If they assert that even such tame legislation can harm 'legitimate' patent holder then it's an argument in favor of abolition of patent system altogether, because it's hard to find meaningful difference between 'legitimate' and 'troll' which makes the patent system itself more harmful than useful since any obviously existing abuses run unchecked. Each such successful lobbying effort supports the position of patent/copyright abolitionists like me :P

HFT looks like taxation levied by private entities to me. No contribution from those traders other than them taking some cut from all deals they piggy-back on.

The real problem is the lack of integration of plot and gameplay. In most current games 'plot' exists as some cutscenes and scripting forced on gameplay that otherwise exists in different universe. Instead gameplay itself should drive the story, not scripting.

DRM is what actually makes the service better for people who choose to pirate. If you buy DRM'd official cd's you have to deal with DRM bugs and just waste time on making it work while a torrent with cracked version from tbp relieves you from those hassles. DRM only punishes people who choose to donate money to game-makers by buying games.

There's no reason to believe that GNOME will wither away based on performance of this foundation. GNOME will still exist as long as there exist people who care to contribute. If this foundation crashes they'll just make another one.

Why not use a mass transit service like subway or tram?

The whole idea of geocentric vs heliocentric is utter bullshit. It's just a matter of choice of frame of reference, there's no way you could find 'evidence' for one or another. True, equations are simpler if Sun is chosen as (0,0,0), but only if you disregard gravitational influence of planets on Sun itself and planets on each other. If not, you're facing the n-body problem and choice of frame of reference is one of the least of your worries..

You can deal with this problem proactively, by using condoms.

Namely gui toolkit developers, driver developers and DE developers. All of the above aren't very fond of MIR..

No inherent problems, yes. But due to current established groupthink on how games should be made only a small subset of all possible genres and gameplay elements is actually tried. And the particular way projects are managed DOES limit game's length and complexity because it involves just tacking on more art assets made from scratch on recycled gameplay elements. Lowering graphics requirement would be a good way to save money, but it's not what the companies want. Instead, bloated artwork/sound pipelines allow them to have multi-million projects that provide more bonuses to management and less interesting things for me to explore in games themselves. I'm sooooo sorry that I'm not in any hurry to fund your CEO's personal yacht :P

I'm talking about both. Level design definitely suffered from efficiency loss after transition to 3d. Gameplay design is a different issue. It didn't get much overall progress since 1990s and is treated as afterthought compared to graphics currently.

Employing a 3d engine imposes some limitations on design stemming from assumptions made by engine's author. They tend to be oriented for first person shooter games. And most game programmers don't have resources or skill to roll out own engine. Besides, requirements for artwork ARE a limitation too. They definitely limit the amount of gameplay elements allowed. Say, if you decided to avoid models and use 2d sprites instead you could save some work for artists. Which could lead to more creatures and objects and larger, richer locations. And GPU work itself isn't free either. It still requires assets such as textures and amount of those is limited by GPU memory. Reducing detail level of models and textures would lead to ability to have more different objects on screen at the same time.

All in all, AAA game companies given up on doing anything else than flashier graphics and I given up on AAA companies in response.

Having more regular geometry allows the program generate more geometry itself and level designer to specify less.

No reason except the requirement to maintain a reasonable framerate. There exist some graphics frontends to DF but they definitely don't use photorealistic graphics. And probably they wouldn't be able to get enough art assets for more detailed graphics anyway. Another option would be to move some processing to GPGPU because DF manages to kill framerates in some cases even if you use ascii graphics only.

You can never know for sure what really happened there and for what reason. But both Ukraine and Russia make themselves known as democratic states. I have no reason to believe one of them is more truthful than other. All people seem to have different visions of what democracy and freedom is so any such statement is close to being a truism. Even China has People's democratic dictatorship.

But it's evidently true that Ukraine repeatedly failed to establish a government that satisfied both eastern and western parts of it. Both of those parts want democracy and freedom. They profess their love for democracy and freedom to implicitly assert that the other side isn't democratic. This is bullshit sophistry.This conflict isn't about democracy and freedom but between two groups that hate each other and have different pet political ideas, and it just got violent. Russia would never get an opportunity to meddle like that if not for this conflict.

It's quite obvious that a level based on tiles is easier to design than a level based on arbitrary geometry. Designing levels in Blender or whatever is definitely not the way to go. Too much workload.

How about the entirety of, say, Dwarf Fortress? It allows infinitely more complex gameplay systems just because it's based on tiles that are displayed by ascii characters. There are compromises possible too, say you settle for graphics complexity last gen but focus on making huge worlds with complex and interesting rulesets. Nobody is trying to work in this direction much. It's only matter of time before people will get tired of glorified interactive movies. I already did, and that's the reason I ended up becoming a retro gamer. When some game weighs dozens of gigabytes, takes ages to start up, provides less not-trivial gameplay than some similar titles of last millenium I really feel cheated.

Pushing the limits of platform like that will not give you that much of a competitive advantage. But it definitely will require more work that would be better spent focusing on game mechanics proper. The only progress games as a whole have lately is pushing more triangles per frame. All other aspects get shafted. Due to nature of those worlds built of millions of triangles it becomes harder to design levels which results in shorter games. And game design is an afterthought too. There weren't much progress with it. Power of modern PC could allow huge virtual worlds with complicated,interesting mechanics, but in practice all that power is spent on making world models less efficient for sake of more triangles per frame.