Because they want to keep you buying paper where publishers have all the control. In a digital book market you no longer need financiers able to absorb the cost of printing and distributing 10k copies and you don't need a marketing/sales department that can get your book onto an endcap at bookstores. You still want the people that work for publishers(editors, artists, etc) but you can contract for those directly.

If everyone switches to digital, the publishers' advantage of having a huge bankroll to be able to bet on multiple authors while keep the lion's share of the profit on the few winners is negated when Amazon will sell for anyone and the contract work can paid for like saving up for a car down-payment.

Sometimes buying through Amazon to get a Steam license is actually cheaper than buying directly through Steam. I bought the Stronghold series plus Civ V and IV on Amazon, which were all redeemed as Steam licenses, because it was the same price as just the Stronghold series directly on Steam.

The nice thing about middle-men is that sometimes they fight each other.

As long as stock market bots and day traders use twitter activity to guide their behavior, I care.

You know that Photoshop has an API for javascript, VB, and Applescript?

I used to do exactly that sort of thing for a product photographer. And it didn't usually take 10 minutes, unless you include the time to execute.

I currently do the same for Indesign documents with linked Photoshop artwork. The Indesign part is worse, actually. Makes dealing with effects and layers seem simple.

Disseminating ITAR-controlled information will get you nailed unless you can prove that only US residents can access it. Same thing happened with early web browsers that had strong(for the time) encryption enabled.

How is having something that is projected into your field of vision legal for use while driving?

Why are LED billboards legal?

I'd be quite happy if they'd standardize the DRM in HTML5. That way there would be one common DRM to crack instead of everyone having their own peculiar variant.

IRC still loves you.

You'd be surprised how many people will give you that info if you just walk up to them and tell them you are a credit card technician from MC/Visa/etc while wearing a jacket with the logo badly sewn on it.

wow, does it solve the halting problem as well?

This is the dev kit, off the shelf hardware, 7 ounces, a little bit larger than a pair of ski goggles. But it will probably stay about the size of ski goggles, though, as Oculus wants to keep the low price point and the large field of view without needing two displays(synch & latency) or complex optics($$$).

The size difference is kind of the point, as they are made for different purposes. The Rift is intended be as large as possible, while .5" screen on Glass is supposed to stay out of your line of sight.

Imagine walking into a crowded room, "tagging" the best looking person there, and then doing an in-depth query on their back story. The next time you see them, appropriate info is fed to you to be able to act like you're someone they should know and like.

And that person does a back search on you as well and realizes that you have never been within a mile of them before this night, nor have you ever been to any of the places you claim to have been or done any of the things you claim to have done.

Ouch.

I'd love to vote with my dollars, but EA keeps interpreting my "no" votes as piracy

Games where I can't possible spend more than the equivalent of two full games on items that materially affect gameplay and are permantent(ships, weapons, etc) or where the stuff is purely cosmetic, I don't mind.

What gets annoying are games where the microtransactions hide that you will end up spending hundreds of dollars on temporary boosts, disabling annoying features, and buying "action points" or "resources" that are clearly designed to limit how long you can play per session.

5 hours of Ingress?

Well I know what phone I'm buying next.

No one would play a hyper realistic farming game

You have no idea how wrong you are.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/220260/