4.99 Steam sale. (It also doesn't help that Steam doesn't let you buy multiple copies of things at one time or to buy stuff for yourself and gifting at the same time, forcing multiple consecutive small purchases).
I've thought about finding another bank -- especially because BofA doesn't even have a presence in the state I've lived in for the last seven years), but haven't found terribly great. Not even credit unions. And of course, my problem is with their systems and processes; not their employees. They've always been pretty fantastic and as helpful as possible.
I wish their alert method was reliable, as you described. Sometimes they will immediately call my cell phone when an alert is put on my card. I don't even have to dial a number. It's FANTASTIC. Other times, I get a call a day or two later. More often than not, I never get a call. I have to call them and have the first person transfer me and wait on hold for a good fifteen minutes, then give them all my information and go through the verification process. Other times (almost never), their system offers me a chance to go to a website and verify everything through an online process. It is just unbelievably inconsistent. (Maybe that is intended as part of the design, so there isn't always a predictable method for someone stealing your credit card?).
I also wish the ShopSafe thing worked. That could potentially help a lot. The idea is that you generate a "fake" credit card that is tied to your main card and it is only usable up to a certain amount, for a certain period of time, at a specific merchant. It becomes a big hassle to maintain and, through some research, I discovered that there is absolutely nothing preventing someone from charging a ton of money on one of these fake cards, anyway (rendering the limit you put on it totally meaningless). These ShopSafe "fakes" also have generated alerts against my card, so they didn't help there.
In the end, I'd rather they be more cautious than let someone totally screw me over and steal my identity or something. I appreciate that they're doing SOMETHING. You always hear it said that banks don't give a shit about fraudulent charges, because they'll just recover the theft from all collective card owners and mitigate it for the individual. That doesn't really seem to be the case, from my experience. I just wish they'd come up with a slicker method of handling these alerts and that their system would learn more from historical data (which I thought was the whole point of it).
Maybe this new card with a sort of RSA keygen fob in another slashdot story posted after this one will alleviate some of these unnecessary alerts.
Calling your bank prior to every $2-$50 Steam purchase is a little absurd. When I bought a home theater in a single day, including a full set of B&W + Velodyne audio system, a call was totally reasonable. I also understand that several small purchases in a short period of time can be indicative of someone testing out a stolen card before going out for a real splurge with it, but not when there is an established history of purchases with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's remember that while games have been funded on Kickstarter for a long time, the current stream of them didn't really start until these past ten months; and only some as far back as that. We're not going to see the results of a lot of these projects until 2013. Even ones that are scheduled to be done by the end of 2012. If EA misses dates with hundred million dollar games, you can expect one or two guy projects with fifty grand or less to slip, too.
I've backed about 350 crowd-funded projects, over the last couple of years. I track them in a giant spreadsheet with as much info on each as I can, including current status (fulfilled, partially fulfilled, overdue, etc). Several have completed. A few have gone beyond the delivery date, but have maintained regular updates and contact with their backers, and most of the rest are still in-progress.
There's not really enough data to figure it out, right now. The real story will start to come together in another year. Having pledged about $7,000 USD and payed about $2,200 USD, I'm not really worried. Many projects will succeed. A few will fail. Most of those will fail, despite the best of intentions and efforts (if it happens in big titles, it'll happen for little indie projects). Maybe one or two will fail due to nefarious reasons. You can nay-say all you want, but the truth is that none of us really know, for sure (which is part of the reason why I back so many projects and track them on a spread-sheet -- I want to actually know the realities of game-related crowd-funding over the long term; not a bunch of anecdotal stuff).
Also, I sent to RockPaperShotgun weeks ago a very lengthy email that contained access to my spreadsheet as well as a long story of my philosophy of backing projects (I think of it as the poor-man's attempt to be a patron-of-the-arts) and a list of things I've learned that crowd-funding project leaders could take a lesson from, over the backing and observation of hundreds of projects. A lot of that seems like it made its way into that article (or that they've made very similar observations over their backing history).
This guy is from the UK and ran a website that hosted links to some copyrighted stuff. He didn't host the stuff itself. The US wanted him charged and extradited to the US for copyright infringement and the UK played ball pretty much right out of the gate.
