Except when...You know... I plopped down $60 on a retail game that used Steam for DRM way back in the day with the promise of access to all features of Steam Workshop. Now I have to plop another $5 for some crap I don't even want just to continue with the functionality I had before? Nice to know your soul is good for the price of -$5. Tell me, what can you do for me that I can charge $5 for just so I can allow you to continue to use a service that I used to provide for free?

I've never bought anything from Steam since I activated the account in 2011. Not. One. Thing. I have however bought 2 games that used Steam DRM, starting with Skyrim. I used to leave feedback and help requests for Skyrim Mods in the Steam Workshop. I also on occasion put up some of my own Mods. While I can still download mods, I can't leave feedback or submit Mods anymore with this setup, because though I've paid $60 for Skyrim and got Batman:AO as a free gift from Newegg, Valve doesn't recognize those purchases for this purpose. So a major functionality, a functionality that was part of the reason I bought the game in the first place, a functionality that has been a staple of the Elder Scrolls series since at least Morrowind, has just been effectively ripped out of Skyrim by Valve (can't even blame Bethesda for this beyond putting Steam DRM into the game in the first place) for the "helpful" purpose of reducing spammers. If they wanted to reduce spammers they should have made it either or; as in you can use Steam services for games if you EITHER purchased at least $5 worth of items in the Steam store OR have Retail Games in your library.

What if I am buying games that require Steam to run DRM, just not buying those games through Steam? Retail purchases or purchases through venues that are not Steam don't count towards that $5.

Read the parent again. Particularly the part of

Because these people put down on a AAA title in a retail outlet that isn't counted towards the Steam ecosystem, they have lost the ability to take part in the Mod discussion for the game they just put a good chunk of change on. They've also lost the ability to post Mods they've created to the Workshop. Valve just made the declaration: "Oh...you want to use the features of the game you just paid for? You need to pay us at least an additional $5 for that privilege. Sure we'll give you something from our library in exchange, just to give you some numbing lube so you can't exactly feel how hard we're screwing you"

To give an example, I have Skyrim. I paid $60 for it when it came out. I have not paid a dime into Steam's client. I use the workshop heavily to download mods for my game (some would say to make the game useable)...but now I'm locked out of the discussion to ask for a feature or give praise to a modder because I haven't paid the $5 tribute directly to Valve. I'm a paying customer of Bethesda and I just got dicked over on participation in the community because they chose Steam DRM and my purchase means dick-all to Valve. There's only 2 other games I have on my Steam account, and not a single one of them count as a contributed dime to Valve: Batman: Arkham Origins (acquired as a free gift from NewEgg when I bought my nVidia GTX 760) and the Kerbal Space Program Demo (only thing I got from the Steam Store, but it was free, so no dice).

Because of this small...minor..."harmless" move to reduce spammers, they've now guaranteed that they get none of my money, and my diligence in ensuring I do not purchase any future games that incorporate Steam has just ramped up to Sony Boycott levels. They would have done better if they did an either-or type of thing where you can participate if you have legal games in your library OR you've contributed $5 to Steam in some way. $5 is a small amount, I'll admit...but how much are your individual principles worth? How much can you be bribed for? Everyone has their price; but there's something seriously wrong with a person if that price is a net negative (they're paying other people for the opportunity to break their own principles)

Eclipse. Visual Studio. Code Blocks. Dev-C++. BlueFish. NASM. gdb. Vi(m). Emacs. Pico/Nano. cat & sed... need more?

Anecdote here... but it's valid to the point. I am Male. This can be generally known by the type of posts I've made, but for this discussing that point must be made clear. In my education, I was a great writer, epic scientist, shitty mathematician. This statement is made by evidence of the grades on my report card. My parents helped to nurture the sciences only slightly, but mostly focused on my literacy and ability to calculate. When given a creative writing assignment of writing a 2 page essay, I gave the teachers 12 page epochs that they always complimented and never made less than an A+ "Very Entertaining." Math, I understood the importance of but the feeble attempts by everyone involved to make Math relate to the real world I couldn't understand. I couldn't understand it because everything was contrived.

Science on the other hand no one pushed me into...because no one had to.

