The Ogre: Designer's Edition kickstarter is going to ship about a year after their initial estimate, largely because the amount of support they got was ridiculously over their initial expectations.

Same thing with the Shadowrun Returns project, to the point where that was basically the first thing Jordan said in the first video update after the Kickstarter ended.

You just have to take Miyamoto's words to heart - a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is bad forever.

There's still $5 games on Kickstarter, it's just gotten big enough thay now there's $20 and $30 games too.

Simcity was cool in the 80's & early 90's, but now? I doubt it.

Wow, do you really think that? I hope you're just being bombastic for the sake of karma, because it's flat out not right.

The SimWhatever line of games have always had significantly wider appeal than "core" games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. Just look at how many people played The Sims, and how much money EA made off of that series - it's ridiculous. Any game that has this sort of mass appeal is going to sell well. There's people out there who haven't played a computer game in decades lined up to buy the new SimCity, just because they remember playing one of the older versions when they were younger. Even if you don't think it's "cool", there's a few million people out there who disagree with you.

The difference is, this is the first time anyone has tried to pull these always-online DRM shenanigans with a well-known mass market game. In fact, that's probably why there's been such a huge outcry - a lot of people are actually buying the game, and realizing that it's unplayable as released. They're not as willing to take EA's bullshit as the benighted Diablo fanboys who suffered through Error 37, so this time we're actually seeing effective backlash.

I imagine whoever "snitched" only did so after they realized that the EU was being completely idiotic and not checking up on their own.

That's probably because there's actually been competition in your area; if there's nobody but TWC in your area, your service isn't changing.

I don't think you understand how communications are "blocked". It's not like the enemy puts up some sort of magical barrier that keeps radio waves from going to their destination; what they do is flood every wavelength they can reach with noise, making it so the drones can't hear the base station.

The problem with that is it makes whatever's doing the blocking a huge target - it's literally like putting up a huge glowing sign saying "blow me up, I'm a military asset". That sort of blocking would only last as long as it takes to blow up its location with whatever artillery you have handy.

The result is that the most effective communication happens in person. Period.

People keep on making this mistake here.

The most effective communication FOR YOU happens in person. Communication is a skill, and one you're refusing to learn.

You are a manager. It is your job to communicate. If you are having trouble communicating with some of your employees, it is your job to figure out how to communicate with them. If you are so bad at communicating with remote workers that you are required to bring them in house full-time just to do your job, that is a failure on your part.

And that's okay, really - since you're the manager, you do have the latitude to make other people's lives worse in order to cover for your personal failings. It's part of the great power that comes with being in charge of people. It's just not the sort of thing you should be expounding as some sort of immutable "the way things are", since there's plenty of companies out there who manage it.

Nobody talked to each other, requirements were mis-interpreted, and every little thing had to be documented because nobody was in the room when changes were made. Decisions (code and business) that could have been made over a 15 minute conversation instead took days of E-mail chains.

It sounds like your office had a severe communication issue, which you resolved by getting people to talk to each other.

There's ways to do that which don't rely on putting everyone in the same room. Yes, they require more discipline, but it's worked great for other companies - for instance, here's a StackOverflow blog post about it.

Thing is though that the at-will employment relationship is very much lopsided in favor of the employer.

Sure, you can just quit and walk away whenever you want to - but why would you do that? Your boss sucks? The environment is terrible? You've got a better offer somewhere else? In pretty much every case, the professional thing is to tough it out for two weeks and give notice at your current employer.

There's almost nothing, short of illegal activities or conditions, that makes it okay to just walk away without warning - while in theory you have the power to do so, in practice actually doing so without a really really good reason will get you blackballed in the industry as an untrustworthy flake.

And even if you do decide to just walk out, it's still not something you can do on a whim - you really need to make sure you've got something to keep you afloat while looking for a new job, if you're going to just abandon ship like that. Since you'll have to plan it anyway, there's really no reason to give your current employer the middle finger and just walk out on them.

On the other hand, in an at-will environment, the company can fire you for no reason whenever they want to. And they will. The company has pretty much zero incentive to give warning, and garners zero negative publicity for doing so. They're not going to worry about your mortgage payments, or how you're going to find money for food or gas - they'll just do it, preferably out of the blue.

So yeah, while "at will" sounds like a great system, in practice it hands all the power over to the employer while retaining nothing for the employees.

Dude, are you seriously trying to argue that a Tesla employee told the reporter "sure man, I know the car's only displaying 32 miles of charge left but you're totally okay to go for 61 miles"?

Here's an image where the Tesla blog highlighted the data this idiot published himself - he knew the car was saying "you've got 32 miles left", he knew his next stop was more than 32 miles away, and he in fact published that he drove 51 miles, 19 of which were on an "empty" battery.

The thing is, the days really do have to be mandatory - otherwise, you get those people who basically live in the office and never use vacation time ruining it for everyone else. They almost never do more work, they're just slower at it (because they're burnt out from never taking any time off, it's a chicken and egg thing I guess). The worst part is that because "butts in seats" is an easily quantifiable metric (significantly easier than, say, "work quality" or "features completed"), managers tend to even encourage that self-destructive behavior.

That's pretty much how the USA got to where it is right now, in fact - we have the worst time off laws of almost any nation, and it's largely because of the ridiculously overblown Protestant "you should either be working, eating or sleeping" work ethic. We would probably get more done as a country if we had more time off.

We don't know of any other sentient species yet.

That's only true if you define "sentient" as "human".

Animals have been described using tools, passing tool-use down to their children, giving their children names, engaging in economic activity (including prostitution), using rudimentary languages and all sorts of other, "sentient" behaviors. In fact, at least one African Gray Parrot was taught how to spell - the scientist studying him described an incident where he exclaimed "want nut! Enn you tee!" (there were also other, more rigorous tests done on Alex).

Basically, for every definition of sentience with even a little leeway for creatures that aren't human, we've found animals that achieve it - and we have many examples of humans who don't (if an adult dog isn't sentient, the clearly a newborn baby isn't either)

You can say the exact same thing about C. If we sit around waiting for the perfect language, it's going to be a looooong wait.

I would argue, though, that Javascript is significantly better suited to UI work than C is, much like C is better suited to systems work.

It's flexible so you don't have to write a bunch of code to encapsulate a data structure that only exists in one place in the UI, and powerful enough that you can easily write behavior-driven components.

Coincidentally, the PS3 and XBox 360 were both released in 2005/2006.

Since it's always been games that push the bounds of consumer hardware performance, and because almost all games are stuck with platforms from six years ago, it's really no wonder that a modern, low-end computer can easily run pretty much any game.

The only exceptions are PC exclusive games like Guild Wars 2 or Planetside 2, which can still bring a high-end computer to its knees.

By not making a decision, they believe they minimize the risk of making the wrong decision, never mind that doing nothing is rarely the right decision.

Choosing to do nothing is always the right decision when you are trying to minimize personal responsibility for failures. If you choose to do nothing, then nobody can blame you for anything besides inaction; on the other hand, if you choose to do something and it doesn't work out, then anyone who wants to take you out has concrete ammunition.