That's more lucky than good though. Steam does very little to make sure shit works. Older games are notorious for problems whereas other services (like GOG) make sure they are fixed to work on modern systems. If you ever do need support, Steam is a nightmare.

I agree that needing less maintenance is better than having good maintenance support, but you need a large sample size to be able to tell if that is the case or if you just got lucky. For example I have needed maintenance on precisely zero of my LG appliances, whereas I have needed maintenance on one of my Kenmore appliances... thing is I have owned a grand total of two LG appliances and one Kenmore appliance. That doesn't tell me anything, we are WAAAY below any sort of statistical significance.

On the other hand at work I can say we use Seagate and HGST enterprise drives because we have had zero failures across about 200 drives, as compared to WD RE drives which have had about 40 failures across 400 drives. That is a large enough sample set that the results are meaningful.

I've needed Steam support precisely once, and was unable to get it. I've needed Origin support zero times, but not necessarily because it is problem free but because I have been lucky.

It's easy to write off customer service and praise a brand if you've been lucky and never had problems, but you discover how very important it can be when a problem does occur, and nothing in this world is problem free.

Ya there's plenty of reason to do it, it is just clear Valve has lost interest. They seem to suffer from "Oooo shiny!" syndrome pretty bad, which they can afford to do since Steam makes them more money than they know what to do with. They'll play with a project for awhile, get bored, and move on to something else.

I mean I can respect not making a sequel just for a sequel's sake. If the series has run its course, it sucks to tell the creative people "You have to make another one, no I don't give a shit how much it doesn't fit!" Clearly not the case here, they had more story to tell so the creative types should be happy to continue it.

Likewise I can understand not making a sequel if it is going to be a commercial failure. No matter how much you'd like to continue something, if the market isn't interested it is a bad idea to do. Again, not the case here, the game could be crap and it would still make money because so many people want it bad (not that it matters because of Steam).

So there's no reason not to do it here, only that Valve is flighty and isn't interested in it anymore for whatever reason. I mean all the crap about innovation is bullshit. Valve is happy to do things that are just more of the same. See Left 4 Dead 2, DOTA 2, and CS:GO. Left 4 Dead 2 was really just an expansion pack sold as a new game, DOTA 2 is just a MOBA, one of a shit ton of them and one that borrows heavily from others, and CS:GO is, well, Counterstrike. No problem, I'm not hating, but trying to claim that they somehow have to be really innovative with their games is crap. They have been happy to release games lately that are just rehashes of existing stuff.

I guarantee if the Steam money pit dried up they'd be looking to make HL3 really fast. However they don't have to care right now, they can just play around since they make shit tons of money for doing nothing but being a middleman.

It also shows lack of commitment to their projects, specifically the Steam Machine. Valve really is half-assing it (as is obvious from the timeline, that there is on QA on the various platforms, and so on) if they really wanted to try and drive it, HL3 would be there and be used. Make that a Steam Machine/SteamOS exclusive people would give a shit. Even if it was just short term, and then it comes to Windows, it would massively push sales having an exclusive title that people really, really want. Existing console makers know this, and always try to have a killer franchise. Were Valve really committed to their new toy, they'd have HL3 ready to go for it.

Refusing to see the difference between "A" and "B" (you: "hey, they're both letters!) is unwise.

On the other hand, we have water, so much of it that half the year we have to freeze the excess :)

Life is full of trade offs ....

It's pretty much like that now with most shows. You can buy each episode for 2 or $3. Whatever the % of shows that distribute this way, it is only going to increase as time goes on. This isn't an assault on that, just further options for people who prefer the certainty of a fixed budget (rather than a variably one) and think 25 channels is just the right amount of channels.

That's always been true. It's not your car.

I'm not sure that the surest sign of nefarious monitoring is to ... install a visible camera and microphone.

Hey, since real world girls refuse to become geeks despite all the countless programs everyone is coming up with, I guess we do have to make some mechanical ones ...

There is plenty of easy science still yet to be done in taboo subjects. The possibilities for illegal drugs alone are huge. Can't get funding? Crowdfund it. There are plenty of people who will contribute to good science in these areas, like this one which essentially is just putting people on LSD in a fMRI machine and looking at the results. I donated some money and it looks like 1279 other people did too. They are currently at 177% of their funding goal with 34 days remaining.

Right now, there are obviously a lot of donors and too few studies using crowd funding. That will surely change in the near future but I still think that is a far easier task to find 1280 people willing to give you $50 instead of finding 1 person willing to write a check for $66,000 (44,500 British Pounds). There are plenty of people like me who want to see research into these areas and are willing to pay for it.

