Zoraptor

1) Police don't (except in exception circumstances) deal with civil infringements like copyright, the rights holders do 2) Piracy = copyright infringement by means of unauthorised duplication. If you're offering the files for download yourself then you have authorised it. 3) The letters are legal, at least in Germany which is where they are being issued. They're quite a big industry there.

It was on an espionage mission, I don't think there's any real doubt, and there is- given it's state- little doubt that it landed rather than crashed. It should not matter whether the border is well demarcated or not as it could carry out an observation of a nominal border line from well inside, and an inadvertent crossing would require a far larger deviation than credible. While physically shooting it down could (theoretically) be achieved very quickly and 'off the cuff' any sort of complicated electronic lassooing should take a more considerable amount of setting up and implementation. More importantly it would be far easier to achieve around certain highly valuable fixed points that you know will be of interest rather than along the border which is... ~800km long, not counting the Pakistani parts, nor the sea parts (something like 2000km), nor the border with Iraq, nor the border with Turkey; any of which the US could use as well. You simply cannot prevent intrusion along the border, it's too long, so you protect your high value targets, ping zap and you've got another card to trade with your friends in the Rus and Qin. Plus the US regularly has used overflight missions- see Gary Powers, the Blackbird etc- so it's hardly a great leap. In this case it's a wholly unarmed spy drone, so no weddings trashed. Though the "please can we have it back"s are amusing.

Yeah, I remembered that too. I thought they could do no wrong? I don't think you'll find many people thinking that the GOG shutdown stunt was in the best taste either. The mafiaa shakedown letters also happened with the first Witcher so it really isn't surprising.

Polish translation of the judgement. I don't speak Polish so cannot absolutely vouch for it.

Hmm. That would involve them offering the file for free themselves, as an agent of CDPR. Can't see them getting any good result if that were the case (it's either entrapment or they've voided their own copyright protection against duplication by allowing said duplication in the first place). I'm always deeply sceptical of 100% accuracy statements as that will often mean something like "we included a clause in which liability is admitted in all settlements and as such our accuracy is 100%! FACT!!! r00fles!". It's also telling that they are doing it in Germany rather than somewhere like the UK where lawyers have been disbarred (IIRC) and firms have gone out of business for issuing such letters, or the US where the extremely apropos "Shakedown" description comes from. They did lose the distribution stuff (if you want a cheap digital version of TW2 and live in Australasia buy it now, as GOG is being forced to reinstitute GeoIP) but they won the DRM part of the case outright. They're hardly out of money though, N-B was ordered to pay CDPR the arrears they'd been collecting from the retail version as well.

One or two people mention it here, and it isn't particularly well rated. Somewhat amused that even the people who gave it a good rating made it sound pretty bad.

I think a Euro superstate could work in theory, but would have required a quantum leap from having the Mark/ Franc/ Guilder/ Drachma straight to having a genuine fiscal union with proper, and enforceable, rules and supervision rather than the half way hodge podge that actually came. As below, nobody really wanted strong enforcement at the time as they all wanted the ability to break the rules. Now, they're in a far more weak position fundamentally and trying to bolt the door after the horse has bolted. France and Germany sought "stability" and economic growth (financial imperialism) through disciplined economics. The first part is certainly true, but France and Germany hardly used disciplined economics- they happily broke the established Euro rules themselves when it suited them.

I doubt they would fail outright anyway, their market capitalisation is very low so they'd make a nice target for a competitor to buy- it would be less than 10%* what EA paid for Bioware/ Pandemic for example, and given that they could then rationalise the distribution side of things plenty of savings could be made. *They'd have to take over the debt/ liabilities as well, presumably, which would up that.

Mainly because they don't (and never have) wanted a federalised European Superstate, they want the glorified free trade zone they signed up to. Given the direction of Europe no one with any sense would want a European Superstate. The Euro has problems! Damn the Torpedoes! Full Steam Ahead! The Square Peg can fit in the Round Hole if you just Hit It Hard Enough! You cannot stop your ships from sinking by tethering the half that are sinking to the half that aren't, you'll just end up sinking everyone. I don't like Cameron at all, but he was absolutely right that it would not be in the UK's best interests to sign up, even if some of the provisions are eminently sensible.

Just should just download it instead, you've payed money for it. Don't join the dark side! :< Nah. If you wanted to buy it do so via second hand/ rent or borrow, for console. Steam gets nothing, publisher gets nothing; get a cheaper game, the sweet knowledge that some accountant/ exec is foaming at the mouth at not getting a cut, don't miss out on anything and have the lovely warm feeling of it being 100% legal. Since publishers have zero qualms placing limits because "it's legal" you should have zero qualms using the same argument in reverse.

