This is basically it. When you pay for a game up front you know what it costs. When a game is "free" all that means is you don't know up front how much it's going to cost or what you are going to have to pay for. There is some amount of deception in the business model. And of course they always end up introducing more ways to get money from you, making a lot of people feel like all of their time spent on the game is wasted once it hits that breaking point where they ultimately quit.

Presidents these days are mostly elected for their charisma. You have to look at who a candidate associates with to get an idea of what they are actually going to do. For example, Obama putting 5 RIAA lawyers in the DOJ then pushing for things like ACTA. It's usually the advisors that come up with the ideas, so analyze who is advising them. This is probably why the NSA stuff has been consistent between Bush and Obama.

As for the lack of accomplishments that's another plus in an election. Voters tend to react more strongly to the negative stuff and people sometimes make mistakes or do things you might not agree with. A ghost is more electable.

I'm sure the exchanges see value in it when the banks are paying to put servers at the exchange: http://content.time.com/time/b... (5 years old but it was the first hit on Google).

There was actually some brief talk about this I think in 09? The response was predictable. The banks screamed about how it would be the end of the world if we did that and clearly the government doesn't understand what they're doing and need to stay out of it.

You don't seem to understand who you are talking about. Feinstein has always been one of the biggest supporters of pretty much every controversial thing the various government agencies have done. Whatever her motive here I assure you it has nothing to do with speaking up about overreach. Unfortunately she isn't up for re-election for another 4 years or so, which means her strong support of these unpopular activities will be forgotten by then and she will probably be re-elected anyway. (I am a little annoyed because there were some very good candidates on the ballot running against her but people see D and INCUMBENT and vote for them regardless of how bad they are.)

Admittedly I mostly skimmed it the first time and read the conclusions at the end. In a second read through you are right there is a lot of that "it was fine, the users are dumb" attitude. But it does say that Microsoft is making an already inconsistent UI even more inconsistent without trying to justify or downplay it at the end like he typically does. Overall the article doesn't feel like a big sales pitch like most of his other articles.

A Peter Bright article that is actually critical of a Microsoft product without trying to downplay all of its flaws? What is this world coming to?

The scariest part to me is what will happen when the founders leave? This is when most tech companies take a nosedive. For that reason alone it's worth being cautious about them getting too big.

Gnome 3 is becoming usable but I'm thinking it is poorly managed more than anything. I don't know that I would blame designers for this one.

For example, in 3.8 the overlay doesn't let you filter by categories anymore. A feature they actually REMOVED. Apparently it's because in some *future* version they have a new feature that replaces it. But that's not in yet so for now have fun finding anything. If they would stop doing stupid shit like that they are very close to having a good usable desktop.

You can pretty much assume every company is collecting as much information from you as possible. Just because you're also giving them money doesn't change anything. At least with Google they tell you what they collect and what they do with it. And unlike most companies, Google doesn't sell this information.

Not that you should trust Google, but the "they're spying on me so X company is better" logic just doesn't hold up.

The store page actually does tell you whether they have third party DRM and if so what they use. One example I know of is if you check BioShock (the first one) the store page says it has SecuROM. Though it's true that they don't appear to list whether it has their own DRM and as far as I know there's no way to filter by DRM.

It's all about trade-offs. Dynamically typed languages are more flexible but you have to be more disciplined, especially when it comes to documentation. People who hate documenting things typically don't like dynamically typed languages. Unfortunately one of the trade-offs of the flexibility is worse IDE support, but you learn to live without autocomplete.

That said I haven't used javascript in over 5 years and didn't like it at the time, but I use Python quite a bit and when I use other languages I find myself missing the language features of Python more often than I miss the IDE features I lose when writing Python code.

Basically. The point is Valve came up with Steam Box but all of their own titles are designed for mouse and keyboard, so they needed an appropriate controller or there wouldn't be anything to play. I was wondering how they were going to solve this problem and this controller design was a brilliant solution.

I remember reading many years ago when Diablo 2 was in development that they experimented with the idea but didn't like how the gameplay turned out.

He also called the ZR1 car of the year when it came out and from what I remember he did buy one. They just like to bash American cars on the show. It's a comedy show first and a car show second. The ZR1 has the magnetic suspension so it can be adjusted between stiffer and softer. I can't say personally how much it actually changes though. I have a base model with the Z51 option (stiffer suspension) that I daily drive and it's fine. If you drive on bumpy roads it can be rough, but it's a sports car and that's the trade-off for better handling on a smooth road. It's a Corvette so you can always mod it. And the visibility in a Corvette is the best I've ever seen because of the giant rear window. The squeaks and rattles are real though...