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Comment Re:Drug incentives still not allowed (Score 1) 67

Left 4 Dead 2, pictured right below that drug use notification and a major point of contention in this classification debate, would still have trouble because it features downing a bottle of pills or injecting yourself with a syringe of adrenaline in order to continue killing zombies, and has an achievement related to that as well.

Comment Re:Implement real e-book lending (Score 1) 150

Amazon has actually had this feature for a while: Loaning a Kindle Book

Also, when the loan period is up the lendee gets a link to buy a copy of the eBook from the Amazon store, so publishers might see an increase in sales, especially if the loaned book is the first of a series or something.

Comment Re:"Concerns about a closed model".. (Score 1) 197

If I'm understanding the article's quote correctly, Gabe is talking about how the iOS devices and the XBox 360 only give you the choice of only one digital distribution service, shutting out potential competitors.
On computers, Steam competes with other digital gaming services, such as Direct2Drive, Desura, GoG, and so on. Later on he goes on to say how a hypothetical Valve-produced console would be "open" so that users could use Steam's competitors alongside Steam.

Comment Re:Free to play accounts are limited (Score 3) 195

you can't buy an account without these restrictions anymore; you can only get a "free" account.

While that is technically true, you can permanently upgrade to the normal account with your first purchase in their store. See their FAQ.

You have to add a minimum $5.00 to the Steam Wallet to buy stuff from the store, so practically you can look at this as the price of getting a normal account. If you feel like spending $1 on a cosmetic item is unfair to other players for whatever reason, there's a Map Stamp item which basically lets you vote on your favorite maps, and the creator gets a bit of that money.

And if it's the DLC system itself that you don't want to give money to, you can try looking around if there's still retail copies of the game around somewhere.

Comment Re:Splitting hairs (Score 1) 195

Most of the purchasable items that affect stats can be acquired during normal gameplay via the random drop or crafting systems. The cash store was introduced as a shortcut to people who didn't want to invest time in randomly getting a certain item they wanted, but it's still possible to acquire these items by spending no more money than the initial purchase of the game.

Also, the items were introduced as alternate play styles for each class. People complain about some items being over/underpowerd, but that's true of every game. You can still play well with just the default weapons.

Comment Re:They did what now? (Score 3, Insightful) 388

You can't prevent someone from giving your product away.

No, but Apple could chose not to ship you anymore iP[a/o]ds. This is targeted at retailers trying to use the products in a promotion to get customers, not at a normal user who wants to give their device away to a friend (although I'm sure that they've already developed DRM to do just that).

Apple is probably doing this as a proactive maneuver to protect their brand name from being cheapened.

Comment Re:Say WHAT? (Score 1) 184

I remember it being stated before that Activation is trying to position itself as a multi-faceted, digital entertainment company. Relating an online FPS to Netflix or Facebook pitches it to investors in terms of other succesful businesses whose main product is delivered via the internet, and is enjoyed by the average consumer and not just niche gamers/geeks.

Comment Re:Opera Mail (Score 1) 132

It's worked fine for me in the past. Go to opera:config and check the Bittorrent settings. Normally changing the port helps with this.

In general, I agree and think it'd be better to just have a small program for each type of operation. The point Opera was trying to advertise was that normal users wouldn't have to muck around and install Torrent clients, their downloads would just work.

Also, I guess it'd be beneficial to useeverything (torrent, email, etc.) Opera offers if you're the type to leave your browser open all day. Having to manually restart torrents when you reopen the browser was a pain last time I tried it.

Comment Re:But the memory leaks still aren't fixed. (Score 2) 306

See, after getting 4gb of ram, and having like 6 more in swap, I don't worry about memory usage

The problem is, that's the equivalent of saying "There's no problem with the software. The user should just throw money at the issue and upgrade his/her system."

Even Mozilla's recommended system requirements indicate 1/8th the amount of RAM you have.

We can't daydream and imagine we can acceptably run modern websites, let alone 50 tabs of them, on decades-old machines. But if the developers themselves are recommending 512MB, then the user should have an acceptable experience at 512MB, not 4GB.

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