Not necessarily. If you simply do not have enough time no planning, no matter how excellent, will do anything but mitigate problems because the ultimate problem is trying to do too much. Personally I think they did have enough time, though it would be a tight squeeze. The main problem was trying to make a game with some fundamental changes without allowing enough time to check that they actually worked properly and to fix what needed fixing. Ultimately it's likely to be a combination of both unrealistic top down management dictates (narrow release window/ fast turn around) and poor project management.

There's non-steam versions of Torchlight (and will be for the sequel). Minor correction: 1404 used Tages (? maybe SecuRom), not Uplay. The new game (2070) does use Uplay, but at least in a far more moderate form than the always on monstrosity it started as.

Pirates are not competition. It's simply a question of not offering for sale a product that is worse than a pirate copy/ punishing legitimate customers relative to pirates. If you want to take a TWitcher2 approach and offer a bunch of extra stuff that's even better, but not really necessary. More extended: they have to live in the world that exists, not the one they'd like to- fortunate really, as I'm sure most publishers would love to have persistent monitoring systems coupled to automatic monthly/ instant debits and 'Trusted Computing' style big brotherism; and for just about everything. What determines whether you are a profitable company is how many copies you sell, not how many copies are pirated, so if you take measures that cut into the number of people willing to buy you are hurting yourself. If pirates offer a free, less restricted and more convenient/stable experience you should at least try to tackle the two elements you can control rather than waving your arms and wishing real hard for a world in which piracy does not exist while coming up with ever more elaborate Rube-Goldstein schemes which just further worsen the other two factors. Ironically, one of the later ACs had just a disc check on retail. One of the more pernicious effects of DRM schemes is that all your products get tainted with it even if they aren't actually using it. Oh, that's definite, can be seen from their annual/ quarterly reports. Their revenue from PC more than halved.

May not be for sale though, since it seems that the shut down was not for 'standard' reasons like going bankrupt/ running out of money. The Stalkers sold 4 million+, with GSC self-publishing most of those, so it is highly unlikely to be direct funding issues.

I don't know why anyone would pirate something which is rubbish- but that's irrelevant anyway, as I was talking about their sales on PC and their belief that they are entitled to a certain amount. If you sell a crap product you cannot expect it to sell well irrespective of piracy- it didn't sell because it was crap. So if it's a wonder anyone would pirate it, it's far, far more so that anyone would pay for it. Blaming pirates rather than yourself when your crap product, marketed crappily with crap DRM to people you describe as being pirates even if they have bought the game fails to sell, is, well, a load of crap. Neither Ubisoft nor anyone else is entitled to sales or anyone's money simply because they release a product. But that is clearly how they feel.

It's pretty much entirely the banks'/ financial institutions or at a pinch the regulators fault. An ordinary person is definitively not supposed to be an expert on matters financial and if told that they can pay back a loan will inherently believe the expert. Banks definitely are supposed to be experts, as is the government. If a bank is willing to issue a loan there is an implication (or obligation, if you have anti predatory loan legislation) that the loan should be able to be repaid in the vast majority of cases- traditionally foreclosure is an extremely poor outcome for all involved, including the bank. If you as a financial institution are deliberately designing loans in the knowledge that a high proportion will not be repaid and an even higher proportion won't if the economy worsens then you should shoulder the vast majority of blame as you have (1) designed the agreement (2) designed the implementation (3) have the requisite expert knowledge for things like asking and modelling what happens if house prices start dropping instead of increasing. Much as our banks here are a bunch of vile piratical Australian interlopers determined to gouge as much cash as possible they're infinitely better than those elsewhere for the simple reason that they didn't loan money stupidly and stayed well away from the snake oil derivative market.

Ah, the good old entitlement argument, I knew you'd show up eventually. Both sides have entitlement issues- Ubisoft feels entitled to sales despite shoddy ports, hopelessly annoying DRM and a horrendous attitude, for example, and appears entirely unable to examine their own actions' role in the face of their imploding PC sales. They're selling an entirely voluntary luxury form of entertainment with hundreds of alternatives available yet believe that they ought, by right, to have better sales no matter what and no matter how they treat their customers.

