and whenever they've added any sort of setting, the default was quite restrictive.

Well good enough for me then, right? Nothing bad has happened so far, so nothing ever well.

The woman's word didn't convict them. It amounted to reasonable suspicion to pull a vehicle over, that's it. Your ignoring a big chain of events.

It could have been a female Federal agent wanting to create a parallel construction of evidence.

Its conceivable. Do you have any evidence for this beyond a mere statement of the possibility that it might be the case?

An anonymous call, by itself, warrants just the smallest of investigations -- in this case, the law enforcement official followed the vehicle and did not see any evidence of wrong doing. That should have been the end of it.

Because pulling the driver over and asking if he was drunk is an "exceptionally deep investigation"?

The woman apparently did not want to press charges

Press charges for WHAT?

or even testify since it is assumed she refused to give her name.

Not wanting to get involved is pretty normal. If I saw a drunk I wouldn't want to get dragged into court, have my character, recollections, and life torn apart by cross examination, my time wasted etc. And if the police catch up to him because of my tip, and notice he's drunk then they can take care of him without my help.

I suspect in this case, however, you'd need to have the caller identified since if the run-off-the-road case was taken to trial, the defendant has a right to cross-examine witnesses.

Only if he was charged with running the other driver off the road. If he's to be charged with drunk driving, the fact that he's impaired when pulled over is more than sufficient.

I do think they overstepped what was appropriate for the situation.

Pulling him over to see if he's drunk is inappropriate after a report he was driving badly. FWIW Drunk drivers rarely drive erratically. Their reactions and awareness is impaired; so unless something unexpected happens they'll probably appear to be driving just fine.

Now it's starting to sound like Warcraft II and Beyond the Dark Portal, or StarCraft and Brood War, or DDRMAX and its mission pack sequels (DDRMAX2, Extreme, Extreme II, and SuperNOVA).

It would be approaching that. But again I think the difference is that the game is aware of and pushing the expansions from within the game immediately after *buying* the game.

So where Doom can be forgiven for having the Shores of Hell and Inferno greyed out because you didn't pay anything for it -- imagine you just bought Star Craft but the Broodwar campaigns are showing there, but greyed out with a $ next to them. Except that's not it either because at least starcraft was a complete game with 3 campaigns and multiplayer... its more like buying star craft, and finding the protoss and zerg campaigns are greyed out with $ next to them, and only one multiplayer map with the rest all showing that $.

Did a quick check: There are several games on GOG with DLC.

Yeah, but too be fair, I think that's a fairly recent feature for GoG.

I know "AI: War" also uses (used?) a serial key to differentiate between the demo and full version, which was another sticking point with GoG. (Although they allow multiplayer keys for NWN etc... so there's that...)

By this point though, I don't think Arcen is ~that~ concerned. By far the majority of the revenue is from steam. They wrote that steam is 91% of the income, 3% was direct sales, and 5.9% is gamersgate and impulse. Leaving 0.1% for 'others'

http://christophermpark.blogsp...

That's a while back and still predates bionic dues being released, etc but at the time GoG and other distributors amounted to less than a 10th of a percent. (Although he candidly admits both that at the time of that writing gog was a very new distributor for them, and that gog didn't have ai war -- which is far and away their most popular game so the low numbers are entirely expected.)

Still, it suggests that its not really worth arcen's time to jump through any major hoops or obstacles to put ai-war on gog.

if (!steam_is_available) panic();

If the game relies on steamworks cloud saves etc and doesn't gracefully run without them that's not DRM any more than this is:

if (!sound_card_is_available) panic();

Its lazy at worst, but its not DRM.

What Bundy did, using someone's property without permission..

Property that you just said is owned by its current owner because nobody else wants it and that the current owner couldn't give away?

Maybe the government should have just said, "Wait, what, you want this land? Great! its your land now. We've forwarded you title, and you can start paying property taxes on it."

So go to your preferences and turn it off. Or uncheck the 'also share on Google+' checkbox when posting.

And relearn how to do that every time google changes anything. Possilby needing to learn new permissions models and settings and interfaces on Google's unpredictable schedule.

Take a look at Facebook's permissions settings history for an example.

Seriosly, This isn't hard.

It's harder than it needs to be.

Separate the accounts entirely that aren't linked to something with your real name eliminates unintended mistakes no matter what google does with the interface tomorrow.

No, because its no trouble to carry more than 1 SD card should I ever have the need.