I hated Language Arts and writing (even though I did well). I hated math for the sake of math. Science, however - Especially Mechanical Physics, Earth Sciences (patterns and cycles of the Earth's ecosystems), and Astronomy - I took a natural liking to not because of any kind of push from any party, I was just wired for it. Apparently I was also wired for creative writing, but it takes external effort to make me want to churn anything out. There was one thing though...one thing that I was never exposed to anywhere until later in childhood. One thing inexplicable that blindsided everyone, even though the signs were there. Going past the classic RadioShack stores I'd always eye the monitors with a keyboard in front of them. If I got to touch one, I used to love the loud *CLACK* they made. I only got to work with an Apple ][ for about 15-20 minutes each week in my early elementary school years, playing "Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego"...I remember despising that game, and I still do. It wasn't until 3rd grade that I got to play with the Trash 80's...again only running existing programs like Oregon Trail, Hangman, etc. I was more interested in what I could do at the RUN prompt...but I was actively discouraged from doing anything there for fear that I'd "break" something. Then, in 7th grade, my parents got an Apex 10/100 IBM Compatible by Epson...and everything changed.

It was the family computer, but my parents put it in my room. It wasn't long before I knew the ins and outs of the system...and after researching other computers, I found that my parents got mega-gypped. But even so...this. This was the turning point. I was given full access to a device that had been taboo and mysterious for so long that I needed to know everything about it. I found the QBASIC program on it, and that was it. The machine became mine and would bend to my will from that point on...and I vowed that all other computers I came into contact with would do the same... well, I haven't been able to live up to that vow due to various workplace policies...but everything up to the limits of policy I owned. Computers became my life, and Computer Science became my field, and it's been that way ever since.

The moral to this story? Well, for me it worked that I hated being a part of the mold that everyone tried to tell me to fit into. My interest in a field was inversely proportional to the amount of push other people had for me to go into that field. The only exception was sports...no one really pushed me into sports, and I never had an interest. Hell, I can't even go to the Gym without feeling a sense of anxiety over the opportunity cost not working on one of my many other projects. Note that I also accept that I'm very ...different... and for (most?) other people the inverse is true where they don't take an interest in something UNLESS they're pointed in that direction and told "do this!" I tend to be a big proponent of let a child do what they show an interest in and let them show you what they discover...giving little tweaks to morality where it's needed. "No Johnny...it's not a good idea to pull the limbs off little Jason to beat him with them. no...I Said...PUT THAT DOWN NOW!"

Making an interface look JUST the way one wants is often a heck of a lot more investment than "a couple of mouse clicks." I've spent hours configuring a desktop environment before. Tweaking everything from colors to window behaviors to terminal transparencies (not only for looking good, but good compositing can really help with maximising screen real-estate by allowing informational/reference pages to reside behind a well positioned terminal) to button positioning to general aesthetic fixes to allow myself to adjust to a better mood just by viewing the desktop (I usually set my wallpapers to my favorite picture of my wife, so at a click of the button - there she is). While the financial cost for doing this is generally zero, there's certainly an opportunity cost involved in configuring ones workspace to be appealing in such a manner that it doesn't make one's eyes bleed out of the sockets to have to look at the thing...like metro-stylized graphics do for me.

I had no complaints for the look of any User Interface I've had to use for most operating systems, even Unity...until tiles became a thing. It's not that it's different. I can handle different, and have....It's that metro is visually harsh and feels like razorblades having to look at it. I don't even like looking at websites that use tile-like themes (though my super likes putting those into pages he develops for the Company).

I don't know...I tend to like being able to arrange my workflow in 3 dimensional levels on my screen, allowing active panes to take the front, with informational items filling the screens behind. Transparencies facilitate this even more, along with slight blurring to give more a feeling of depth...which I can use as prioritization organization on a filled screen. The clearer an object, the closer it is, which means the higher priority in the flow it'll have. Having Metro, where everything is forced flat, or forced to look flat...It breaks the way I flow.

Unfortunately, it appears that CBS Studios owns the patent* on rounded corners in the UI.

* yes I know it's actually a copyright; but that doesn't quite make the joke, does it?

Uh huh. Is that also why that any game where you're doing an escort mission the AI you're having to escort is doing some of the stupidest stuff to get itself killed? Aim bots aren't intelligence either. It's nothing more than a variant on a frick'n raycast rendering engine applied to actor positioning. AI drivers in racing games? I've played plenty, and programmed a few (rFactor allows screwing with the Robot Driver scripts), at what you consider to be "above human performance" The AI isn't doing anything especially smart, it just knows EVERYTHING about the rest of the variables in the simulation... And that right there is the crux of why you can't say AI is ready to completely take over from a human.