I'd tend to think the better point of comparison would be the movie(s, if you include ImaginationLand/ TA:WP) which had context in current events but whose overall 'message' was not directly tied to those events. I really can't agree- you can say much the same about 'story' too and it works well in an RPG setting. In order to have a compelling story you 'need' it to be a tightly controlled progression where characters and plot points are introduced and fleshed out which runs counter to being able to choose how the story unfolds- this is how books, movies, TV series and even traditional oral storytelling work, the experience is wholly linear and (theoretically at least) repeatably identical. It doesn't have to be that way in games and you can- and should, really- adapt to the strengths of the medium. One of those strengths is more flexibility than traditional methods. I can't think of a good reason why that flexibility can be a strength for storytelling but not made to work with humour as well, and certainly not in the more facile storytelling sense (Bioware style basically, choose branch A: Cartman abuses Kyle hahaha; choose branch B: Cartman abuses Kanadians hahaha; choose branch C: Cartman abuses poor people/ Cenny hahaha). Obviously I can't say that it will work, but I think writing it off is certainly premature, and there's no inherent reason it can't work.

Any 3d engine can do 2d- almost all UI elements are 2d for example, but in any case all you need to do to get 2d from 3d is set dimension 3 to zero. That's kind of fundamental to geometry. You can even build environments in 3d then turn them into 2d if you want, as was done for the Infinity Engine games. Else none of the minigames in System Shock 2 could exist- they're 2d games in a 3d engine, after all.

Nothing to be offended about. Fart jokes and making fun of everyone and everything is what goes on in the show. Apparently this equals a right-wing show. There's a bit of an authoritarian streak in the left which is frequently combined with statements espousing choice and equality. That's one of the show's biggest targets as they hate both authoritarianism and hypocricy, but it really gets under some people's skins that their views can be ridiculed. As such it's easier to just label things because, well, they're right wing hence wrong, biased, stupid and ill informed by definition. I pretty much always end up as anarchist in the political compass type things- ie about as left wing and real meaning liberal as it's possible to get- and I can't remember ever having a problem with South Park's political slant. They may have gay/ black/ left/ right/ male/ female characters who are horrendous d-bags (if we get SP forums will they have relaxed **** generating algorthyms?) but they're d-bags because they're self-important/ hypocritical/ obnoxious, not because they're gay/ black/ left/ right/ male/ female. Overall it's rather like the more balanced news outlets. If the left thinks they're right wing yet the right thinks they're left wing then they're probably pretty balanced in reality.

It's not so much the strong/ weak currency dichotomy or keeping it at various levels longer term that is important (stability is usually the best approach long term), but the ability to have it be flexible and responsive to your unique circumstances as a country. Something that the current Euro set up lacks. If you're in an economic bind one of the best immediate responses is to drop the currency as it makes you 'instantly' more competitive. If you're lucky enough to have your debt in your own denomination you can also inflate away/ print money to pay your debts by having a lower value currency, something Greece et alia would love to do at this point, and that the US is actually doing to an extent. If you don't then you want a sufficiently low currency to keep you competitive, but sufficiently high that you can still pay down debt, all without turning into Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic. You can also make a bit of extra money and influence the valuation by buying/ selling your own currency, so long as you don't get into a speculation war you can't win (UK and the ERM, for example. Bet there are a few people retrospectively glad that happened)

I think you doubled HAWX2's PC sales there. So few people cared about it that it never got "patched" even as a matter of pride. As I said elsewhere, Ubisoft are bipolar. They make particular types of games on PC that pretty much every other large publisher has abandoned as not having a large enough market, but at the same time have some ludicrous and- worse, since it taints even those titles with more reasonable implementations- wildly inconsistent DRM schemes while their personnel flip between Five Minute Hates and bemoaning their PC sales having halved. They've used no DRM, SecuROM, Steam, plain disk check and various different iterations and implementations of Uplay in the past three years and I have no idea which used which without checking.

With the Fed lending to banks at basically zero interest for the past 3 years that's hardly surprising. It's also rather... questionable as to whether that is significantly different from an outright bailout in anything other than the method in which it is delivered. It has at least illustrated why the US is so keen to keep its global reserve currency status, since that sort of action and quantitative easing ("printing money") would have far more severe effects if there wasn't a built in reason to hold onto US dollars.

Ubisoft is bipolar, on one hand it spews a lot of PC hate and piracy BS, on the other hand it's one of the few major publishers that still releases PC exclusives that aren't MMOs. Anno2070, if it were a EA/ Acti release would be multiplatform most likely never even considered due to not appealing to the right focus groups or if it were considered would be turned into Anno Post-Modern Warfare or similar.

I'd call it a failure due to its sales, though mainly because its predecessor did so well. Losing nearly 50% of your sales from the previous title doesn't usually spell success. I think that's conflation- Bioware Montreal is the one doing the new IP and this is being done by a different (pre-existing but rebadged) studio with us previously knowing nothing about it?