In fact, with the whole "boo hoo, we want Amazon and online shops to be taxed" thing going on (supposed in an effort to force people to shop at local brick and mortar -- wich are usually NOT mom and pop stores ANYONE), I'm making more of an effort to buy online than ever before (which was already like 95%). I mean, if I'm going to buy things and be taxed directly either way, I might as well at least get it delivered to my doorstep.
Almost all of my shopping (other than groceries) is done via Amazon. I bet I've spent $30k on them in the last eleven years.
This is going to confuse the hell out of people this holiday season who are already confused enough about Nintendo's consoles as it is. Nintendo has seemingly done a poor job educating consumers, so they're left often still thinking that Wii U is just a thing you buy to add on to the Wii. They don't realize it's a separate console. This is going to compound that confusion.
That said, I'll buy one. Primarily because I'd like to have one to put in my shelf full of collected consoles and I have no idea where my actual Wii is. I haven't touched it since Boom Blox came out in 2008 and when I moved, I packed up everything in boxes and forgot which box I put the Wii in. Three years later, I haven't found it. I haven't even looked. I don't even care. Aside from a very few number of first-party titles, they just didn't offer much appeal to anyone other than maybe my mom.
My PC game collection is around 2,400 titles.
My XBOX 360 collection is around 300+ titles.
My PS3 collection is around 40 titles.
My Wii collection is 18 titles.
he is an Apple shill
He was the editor of PC World.
Unlike Christians, I've never had a Jewish person come to my door and shove literature down my throat and generally harass me on a regular basis; nor stand out in front of a shopping center with a sign telling me the end of the world is near if I don't "repent" and subscribe to the same goofy magic man in the sky that they do.
I am just replying here to everyone to tell you not to reply to everyone. Send a direct message, instead!
Religion is a choice.
Also, you shouldn't need to cry "my religious beliefs!" for something like this to be a valid claim. If that contributes any weight to her complaint, then that's kind of a fucking catastrophe. Kind of like when I see stories about "NUN patted down by TSA!"... because, you know, it's only a violation of valued principals in this country if you're religious (or disabled, very old, very old, or a vet -- in the case of TSA stories).
Because this isn't a university. It's a high school, which means the child is basically forced by law to attend each day and is treated as property.
Except that you do. And if "my goofy magic man in the sky is the reason I can't do this" than ANY belief system should be acceptable for saying you can't do something or must do something.I derive my belief system from logic and from myself. My belief that I have a right to privacy and to not be tracked like cattle is at the very least as valid as someone else's belief that they can never be forced to work one day a week because magic man in sky say "no way".
As per the dictionary: ROBOT -- A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions AUTOMATICALLY.
The action resembles a real-life version of last year's hit movie Real Steel
So, just like Battle Bots, it won't actually have anything to do with robots. It'll just be giant remote-controlled toys operated by humans.
Don't really miss cable. Definitely don't miss "SyFy" (aka, the John Edwards and fake wrestling channel) or Comedy Central.
Has Oprah seriously influenced your life? Other than this story, I can't think of the last time Oprah even came up in my life. She was totally a thing back in like the mid 90s, though.
And I honestly don't give a shit what anyone endorses. What, without the demonstrated contradiction of loving the Surface via an iPad, I'm supposed to think "gosh, this Oprah chick is really sincere about her endorsement!". C'mon.
The annual list of new words from the OED is just a lame promotional bit filled almost entirely with dumb words. Just ignore them and maybe they'll go away.
China has over a billion people. They have an established government and industry. They have labor groups. They have laws. They have politicians. They have activists. They have huge cities with technology and skyscrapers that put anything in America to shame. They are not some bumbling backwater in the sticks, controlled by some skeezy warlord herding children into a fire-prone dark workshop at gunpoint, to make clothing.
If there is such a major issue with work conditions over there, they have the people and means to address it, if they really feel it is such an issue. They don't need me determining how they'll do business and who they'll work for and under what conditions in their company. If this was something like I described above, then that would be a different situation. In this circumstance, there would be plenty of reasonable instances where foreign entities (activists in France, the UK, etc) could freak out over the "horrible treatment" of US employees by US companies in the US that make things they buy overseas. I mean, c'mon.
