I always thought that the obvious approach for commercial open source games would be to make the executable freely available but to assert your copyright on the other assets. Of course that doesn't work if the assets are also open-sourced, in which case I think a prefunded model (cf. Kickstarter, Desura Alpha Funding) would be the most plausible approach.

Of course you always have to ensure that you actually are allowed to sell the assets you use. While the GPL doesn't prohibit commercial use, CC-BY-NC does.

So if you overclock all of the Intel's cores at once it turns into an AMD?

1. Web developers who were apparently born after 1998 decide that "optimized for WebKit" is the way to go.
2. Other engines pretend to be WebKit in order to work with the standards-incompatible websites designed by the "WebKit only" people.
3. Congratulations, we're back in 1998 where you have to do arcane browser-sniffing hacks because more reliable methods of distinguishing between engines (like vendor prefixes) were made useless.

If you have such an aversion to writing '-moz-', '-o-' and '-ms-' then just use SASS/Compass and let that handle your CSS. One nice advantage is that Compass doesn't come with mixins for extremely nonstandard stuff so you can be reasonably certain that your website will actually work outside your beloved WebKit.

Or, of course, you can just pretend that it's 1998 and WebKit is the new IE 6.

This.

I used to like intricate rules for everything until I realized that they mostly just serve to make the game more complicated. If you have a GM and players who are committed to making the game fun and semi-sensible you don't need anatomically correct hit zone rules; you just estimate what effect the given hit could have and move on. If you do decide you need more complex rules you can still introduce them as neccessary.

An enlightenment in this regard was moving from Shadowrun 3E with its utterly complex combat system to Exalted 2E where the combat rules are so simple and flexible that they're also used for army-scale combat and social arguments with only minor tweaks. Are they precise? No, even with their per-second timing. Are they realistic? Hell, no. In fact, they go out of their way to reward improbable but cool maneuvers. Then again we're talking about a game with characters who can leap over mountains and punch people so hard they stop existing entirely.
(I do like, however, how Exalted does model injured characters being in worse shape. It does so by dividing the health levels (hit points) into groups with associated penalties to all rolls. Easy as pie and still a big step up from being in perfect shape at 1 HP.)

In fact, an even bigger enlightenment was playing (d6) BESM where there is only one kind of die roll ever and characters have about half a dozen stats in total. And it still works very well for what it does as long as you are aware it doesn't even try to be detailed. It's fairly well suited for quick fire-and-forget one-shot rounds.


On the other hand my group's role playing style is 95% character interaction with combat taking the back seat, usually being reserved for "boss" fights. Someone who wants to play a wargame with some character interaction added in is going to have entirely different preferences as a stay-out-of-the-players'-way approach won't do them any good. In their case something like the very first first-edition D&D might work: Take a wargame and put some social rules on top.

That's not going to happen. SSDs aren't going to shrink much anymore; they can't make the transistors significantly smaller as Flash doesn't perform well at such small sizes. We're already seeing SSDs becoming less and less reliable due to this. (Okay, they might release Flash drives at 10 cents/GB but I certainly wouldn't trust those drives with my data. Not without a backup to a more reliable drive.) Besides, HDDs are still under active development so the goalposts keep moving.

I'd love to see HDDs getting replaced with something that's faster, more energy-efficient, more shock-resistant and more reliable. Unfortunately, Flash isn't that technology due to its scaling issues. Perhaps the memristor will be the technology that displaces the magnetic platter but it's still a few decades away from that point.

You'd get a Superman clone with a blond mullet, of course.

Would your average Slashdotter? This story is interesting for a reason. I am led to believe it is because 38 Studios used launch DLC to get around the first-sale doctrine, not because the CEO was apparently a reknowned baseball player at some point. The first-sale doctrine getting undermined is interesting to non-American Slashdotters because when companies get away with such nonsense in the States they will invariably try it elsewhere, too. American sports have no impact on my life; launch DLC does.

Now, the summary also failed to mention the first-sale doctrine thing; I had to find that out through the related stories. But that's just the summary being badly written.

To be honest I pretty much only know the name from hearing it in movies or series (usually in relation with some character being a Red Sox fan even though they apparently never win, IIRC) so I wasn't sure about the spelling. I figured I must have had confused them with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

And for the record, I'm from Germany and I don't give a shit about soccer, as well. That should serve to illustrate how I don't care about sports at all, given that most Germans are extremely enthusiastic about soccer even if, just like Hollywood's version of the Red Sox, we never win.

I said "much of the rest of the world", not "the entire rest of the world". I know that baseball is popular in certain parts of asia but that doesn't change the fact that in large parts of the world no one will know a baseball player even if he is a household name in places where baseball is celebrated.

Of course, Slashdotters who aren't from the United States will be hard-pressed to even name a baseball team*, will wonder why unearned runs aren't prevented by the referee and will wonder what a French New Age pop band has to do with sports. Baseball and American football, while big in the states, are entirely obscure in much of the rest of the world.

* Well, I know that there is a team called the "Red Socks" but I have no idea whether it's a baseball or football team, nor do I care about it enough to ask Wikipedia.