> Sooo...Valve has a history of changing its policies to follow the law?
The article isn't well written, but I believe the point is about Valve making the change worldwide, even though their legal obligation is just to do it in France (or possibly the EU).
> the high court ruled that, under European Union law, Steam customers have a right to be able to resell ‘dematerialised’ goods, i.e., digital games on Steam.
IANAL but while this is a French high court, they have clearly interpreted EU (not domestic) law, so I think it's safe to say that if Valve loses the appeal, or decides to change it regardless ahead of time, they likely won't take the unnecessary risk of not rolling it out across the EU.
If they have to build infrastructure to support reselling game use licenses to comply with this law, it's unlikely they'll be able to justify releasing it to France only; there'll be backlash from their users in other countries.
Companies release features to some regions all the time. For example, in Google Photos, you can search by face in the USA but not Europe (due to differing privacy expectations).
That sucks; glad I'm in the US because I use that feature often. It's great for when friends ask for the photos I took of them.
In any case, I predict the Steam situation will differ because privacy and retail goods are valued differently. Americans are going to want that feature if Steam has to implement it, and they have options regarding what game store they use; it becomes a point of competitive advantage for Steam to switch it on in the States. They'll have to do the calculus on whether they lose more potential developers if they do vs. lose more potential store users if they don't.
Funny enough, if you use a USA based VPN server, the option will appear on your account and you'll be able to activate it. It Will stay activr for your account even if you switch back from VPN
That's deliberate... Those kind of "annoy the customer" limitations are all for PR/legal/business reasons, and the engineers building the features want to make the restrictions as easy to get around as possible.
"convicted"? It seems as though this would be a civil issue, not criminal. I'm not sure to which case you're referring in Australia, but it appears this case was civil.
Only slightly related to that but if you enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's piece you may also be interested in this episode from his excellent Revisionist History podcast where he tracks down why the fries at McDonalds don't taste the same any more:
Thank you for this link -- it was an absolutely revelatory read for me in terms of sales and marketing, and also as to why Heinz is as satisfying as it is.
Artificial refrigeration and air-conditioning also serves as a handy proof of work for all the cities that in fifty years will have newly hot climates battling scorching temperatures and partially underwater.
Just last week on January 28th Vogue Business ran a huge feature on Angela Ahrendts with an exclusive interview and photo shoot, and now this? Seems like weird timing with how "work in progress" Vogue characterized her work at Apple with the tone of the piece.
https://www.voguebusiness.com/companies/angela-ahrendts-appl...
"After turning round the fortunes of Burberry, Angela Ahrendts is five years into reimagining Apple’s bricks-and-mortar presence. Vogue Business meets the tech behemoth's senior vice president of retail on the steps of its soon-to-be-unveiled Washington, DC, flagship"
Depends on whether Apple PR organized that profile of her or whether she did herself. If she was planning on leaving she'd want to go out with her accomplishments highlighted.
I'd imagine the interview was organised by Apple PR, but the decision to fire her was being discussed & made shortly after (because Apple PR wouldn't know of or be involved in a decision that big regardless).
Or quite simply deciding she wasn't good in her current role doesn't mean Apple want to burn her career to the ground. This sort of PR piece could easily have been a helping hand to find her her next job.
I find it's easiest to avoid a lot of these scammy practices without the mental load of double- and triple-checking labels by only shopping at places that stake their reputation on the quality and curated nature of what they carry.
The Aldi brothers have their share of scandals in Germany when it comes to tainted and mislabeled food. I wouldn’t be so confident that Trader Joe’s is what it claims to be. They are very secretive about where their food comes from and have shunned independent food tracking services to verify the non GMO status of their foood. I’m not opposed to GMO food so this doesn’t bother me but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that their honey or olive oil isn’t pure. It’s hard to find non adulterated products these days.
That's actually been done, although no lasers were involved. You can modulate an ultrasonic beam with an audible sound in such a way that someone hit by the beam will hear the audible sound. Ultrasonic beams can be focused into a fairly narrow region. See [1].
They used this in an ad in New York in 2007 for the TV series "Paranormal State", which was premiering soon on A&E. It was a paranormal themed reality show. They had a big billboard for the series on the side of a building, and Holosonic's "audio spotlight" technology on the roof that sent two beams of modulated ultrasound down to the sidewalk.