Why not a raspberry pi + usb3 hard drive to give you terabytes of storage in a portable hotspot; all accessible at once instead of having to swap cards to get at different files. And now again your phone has access to effectively 'unlimited' storage, without an SD card.

What scenario are you really envisioning where a bag full of tiny $100 SD cards is REALLY better than a multi-terabyte hotspot/NAS (that you can have with you or leave at home and still access from most places) for under $150?

Yeah, that's exactly what i was thinking. It looks exactly like the tangles my corded desk phone gets.

Your logic is all based on the assumption that a phone that supports SD necessarily also has a smaller (read: inadequate) internal space for just apps, when comapred to phones without SD slots.

While your logic is all based on the assumption that a phone that supports SD necessarily supports SD cards big enough to hold ALL your media, and has big enough internal storage for your OS to live comfortably.

That is no more an arbitrary scenario than mine is. And that's my point. Your SD card scenario is different, and may in some cases be better, but is just as likely not to be.

I don't think that is even close to true.

And yet the Galaxy S5 really does have only 16GB storage + SD card support*, while this Oneplus one or whatever comes with up to 64GB internal. My hypothetical scenario actually exists.

Which of those 2 memory configurations would you prefer?

I don't dispute that 64GB internal + 128GB SD card support is an even better option, or that 256GB internal would be even better than that.

But if your choice is 16GB + 128GB SD or 64GB internal which would you choose? This is a real choice between real phones.

* yes in theory there is also a 32GB samsung s5... but its not actually available from ANY carriers here so it may as well not exist.

Not as far as I'm concerned. My whole point is that I have a 2 generations old phone that nothing newer can compete with, because most don't support SD.

The S3 only takes a maximum 64GB card. Assuming you bought the 32GB S3, you have a maximum 96GB storage.

There are already 128GB internal memory phones on the market. (Admittedly they are still rare.) But surely that would also be better than your S3, despite not having an sd slot.

I don't see what's wrong with paying for expansions, so long as it's spelled out clearly in the description. Case in point: Doom for PC came with one free episode. One purchase (Ultimate Doom) unlocked three more episodes, and another purchase (Doom II) unlocked an additional game's worth of missions.

Well the first difference is that he's complaining about $2 up front, + $5 for levels. vs free + pay for rest of game.

By paying $2 up front in the former case, he's sort of expecting that since he PAID that he's getting a game for it. So getting hit up for $5 shortly in is a bit of a kick in the teeth.

You can't really complain about Doom only including the first 3rd of the game, when you didn't pay anything at all.

Further, the first 3rd of Doom is a bigger game than most 'apps'. So today, you pay $2 for the first couple levels, $5 for a level pack... and you've probably still gotten less game than Doom gave you for free.

And that's a big part of it: the value proposition. Doom was great value no matter how you sliced it. Apps + dlc ... not so much. And the F2P trend today isn't content, its progress.

The game is free, but it moves at a snails pace unless you pay extra to keep it going.

Take a game like sim city; great game, you buy it once, and then you play it. You build cities, you have taxes and expenses and you have to balance revenue and your spending and expansion of the city is balanced on your income. Majority of you time is spent bulldozing things down and building new neighborhoods, and roads. Fun.

Now take the same game done as a modern app. Its the same game of building and so forth. But the economic system has been reworked : now once a real-time day you can tap on all the buildings in the city to collect your taxes. You can also do a variety of "daily tasks" once a day for a bit more income these tasks are unlocked by adding a given building to your city. If you miss a day, you don't get your revenue that day. And many things cost a nearly outrageous amount of money.

So each day you have to play the game, and tap on all your buildings, and perform all the daily tasks. Its mindless and repetitive, and as your city gets bigger the amount of time you have to play it each day to maximize your revenue also gets bigger.

However, the amount of time you spend actually designing and building the city gets smaller replaced by the in game currency harvest tasks. Until eventually you spend several days doing all the tedious tasks and revenue collection to add one new building.

Originally they just let you spend $ to just buy in game currency, but that was too brazen... and too many people caught on to the scam. So the current trend is buy an energy booster which just makes all your buildings generate 1.5x cash for the next 5 days. Same game, no cheat, just the reward comes a bit faster. Plus your on the hook for another $$ every 5 days or you go back to the slow slow plod. Plus now you cannot miss playing for a single day that week because you'd lose out on some of the extra in game currency you effectively paid for.

Of course, this game only resets the building currency harvest daily... and that's too limiting. We can make that better by giving EACH building a different real-time cycle rate, and the cycle doesn't start while the cash is sitting there.