Every do-gooder busy-body over here in the states won't stop banging on them for supposed "horrid slave-treatment" of their million employees? Then we're gonna replace them with robots and now they have *no* jobs, at all! :D
Star Wars was THIRTY FIVE FUCKING YEARS AGO. It was fantastic at the time, I'm sure. Can we please fucking move on?
I love that you've been moderated "offtopic" for commenting about how an off-topic submission is off-topic.
It's relevant, I guess, because Slashdot is making that slow Gawker transition.
This reminds me of the time I tried to use Google Latitude, but it seemed to require that you update your location in new locations. Since I live and work at home, it was always "here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here" and Latitude simply didn't grok it.
Long story short: Google discriminates against hermits.
Plus, it doesn't even remotely apply to anyone on Slashdot, because it involves physical activity.
They needed a justification to reverse things. This gave them the opportunity to "reset" things for another couple of years.
It's not dissimilar from how you have reports that "there will be a lot of storms this summer" or "there was ONE fire at ONE oil refinery in the south" and, suddenly, that is justification for gas prices to fucking skyrocket for the season (despite other refineries and despite massive reserves). In other words, not for any logistical reason. Just because "we can".
Agreed. The kid who delivers my pizza has enough information to go on a spending spree on my dime.
It's Bank of America.
My spending profile can occasionally be erratic and I completely understand flagging really strange series of purchases (try filling up two tanks of gas and immediately going to the store and buying a pair of Nikes). It becomes a nuisance when we're talking about small purchases with places you've done a lot of business with for years. I shouldn't have to stop everything, because I pulled the trigger on today's $4.99 Steam sale. (It also doesn't help that Steam doesn't let you buy multiple copies of things at one time or to buy stuff for yourself and gifting at the same time, forcing multiple consecutive small purchases).
I've thought about finding another bank -- especially because BofA doesn't even have a presence in the state I've lived in for the last seven years), but haven't found terribly great. Not even credit unions. And of course, my problem is with their systems and processes; not their employees. They've always been pretty fantastic and as helpful as possible.
I wish their alert method was reliable, as you described. Sometimes they will immediately call my cell phone when an alert is put on my card. I don't even have to dial a number. It's FANTASTIC. Other times, I get a call a day or two later. More often than not, I never get a call. I have to call them and have the first person transfer me and wait on hold for a good fifteen minutes, then give them all my information and go through the verification process. Other times (almost never), their system offers me a chance to go to a website and verify everything through an online process. It is just unbelievably inconsistent. (Maybe that is intended as part of the design, so there isn't always a predictable method for someone stealing your credit card?).
I also wish the ShopSafe thing worked. That could potentially help a lot. The idea is that you generate a "fake" credit card that is tied to your main card and it is only usable up to a certain amount, for a certain period of time, at a specific merchant. It becomes a big hassle to maintain and, through some research, I discovered that there is absolutely nothing preventing someone from charging a ton of money on one of these fake cards, anyway (rendering the limit you put on it totally meaningless). These ShopSafe "fakes" also have generated alerts against my card, so they didn't help there.
In the end, I'd rather they be more cautious than let someone totally screw me over and steal my identity or something. I appreciate that they're doing SOMETHING. You always hear it said that banks don't give a shit about fraudulent charges, because they'll just recover the theft from all collective card owners and mitigate it for the individual. That doesn't really seem to be the case, from my experience. I just wish they'd come up with a slicker method of handling these alerts and that their system would learn more from historical data (which I thought was the whole point of it).
Maybe this new card with a sort of RSA keygen fob in another slashdot story posted after this one will alleviate some of these unnecessary alerts.
Calling your bank prior to every $2-$50 Steam purchase is a little absurd. When I bought a home theater in a single day, including a full set of B&W + Velodyne audio system, a call was totally reasonable. I also understand that several small purchases in a short period of time can be indicative of someone testing out a stolen card before going out for a real splurge with it, but not when there is an established history of purchases with it.
Or the poor hot sluts.