Pedestrians who walked directly into the beams would hear a disembodied voice whispering creepy things like "Who's there? It's not your imagination", but someone next to them who didn't enter the beam would hear nothing. Here's a video [2].
Here's an article about that ad campaign, and it also mentions some other ad uses of the technology [3]. Interesting quote from it:
> Joe Pompei, president and founder of Holosonics, said the creepy approach is key to drawing attention to A&E's show. But, he noted, the technology was designed to avoid adding to noise pollution. "If you really want to annoy a lot of people, a loudspeaker is the best way to do it," he said. "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people."
Hopefully the ad tech uses the lower-acoustic-clarity method mentioned. It'll be like bus driver announcement white noise. "Wah, wah. And if you wah wah wah, visit wah wah wah dot com today."
Edit: I also wonder how it works if you modulate or otherwise moderate the interface between ear surfaces and ear-surroundings moisture, since that's apparently the resource this method needs in order to work at all. Shopping with headphones on can be a pretty nice experience IMO, and maybe it doubles as a countermeasure.
Yep, this is going to be Altered Carbon or Ghost In The Shell type of crap. Whatever you Google for will follow you everywhere, and nag you until you buy it...
Well, now you can directly target people so personalized ads when you're walking down the street. I'm scared it would devolve to pseudo-hallucinations ('did you hear that?').
We get a fair few of them (edit: Great Walls, not this new model) in Australia, and they're pretty universally considered utter crap. From reliability to crash tests, they consistently just don't live up to the marketing and hype. Sure they're cheap, but this seems to very much be a "you get what you pay for" cheap, not a "great bang for buck" cheap.
Personally I've only been in 1, one of the newer utes, and it felt like a 15 yr old base-model rental, despite being brand new and spec'd out.
Few examples of previous models bombing their testing:
> The budget Great Wall Steed ute has scored a shocking two stars in the latest round of ANCAP crash testing, against the 2016 ratings criteria.
> Chinese Haval H9 SUV slammed in world first independent crash test, conducted in Australia
> [...]sales of Chinese vehicles have almost come to standstill in Australia after safety recalls of Great Wall Motors utes due to asbestos components and poor crash test ratings of earlier models in recent years.
> they're pretty universally considered utter crap. From reliability to crash tests, they consistently just don't live up to the marketing and hype
If I remember my history correctly, this used to be true of Japanese exports too (and Taiwanese, and Korean, et al). Hopefully the Chinese will improve with time, and start to be known for high-quality exports!
I've ridden a Chinese electric taxi in Guangzhou. it was fine. If you want to walk away from a high speed crash I'd chose something else. If you stick under 60km/h which is what an awful lot of urban driving is, in traffic, I think you'd survive.
A 1960s mini minor, or a fiat 500 or even a fiat panda or a Citroen 2cv would be as dangerous. And yet, entirely street legal.
Tbf, Fiat Panda has recently been downgraded to 1 out of 5 stars in European safety tests, due to the fact that the most advanced safety feature it has is a beeper if you don't put your seatbelt on. So while still legal, hopefully the dire safety rating should put at least some buyers off.
You have to be careful when interpreting 'safety feature'. It does of course have airbags and SIPS but NCAP is now considering driver-assistance equipment as part of the assessment. So they moved the goalposts and retested the same Panda.
And as a result year's NCAP 'stars' signify something different to previous model years, so a zero rating in 2018 might still be better than four stars in 2014. That is important when comparing against second-hand models.
Personally I think that NCAP should just rate on actual impact protection measures and provide additional, supplemtary ratings for other features.
Static seatbelts. God.. what a pain they were. I liked the first panda, it felt a lot like a 2cv or a mini. I suspect it would be hard to get real insurance now, for the obvious reasons. Mind you.. the Dutch canta.. now there's a deathtrap and more than a few of them on th streets of Amsterdam
There are lot of fatal crashes in cities as well, because going 30 while getting hit frontally by a speedster at 60 is still releasing 90dv of energy and that scales quadratically with speed
But Target and Walmart have a large amount of products in stock within an hour or so ready for pickup from small towns on up. That's not true for Amazon except in large cities. For most of the country, you still have to wait one or two days to pick it up if you order with Amazon.
They are full-wave rectified so they don't flicker, and have an interesting semi-directional output them gives them visual interest when draped on the strand that brings to mind old-style incandescent bulbs.
A warning, though--these are way too bright to use indoors.
Sooo...Valve has a history of changing its policies to follow the law?