So now you have to check the game every hour or so. Otherwise some of your buildings that could be generating money are just idling. And now lets put in some ads... I mean your checking it every hour or so like an obsessed lunatic anyway, might as well try and monetize that too.

One big advantage of having a completely separate volume (i.e SD card) for media is that you can even fill up the SD card completely, and still have no fear that the phone will become unstable because the os or some installed app tried and failed to grab a few more bytes of storage, potentially making the whole system unstable.

I understand that.

But with a smaller dedicated system volume you still have to fear that the phone will fill up and become unstable, because its smaller to start with.

The 'advantage' of 2 volumes is offset by the opposite scenario, where the OS and apps are installed on a fixed smaller device/partition may then run out of space despite the fact that there is still a ton of space on the 'media' volume.

The idea that having a separate media volume somehow prevents the system volume from running out of space doesn't really work out if the system volume is that much smaller to start with.

The galaxy s5 has 16GB internal, and can take a 128GB card.
The one can have 64GB internal.

The s5 can have more media, but is stuck with a much smaller system. The one can have less media but can have a lot more apps. Neither solution is better. But the 64GB internal is more flexible, and would be my preferred choice most of the time.

Besides I've got a 3TB western digital live drive + app on the phone. Odds are very good I've got everything I need on the phone, but if I really need a song that isn't, all i need is a wifi connection for a few minutes.

Are you really setting the same scenario I just described above, and then against all logic and common sense trying to justify that running out of system memory is somehow less likely to happen if you also put all your media on internal memory too?

For a lot of people, YES, that is exactly the case. I've know TONS of people over the years who have partitioned their hard drive into system and data partitions and then completely ran out of room on system long before they ran out of space on data.

If they'd had the same amount of space as a single partition they'd have been fine. Hell, if they'd have had half the amount of TOTAL space in a single partition they'd have been fine.

Rather than try and prove me wrong by just hypothjesising I must be, why don't you actually try it? At least with my Galaxy S3,

You are arguing with me about a phone that is now 2 generations old. We're talking new phones and the future here: USB3 (and beyond).

And other than the initial sync/load who cares? Surely you don't re/re your SD card everytime you need to add another 2 dozen new songs to the card or copy the latest 2 dozen photos off it.

I can completely fill up my SD card with my crap without also worrying about putting my phone system or apps out of storage space, because they use the internal memory no the SD card.

You need more than 64GB, and that's fine but you just need more than 64GB... it doesn't really matter if its internal or not does it.

For example, suppose the samsung s5 only supported up to 32GB SD cards. So 16GB internal + 32GB SD card... would that be better than 64GB internal? I seriously doubt it.

2) Its easier to see exactly what you have if you keep your media on the SD card, as its the only thing on there, whereas the phone's internal storage is filled up with all sorts of crap from the system too.

Would you prefer the system's smaller internal storage filled up and unable to install anything new, even though you've got 10s of gigabytes free on the add on card? How is that really better than just having a much larger internal memory to start with? But sure there's a valid argument for phyiscally separate drives too. Hardly a deal breaker though, either way.

3) I can transfer large files/lots of data to/from my phone a lot quicker by removing and using the SD card directly, than using a USB connector via the phone, which would be the only choice for internal memory.

The limiting factor is the SD card write speed, not USB3. Moving it back and forth for speed will steadily be less relevant. Maybe still relevant this generation of phones/computers... probably not for the next.

The selection though is a little more limited,

A lot more limited, but they also have one of the best and largest old game libraries. I love gog for old games.

My 'beef' with GoG for indy games though was Linux support. I buy a cross platform indy game on steam and I get pc+mac+linux. On GoG I only got PC+Mac downloads.

Recently GoG has announced a committment to support linux, and I couldn't be happier to hear this!

Another quirk with GoG's model is that its a bit at odds with paid expansions. For old games, all the expansions that are are ever going to come out have come out, but what about expansions / paid DLC for current still in production indy games. -- And I believe I read its one of the main reasons AI War, for example, is not on GoG. I'm not sure what the solution here is.

If a Steam game is DRM-free, you can still load the executable directly without Steam running at all,

Its not quite as simple as that. If the game supports steam achievements, workshop, trading cards, cloud saves, etc then its not necessarily steam "DRM" that is causing a reliance on being logged into steam.

There are lots of genuinely drm free games that 'like' being tied to steam... not for the drm, but for the other steam features.