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Comment You already got your dollars (Score 1) 908

When I buy your game, you get money and I get the game for the remainder of my life and the remainder of its life (whichever is shorter). When I decide I don't want the game for the rest of my life, I can sell the rest of the games life to someone else. This is how it has always been, and how it always should be. This is a perfect example of destroying customer value, for no gain to the customer, in an effort to make more money for yourself. Imagine if real estate developers did this, and forced one room of your apartment to close each time a new owner purchased it.

I hope EA's sales plummet and a rival company who RESPECTS and VALUES their customer take EA's market share. I for one will not be purchasing any more games from EA whilst such practices are in place.

Comment Re:Proper response to piracy (Score 2) 239

I like to think steam is doing a lot to further this cause. They are by no means perfect, but they are a step in the right direction. I personally went from being a heavy user of pirated games to being 100% legit due to the service offered by steam. It is not perfect, but I'll take community, auto-mated maintenance, single point of sale, specials and good service over punk buster and/or downloading cracks any day.

Comment Re:Prove your absurd prices (Score 1) 1303

In some respects I'd argue that they have as much obligation to solve America's problems as solving any other countries problems. Considering they are causing, or promoting practices which cause, problems in China, perhaps they are more obligated to solve China's problems than America's. They aren't doing this either, but they aren't necessarily exploiting the US.

It is interesting that such a big corporation says such a thing, when other big corporations believe America has an obligation to solve the corporations problem (see bailouts). It has been passed around a lot, but the idea that big companies privatise profits and socialise losses seems to fit here. Apple is in a big stage of profitability and growth, so they are not tethered to any country and not obligated to solve any problems for them. Whereas other corporations which are in trouble are directly tethered to a country and feel that country is obligated to solve their problems.

By this measure, I shouldn't pay taxes when I'm earning money but I should receive government support when I'm unemployed.

Comment Re:Yeasty "evolution" (Score 3, Insightful) 285

Once again, great successes hailed while ignoring the elephant in the room: the researchers cheated by selecting out certain ones (those that sank to the bottom.) in TRUE life-by-incremental-changes, every event is random, including which cells are selected out of the tube to prosper.

False.

The purpose of this "selection" was simply to simulate a larger environment. If this occurred in a big place relative to the size of the yeast, let's call this imaginary place the ocean, it is highly likely the yeast wouldn't be contained to a test tube. It would disperse on its own. Selecting certain ones and continuing to examine them is the same as zooming in and following the large ones in the ocean you'd like to examine. The centrifuge is not meant for culling, selective breeding or to "intelligently design evolution in yeast".

N.B. I have no idea about the atmospheric requirements for this experiment as I skipped that part of the original article. For all I know the bigger place could have been a rock, a lake, a cloud or an iceberg. The argument is based upon the false implication that yeast only exists in constrained environments.

Comment Re:It should be modular. (Score 1) 406

Who exactly is going to design games for a modular console which allows a multitude of CPUs, GPUs, storage and ram? What sort of performance standard are you going to achieve? Imagine the backlash from the developers who have spent the better half of a decade learning to program the cell and achieve the high performance it offers only to find out Sony have dropped it for something that closely resembles a PC? Also, no one will buy it if they cant choose their own OS since something so modular would have applications in many domains. But if you could choose your own OS, and choose your own hardware, then why not just buy a PC? The only advantage consoles have is that they have limited variability in their hardware. They define a standard which developers build specifically for.

Comment Re:For what (Score 1) 377

And I, too, agree that copyrights should just die. I'm a scientist, and I am appalled at the science that is being swallowed up by the for-pay journals, at the journals that require me to renounce any copyrights to my own work. And I hate it that even very old scientific papers are still behind fucking paywalls.

Copyright has to end. It has to go away.

I am a scientist who is all too infuriated by copyright. I release all my modelling code under GPL licenses, and publicly release collected data. I also reserve copyright to all articles which I make freely available on my site and others. Copyright can slightly increase revenue for the producer/artist, but this increase is not greater than the cost of establishing, enforcing and protecting that copyright. I do not believe in charging curious minds in order to line the pockets of accountants, lawyers and possible future trolls.

Lewis CK showed us all how a living can be earned without copyright. The majority of the my research, and in turn my salary, is supported by government grants or industry sponsorship or both depending on who the work will directly benefit. I do not need to charge future implementers, innovators or consumers to support my work and will do everything in my power to prevent them from being charged.

Comment Re:Zeno (Score 1) 313

It would be far more accurate if they wound the clock back and gave it a defined speed in reaction to climate change. "Given new evidence of climate change, we are winding the Doomsday clock back 2 hours and winding it forward one minute every 6 months."

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