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Comment For those interested... Forged Alliance Forever (Score 1) 40

Forged Alliance Forever is a multiplayer mod and update to the Supreme Commander standalone expansion Forged Alliance. It gives the old game new life with community support, balance patches, and an online multiplayer lobby (the only one I'm aware of after the death of GPG),

Also, you can watch casts of some of the more interesting matches on YouTube. My favorite caster, who introduced me to FAF with his videos, is Gyle.

Comment Re:Broken Content (Score 5, Insightful) 223

Yep, back before consoles could be expected to have local storage and a persistent Internet connection, the inability to patch games after release made QA a critically important part of development. Now the balance has shifted to rushing the game out ASAP, and only devoting resources to fixing bugs if the early buyers complain loudly enough to dissuade other potential customers.

Though I prefer the way Yahtzee put it: "You couldn't get away with releasing a buggy game in the cartridge and cassette days; you'd be trampled under the company Brontosaurus."

Comment Re:"Crunch Time" == Bad Project Management (Score 1) 336

But it won't last forever. Between pricey high-profile failures like AC: Unity, and the uncurated swamp of crap indie games getting greenlit on Steam, consumers are getting ripped off on both ends of the spectrum, and they will eventually get disgusted and take their money elsewhere. If big publishers like Ubisoft don't change their ways, they'll be looking at a repeat of the video game crash of '83.

Comment Re:Pay them market value (Score 1) 234

I actually held your opinion about Uber ("I don't get it, what's wrong with normal taxis?") until recently. But so far all my Uber experiences have been stellar: friendly drivers, clean cars, quick and safe driving, plus getting a very exact estimate of when your Uber car will show up at your door. Meanwhile, my last couple experiences with taxis have been atrocious. The most recent one was in a foul-smelling cab with no air conditioning, whose driver took us 15 minutes out of the way because he didn't know the roads, and even was driving in the wrong lane AGAINST TRAFFIC at one point.

So, I now definitely think Uber's valuation is correct, because I'd pay just about anything to avoid another taxi experience.

Comment Re:"Annoying ads" (Score 1) 321

I can see no downside to a hypothetical scenario where every user has Adblock installed, such that every advertising company needs to go through Adblock's acceptable ads program to be seen.

If the ads conform to what's "acceptable", then all ads seen are non-intrusive and free from malware, which is a win for users.
If Adblock raises the price of being allowed on the list in an extortion-racket type scheme, then fewer advertisements are seen overall, which is again a win for users.
If Adblock gets greedy or gets lax with its policing, and begins to allow bad ads through, people will dump it for the next generation of ad-blocker and we're back to the situation we have now.

Comment Re:I call BS (Score 1) 229

Your heuristics idea would create too many false positives, where each false positive represents a paying customer who is now pissed at being treated like a bot. It also would likely allow many false negatives, requiring the spammers to merely tweak their system to fool the heuristic, meaning the problem would not be solved either. So now you have paying customers being treated as spambots while still being spammed by actual spambots. That's a bad combination right there.

Meanwhile, placing restrictions on accounts who have never bought even $5 worth of stuff will raise the barrier of entry above what most spammers can afford, and if it inconveniences a few legit people? Well, if they haven't bought anything, they can't really be called paying customers, so they're not the gamers Valve is interested in courting anyway.

Comment Well done, smart guy (Score 5, Insightful) 247

Congrats, you just took an axe and destroyed a multimillion dollar satellite. Clearly the backers of the GPS system will now see the light and shut the project down forever ... ... or maybe they'll just build another satellite and make the average taxpayer pay an extra dollar.
Seriously, jackass, you don't "bring the public's attention to the government's attempt to control the world through modern technology" through actions that make you look like a frothing-at-the-mouth luddite.

For all his talk of doing what's right instead of what's convenient, the actual right way to bring his concerns about the government and the military to the public's eye would have been to find like-minded people, form a group, start some grassroots activism and some protests to get exposure, and work towards getting his issues on a ballot. But, no, that would be too slow and inconvienient, so he decided to go the easy route of instant gratification by smashing some satellites.

Comment But... (Score 5, Interesting) 288

OK, these guys are probably far smarter than I'll ever be, but... the universe clearly isn't staying at a finite size, and playing the universe's expansion in reverse would imply that it started at a single point. How do they account for this? I even went as far as to read the article, but it wasn't mentioned.

Are they saying that the universe fluctuates between a not-quite-a-singularity tiny point of density and a not-quite-eternally-infinite empty void, or that it simply was a not-quite-a-singularity tiny point of density for an infinite time before it expanded?

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