What? You've completely missed the point.

Everyone since the dawn of time has been able to go to websites like FPSBanana (which still loads slow because apparently it's 2004 or something) and download and install every custom skin/model/voice/particle effect they could possibly want. They can still do this. Thousands of people do. The problem is that such modifications are entirely client side, and thus can only ever be for personal satisfaction.

The point of microtransaction items like "cosmetics in TF2 and shitty mspaint reskins in CS:GO" is for other people to see your fancy hat/weapon. It's to show it off to people other than yourself. Some of it is conspicuous consumption to be sure, but a lot of people like customizing their digital avatars for everyone else to see. That appeal will never disappear. For good or for ill, microtransactions are the lifeblood of many games that millions of people play literally every day. The peak today for DOTA 2 was nearly a million players. League of Legends claims tens of millions of unique players monthly.

Of course valve shutting down these gambling sites is about money. It's also about gambling, but in reality gambling is about money anyways so... yeah. It's just not about mods like you erroneously seem to think it is.

Which is fine by me. I like the longer form of miniseries, it allows the pacing to be more languid. I hold up the Daredevil show in netflix as a good example of this (at least the first season of it). You can compare it directly to the first season of The Flash which is also on netflix, and you can see that the broader strokes allowed by the longer format and lack of forced advertisement breaks makes for a much more engrossing watch. Putting the timing of cliffhangers and story cuts in the hands of the creators instead of the advertising agencies is a huge improvement.

I had no idea the advertisers were so willing to so accurately describe their efforts. It's such a delightful misread that I'm starting to wonder if they were created with intent.

I don't play CS:GO but I have a substantial amount of Fake Digital Stuff in my Team Fortress 2 "backpack". I've spent at least several hundred dollars on completely digital "goods" in TF2 over the years I've been playing it (since open beta, October 2007). Mostly I haven't regretted the individual "purchases" I've made, and to a large part it gives me joy. I budget it as "entertainment" money, so as long as I'm entertained to a degree I deem of sufficient value in exchange for my money, I don't mind giving it to Valve. After all, I've been playing TF2 for nearly ten years and they've been supporting it and adding gameplay (and a huge ton of digital "goods", which is neither here nor there for the sake of this argument). I'm voting with my wallet.

Some players have things called "unusual hats" in their backpacks. They're hats (which are many in TF2) but they're also special. So called "unusuals" have particle effects attached to them. Buzzing flies, or sunbeams, or little clouds, or sprays of confetti, aces of spades, hundred dollar bills, or perhaps little orbiting planets, or a little cloudburst... there's dozens of effects of varying value determined by inherent coolness, appropriateness of effect to headgear (example: buzzing flies is sold for the lowest prices, but buzzing flies on a hat that's a plunger you wear suckered to your head? That's a "valuable" combination!) and rarity of the effect. Unusual hats go from anywhere from twenty, thirty dollars to many hundreds. Still not as much as the knife skins mentioned though, because CS:GO is a more popular game than TF2.

Different items for different circles, but the reason remains the same: Expensive knife skins, rare hats that appear to be literally on fire, the latest iphone, or the flashiest roadster, it's all purchased for other people to look at and say to themselves "that fellow has a fat wallet and I'm jealous of him".

For (extremely roughly) the same reasons that copy-paste commands don't work on bitcoins. Sure, you can duplicate your bitcoins as much as you want (in the case of these knife skins, you can install as many knife-skin mods as you want) but once you transfer those bitcoins to someone else, as far as everyone else is concerned, they belong to that other person. No matter how many knife-skin mods you have installed on your computer, the "digital goods" are in somebody else's safe deposit box.

I recall that Google used to have an option for this sort of thing (it was an option next to the cached page link that would remove that website from the current and future searches) but it wasn't around for very long and my google fu isn't strong enough to find any useful mentions of it.

If you do happen to find a plugin (perhaps a custom search engine for firefox?) that does this, I would be interested to hear about it.

At this point I expect that the supposed cutoff date will roll around, and then one of two things will happen:

1) They start charging whatever they're charging for it. But it won't stop being a "Recommended" update for 7 and 8.1. Meaning of course that some loser will turn updates back on or boot up a laptop that spent seven months without a battery, get updated, and suddenly find their copy of Windows 10 isn't licensed and they have a thirty day countdown. Pay up, sucker.

2) Nothing happens. It remains free. Eventually Microsoft will get around to yanking the updates, but probably not before something like option one happens. Credits to carrots the nagware will stick around though, just different. And no way are the telemetry updates getting removed.

Look deep into your heart. Which one do you think is gonna happen?

posting to undo incorrect moderation

Roughly a hundred gigabytes. Probably more, really.

I seem to recall there being a physical USB key delivery pledge level, but it doesn't appear to be available anymore (problems with VAT because the game is on the stick meaning obnoxious taxes). Obviously anything short of bluray disks are out of the question. The prospect of 25 DVDs makes my heart a-quiver, and I sat and suffered through the six-CD installations of multiple games multiple times (UT2004 and HL2 if you must know).

I sympathize with your predicament my friend. Who knows? Perhaps closer to release date they'll have a solution of some kind. Maybe download the individual modules separately or something.

The actual support article explicitly says that adding $5 to your steam wallet (which is the only way to buy stuff on the steam community marketplace) will count as $5 of purchases.
Co-incidentally, $5 is the minimum amount you can add to your steam wallet.

That's not how it's worked out in practice. Games that have been sold on the steam marketplace that are later removed from the marketplace still remain downloadable and playable for people who have purchased them. I personally have several games attached to my steam account that were removed from the marketplace at one point or another, and I could always download and play them. (Examples: Full Spectrum Warrior series, Titan Quest series. That they have since been restored to the steam store is beside the point.)

Hairyfeet remains correct, however. Valve is a private corporation and will probably remain so for a very, very long time.

Actually, the state legislature passed some bills to regulate the drilling of wells and the pumping of groundwater back in August.

Amusingly, people have been conserving water so much locally that the water utilities are actually running out of money, they say, to maintain infrastructure. The article barely touches on it, but the Santa Clara Water District (termed affectionately by a local columnist as the "Golden Spigot") doesn't exactly have a record of sound spending. Hopefully this will bite them on the ass.