If an "AI" in a game is impossible to strategically defeat in a game (and not because of Ultra high HP, or it's carrying a 1 hit kill mega gun) it's never because of any real intelligence that's been programmed in. It's because the "AI" knows exactly Every. Single. Variable. of where Every. Single. Actor. is in the environment... including the Player's actor(s) and actors that aren't even visible to the player yet. You cannot take that same AI and expect it to function as well in the real world, because it can only ever have as much information as the human does.... and it has to be programmed with situational experience to know how to react to ever changing variables that it cannot pre-read like it could in the simulated world that it controls every aspect of.

As someone who has played around with various AI technologies in the past (Ultra HAL Assistant being one), I can tell you that it took a hell of a lot of time to get my computer to "understand" certain basic concepts that my 3 year old mastered before he was 2. AI is not ready to take over for us, not by a long shot, and anyone who would use video games as a demonstration of the "powah of teh AI" has no fucking concept whatsoever of what Artificial Intelligence really entails; and yes, that includes you as well, drinkypoo. Also as an example for whatever it's worth given that it's a paper and Proof of Concept done by a CIS student, if you take a computer program outside of the simulated environment and measure its performance... it doesn't quite measure up to the level of skill a human player has in the same games. I'm not saying it's impossible for AI to get to a point where it's good enough...we're just not even close yet.

Autonomy can screw up to a degree that completely FUBARs the chance for recovery. There's a reason the saying "To Err is Human, to really fuck things up you need a computer" is a thing. Also, in the air when something goes wrong there's not generally much else around to get in the way and reaction times can be a smidge slower to still be good enough to correct a situation. Rolling on the ground at 80 mph with cars within 3 feet of you on either side, a semi 60 feet ahead of you in the lane to your right and another car 40 feet behind and the semi has a blowout that causes the trailer to fishtail. Now you have to worry about tire fragments flying at you, a limited corridor to maneuver with a trailer that's out of control and an idiot behind you that's just closed the gap to 15 feet as you're trying to slow down. Think a computer is going to handle all that just as well? AI isn't there yet. It's not even close. The more we let autonomy take over, the more we get lulled into a false sense of security... which means that when the autonomous system fails, and it will, the human wastes precious seconds to become alert, more precious seconds to let the initial panic die down, and THEN the human can begin letting the instinct take over to get out of the situation...if they have the memory reference point to deal with it properly to begin with. Humans are experienced based creatures. The more we go autonomous the less the human gains the experience and the less skilled they're going to be in a bad situation...which will cause people like you to call for more autonomy to get the "bad humans" out of situations they can't handle. The cycle will continue until we get to the point where we all might as well be fat bastards living and working in the basement while we let all the autonomous systems do everything for us, including wiping our fucking ass for us...but fucking that up too.

I live in Georgia (the US state), what is this "turn signal" you speak of? Also, how often does the fluid need to be changed?

I admit AC was being a pretentious ass that deserves a "good for you" type of response, but your argument doesn't even address the same problem. He hasn't a problem with a camera being used to provide assistance with seeing behind him. He has a problem with being monitored by arbitrary devices pointed at him monitoring his condition even though he'd be extremely likely to make it through the commute even if he wasn't at his 100%.

"Citizen, you only received 6.5 hours of sleep instead of the minimum requisite of 7. You are not permitted to commute to work today, return to bed. I have already contacted your employer that you will be delayed until such time as you are fit to driving [on long straight country roads with little traffic]. They have terminated your position. Have a good day." "Citizen, I have detected your body heat has risen 20% and your blood pressure is above normal acceptable levels. You are on the verge of road rage. I will be disengaging the ignition until such time as you can calm down." *Ignition disengages at 70mph on the interstate*

There's a reason my favorite 3 vehicles I own are more than 20 years old... the fourth one I struggle with finding the value in making the payment every month. I can more than afford it. It's more the blemish on my credit report that keeps me from having the $20k piece of shit repoed. When I have to take apart the wheel well and pull the plastic fender apart just to be able to reach an arm up to change a headlight, there's something seriously wrong. Forget what I'll have to go through just to change the shocks when they wear out.

Skylink?

You're most likely thinking of Skynet, but you could also be reffering to Sky Lynx of Transformers G1. Despite what Sky Lynx's ego would say, you're probably referring to Skynet.

Its...The Nothing!