Yeah, nothing kills an industry like low prices and near ubiquity.

You guys actually believe this stuff, don't you?

I think the proper use of capital punishment should be defined as certain massive crimes (like murder, defined by the society as a whole) where we simply have drawn the line as the crime being too terrible (in essence, where we - as a society - have decided that those who do it are inherently beyond redemption) and those cases where rehabilitation (within a system - and we don't have this today in the US - where rehabilitation is available and generally effective) is impossible.

Oh that's alright, anyone who's that broken should be first in line for execution. They don't need to set children on fire twice to convince me of that.

Perhaps there is some circumstance in which lighting children on fire wouldn't automatically qualify someone for execution, but I don't care to explore all the different circumstances we'd have to in order to find such a case. Suffice it to say that - as a general rule - things like murder and setting children on fire ought to be automatic.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I consider it a proper use of the state's authority to execute convicted criminals when they execute a convicted murderer. When I'm talking about this, I don't mean an angry father who walks in on his child's molester and beats him to death, nor do I mean someone who falls asleep at the wheel and strikes and kills a pedestrian. I mean someone who knowingly, consciously, willfully makes an effort to maliciously kill another human being without some major mitigating circumstances present. What else are we to do with such a person? A person who robs a liquor store is making a poor choice and hopefully can be rehabilitated such that they won't make similarly poor choices in the future. Someone who has no difficulty taking human life is fundamentally broken in a way we can't comprehend and should simply be removed from society. Prisons are still a part of society inasmuch as members of our society live and worth there.

No it doesn't, unless you believe that prison guards, prison staff, and other prisoners who are in the process of being rehabilitated are not part of our society. The expectation with converting all death penalty cases to life in prison is that we're going to take the most violent, dangerous, destructive people in the world, put them all in one place, and expect a segment of society to wait on them hand and foot for the rest of their lives. Anyone wishing to make that happen should sign up for guard duty with those prisoners. Otherwise, hypocrisy.

They aren't "permanently removed from society" just because you, personally, don't have to interact with them on a daily basis. Someone else still does and you're putting their life (in fact, thousands of lives) at risk because of it.

Life in prison without parole is a death sentence; merely by different means. If we can't ever execute anyone because we can't be 100% certain of their guilt, then why is it morally or ethically sound to allow potentially innocent people to rot in prison for the rest of their lives? Or even just for a few decades? There's almost certainly more innocent people who've been rotting in prison for decades than innocent people who've been sent to Death Row. Not just nominally, but due to the higher burden of proof (and endless appeals system) for Death Row prisoners, I would suggest it's a virtual certainty that the rates of innocent people rotting in prison for the rest of their lives is also much higher. Why is that more acceptable than executions?

They're committing murder. The state is not (by the very definition of murder). I would submit that all murderers should qualify for the death penalty. I would extend that out to any other individual who cannot be rehabilitated (assuming an effective means of rehabilitation is in place - which is admittedly not our current prison system).

And keep in mind, this is all merely a thought exercise as it's all predicated upon major, fundamental reforms from the police investigations to the courtroom trials to the prison system. I'm not defending the criminal justice system we have today as it's vastly more flawed than need be and I'm not even defending the use of the death penalty within that system. I seek merely to demonstrate that there is nothing inherently wrong or unjust about the state executing guilty individuals who are truly beyond rehabilitation.

If that's true ... then it's including some very violent subcultures. But we can't say that, of course.

Maybe we need to change the violent subcultures, instead of trying to shame people for not wanting to hire ex-cons.

One is too many to have die in a prison cell after years or decades of rotting there. The effect is still the same; an innocent man dies at the hands of the state. Based on this, we should release all prisoners because we can't ever be 100% certain any one of them is guilty, yes?

(if this ever happens, I'll be on an airplane beforehand going somewhere far away while the rest of you sort out the consequences)

That's absurd. The very, very worst case you could make against a governor would be conspiracy to commit involuntary manslaughter, which isn't even defined as a crime anywhere that I'm aware. You could possibly make a case for involuntary manslaughter against the police, prosecutor, and jury, but that's also asinine at best. Further, I don't know of anyone who would support the death penalty for involuntary manslaughter. Finally, the premise itself is absurd. Outside of fraud or negligence, there's no reasonable case to be made at all. Now if the prosecutor withheld critical evidence, I would fully support going after them with the full force of the law. Same for the police and anyone else involved.