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Comment Disappointing (Score 1) 131

I thought it was more common to see survivorship clauses, where even if the licensing deal between the platform owner and the distributor ended, the platform was still authorized to service entitlements that were purchased on the platform (i.e. user who "bought" the content could still access it from their account, it just was no longer available for purchase).

Has this become the norm? Or is this mostly just Sony entering into shite agreements because "fuck the users"?

Comment Wasted effort (Score 2) 107

What even was the point of them threatening Pawel's project, really? This petty maneuver accomplishes little besides temporarily (possibly VERY temporarily) stopping an activity they didn't like. In return, they get...the negative attention attendant with being exposed as a douche canoe? And, a need to change their "authentication" method, anyway? I guess they're counting on nobody smart and/or experienced enough caring to replicate the approach?

I suppose their methodology already suggests a distinct lack of consideration in certain choices, but, still!

Comment Land usage (Score 1) 209

You would have to build millions upon millions of olympic-sized swimming pools (vats) combined with millions upon millions of acres of supporting infrastructure....

...What.
Do you know what the capacity of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is? Assuming similar output ratio to a 250kL bioreactor (may not be realistic, there's certainly potential issues with oxygenation and other factors), that's about 30 million pounds of meat each year. You might need as many as 3000 of those to produce every pound of beef estimated to be eaten in the U.S. each year. That many bioreactor facilities would displace around 30-40 average size ranches (~15000 acres).
I'll give you that it would require a lot of supporting infrastructure to supply the biofuel, not to mention significant utilities infrastructure, road improvements, etc. This would absolutely cost a staggering amount. Would it ultimately take millions of additional acres to support this level of production? Maybe, but ranches for grazing cattle currently occupy 600+ million acres of land.
Tl;dr: It would be plenty expensive to set up, but the quoted land use reduction seems believable.

Comment Re:What exactly is "Steam" anyway? (Score 3, Informative) 164

The issue (as is the case in other market sectors) becomes getting people to use your service in the first place. Breaking into a market can be tough and require a lot of time and money/promotional work.

Epic managed this (to the extent they have), by:
A) capitalizing on their hit game "Fortnite" to get gamers to install their platform (analogous to Steam with HL2 in the beginning), and
B) Throwing money at the problem by way of offering a reduced platform cut (only 12% instead of 30%) and by paying developers to release exclusives on their storefront (limited-time exclusivity, not permanent).

Epic had enough capital to generally pull it off, but smaller stores basically starve to death in Steam's shadow. Because, sure, I could buy stuff from other storefronts, but I already have Steam, already own a ton of stuff on Steam, and the things other storefronts want to sell are already probably on Steam, too!

Comment Re:Link busted, statistic questionable (Score 2) 54

Good point. If they are including phones, I find that figure quite believable. My personal experience with enterprise deployments is certainly nothing from which to extrapolate worldwide trends, but I'd find it hard to believe that experience to be so completely out of step with general trends.

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