There are for me. You sure you don't have an ad blocker running? I got one for Gillette shaving gel, and then went back when I read your message to make sure I wasn't imagining it, and got another one for Speck cases.

Replying to revert moderation - accidentally slipped with the mouse and modded you flamebait.

Why? That would suggest there's something almost altruistic about his decision, when it's pretty fucking obvious that he's doing this to make more money than his mediocre game would have otherwise. I suppose I grudgingly admire his PR savvy.

While these kinds of "gestures" by game developers remain a novelty, they will be treated as such, and garner more publicity (front page on reddit, slashdot and god knows how many other sites already) leading to considerably more sales than they would have achieved otherwise. The right-on crowd who still seem to think this is somehow a generous decision rather than a cunning marketing ploy will support it with their wallets and the developer gets more income for his distinctly "average" project than he could have hoped for if he'd tried to launch it at a fixed price.

Speak for yourself, ignoramus.

That's the way of things these days. When you have nothing better to say, you whine and bitch about a substantial project, entirely created by volunteers, given away for free, and to which you have contributed nothing... as if they owe you something. I believe it's one of the requirements for the new Boy Scouts "entitlement" badge.

Because that was the reason. If you want to make a political statement, go ahead, but that doesn't change the factual basis for the error.

is that there is an outside chance that it may finally see the end of Ballmer. He's clearly never had the chops for the CEO position and his tenure has been disastrous. The only thing that saved him was that just as the Vista debacle was at its peak, Jobs lost sight of Mac OS X and turned all his company's attention to mobile devices, just when Apple had the best opportunity in their lifetime to make serious market share gains on the desktop.

Well, the fact that you can do it *obviously* means it's true for everyone then.

Yeah, let's focus on internet radio in order to cherry pick an obscure example that satisfies your ridiculous need to bury your head in the sand and pretend that the U S of A is only "second bottom" when it comes to overzealous rights protection.

Despite this incident involving Japanese journalists, America is way worse. No one has been prosecuted or fined in Japan for downloading illegally. Compare that to the numerous court cases and multiple-thousand dollar "fees" sent out by the RIAA during their war on the consumer. Or any number of other mainstream examples that actually affect people. It's not even illegal (at the time of writing) to download copyright infringing content - only to upload it, although unfortunately that law will be revised in a few months.

I think a lot of PC gamers are pretty fed up with the "release a half finished game, and rapidly release half a dozen patches to actually complete it" model of development that seems to be the standard these days. If this fee stops that from being so prevalent on consoles, I'm all for it.

Except actual programming, which they have absolutely no problem with. Which makes your point somewhat moot given the context of the discussion.

(I work in software development in Japan, for what it's worth.)

I agree, wholeheartedly. It's very unusual to hear Japanese, especially politicians, comment on firmly established elements of their own culture in a negative way. While I doubt we're witnessing a sea change, and to be honest, in a lot of ways Japanese culture is also responsible for a lot of positives (e.g. clean streets, low crime etc.), it's good to see a bit of introspection going on here.

If they decide to make it cellular capable, they could leverage the kinds of subsidies that the carriers offer and build a better tablet but still hit $199. It simply wouldn't make sense for me, with all the hoohah about maps recently, that they would ship a tablet without GPS.

And it doesn't run Linux.

Absolutely. As someone who regularly hires, I've recruited people with a math degree from a decent college over people with computer science degrees before. It's possible the two have changed, but back when I was at university, I did Comp Sci and sat in for a couple of lectures a week with the first year math undergrads. What they were doing was considerably more challenging than anything I encountered in my four years.