Aceticon

The salvageable employee will actually learn.

The AI doesn't learn.

They're only equivalent for the kind of manager who thinks investing in people is a waste of money.

The modern executive who got their post from being mates with the right people, having attended the right schools and relentless self-promotion isn't a highly analitical person who sistematically and in depth researches their options before chosing what to do.

This is unsurprising given that a system were the image one projects is critical to one's career progression rewards almost the opposite: they're supposed to look decisive and confident.

The myth of CxO competence is just that: a myth and the product of confusing the characteristics of the character they're playing with the characteristics of the actor, something we're definitelly egged on to do by the Media.

It's only unbelievable that the execs did not expect this for those who believe the execs are actually competent at management rather than being people born in the right families and whose greatest competence is in playing the right role for the right audience.

Of course not: it makes sense that Bomber numbers were much lower in Ancient times. Also the Romans would've used roman numerals.

So Roman bombers would probably be B II, B III, maybe even B IV

Lies!

Donald's adult diapers stop his PP from reaching his pants.

I'm 100% sure the dam wall is not North-facing.

Mind you, this a great idea for a Dam facing the right way (ideally South).

Actually they used to be pretty good back in the 80s and early 90s when they were a hardware maker and the company was always headed by somebody from the Engineering division - they made high quality consumer electronics at reasonable prices.

This is how they built quite the brand name.

Then in the late 90s (if I remember it correctly) they bought a major movie studio in the US and after a few years the top job went to somebody from the Media division.

After that all their electronics (such as Bluray and the MiniDisk) was locked down by design, quality fell a lot, they started lobbying heavily for things that would make Intellectual Property more valuable such as extending the duration of Copyrights, the DMCA and Anti-Circumvention legislation, and became so anti-consumer that they even put out music CDs with rootkits for people who listened to it on a PC.

But yeah, for over 2 decades Sony has been pretty much Evil.

That is not informing the potential buyer in a simple way, that's hiding the information in a different page, one which is a long text made up of legalese which one need Legal Training to fully understand.

You're just making my point.

You know what would be a simple, obvious, honest way of in that page of telling the purchaser that they're buying a license?

• To the left of the discount and the price put the text "BUY A LICENSE FOR:"

"Strangely" Steam chooses not do any such thing or similar and instead chooses to "inform" buyers with a link to a different page which is a wall of legal text.

I'm just correcting that incorrect statement of yours that:

Nobody is saying you cannot do on Steam, the big difference is that you can do that on 100% of Gog games, on Steam only on a very small percentage. (emphasys mine)

What the previous poster described is in fact possible with much more than "a very small percentage".

Mind you, I agree with you on what you just wrote in this last post of yours and in fact made the exact same point in response to the previous poster.

It's just that "very small percentage" part that I disagree - if you're technically proficient you can "hack" your way around Steam's closed system for most games since it's not really closed tight.

Then again a total impossibility of installing and running most Steam games independently of Steam if one has the right technical knowledge is not really the problem with Steam. The problem with Steam is threefold:

• It's designed so that only people with a certain level of knowledge can actually do that, those being a minority of Steam users.
• Even such "hacked" access is unreliable - maybe it will work easily, maybe it will be hard, maybe it won't work at all.
• There is no way to, before buying a game in Steam, know if that's one of those games which can be installed and run independently of Steam in that way or not, so one cannot make an informed purchasing decision on a game being possible to install and run without Steam or not.

The whole "it's not totally impossible" thing is just a trick that the previous poster and other such Steam fanboys try to pull when confronted with people pointing out that GOG is open and Steam is not: they misleadingly equate "the dependency of games on a central system can usually be hacked around in Steam" like to like with "GOG's is a purposefully open system that sells games guaranteed to not dependent on a central system" which is something very different in terms of intention of that feature being there, how well informed a potential buyer is of it before a purchase, the ease of use of it and how guaranteed it is for that to be the case. That's deeply deceitful, not even an apples and oranges comparison but more an apples and ghosts one.

Long document full of legal language than can only be truly comprehended by those with Legal Training isn't at all the same as BIG FAT TEXT INDICATING IN A SIMPLE WAY THAT THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE.

Absolutely, in the absence of actual Pro-Consumer Regulatory Obligations, the whole "Agreement" is a valid way for sellers of digital media such as Steam to legally cover their asses and not actually saying to prospective buyers the true nature of what they're buying.

It is, however, not a means to help a purchaser make an informed purchase, rather it's a way for Steam and other such stores to, in the current legal and regulatory environment, legally get away with doing the very opposite and obfuscate the true nature of what the purchaser is purchasing.

Think about it this way: if the intention of Steam was to be honest and make sure purchasers were making informed purchases, then why not inform purchasers upfront in the product page in a simple way that what they would be buying was a REVOCABLE LICENSE rather than ownership of a PRODUCT, and even explain the difference, rather than hide it in a long document that requires Law training to fully understand?

The fact that it's legal to have a purchase flow that looks like you're buying things without the seller being legally obliged to have a disclaimer in big fat letters that says something like "THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE, IT'S A LICENSING AGREEMENT. LICENSING AGREEMENTS CAN BE REVOKED AT ANY TIME AND YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO THIS MEDIA YOU ARE LICENSING" is the actual problem.

IMHO, Corruption amongst Lawmakers and Regulators is the actual problem.

People should be avoiding like the plague any stores whose media they can't actually download and keep in an open DRM-free format in their own devices, but they don't because they're not aware of it as the whole thing is one big bloody mess of expert legal domain and the fraud of misportraying a sale to be one things whilst it is a different thing being totally legal when it comes to digital media.

Can't blame people for not understanding this and thus not navigating it in an informed way, but I sure can blame Politicians and Regulators for not doing their jobs which is to make sure that sales are fair and the consumer can make an informed choice when evaluating a potential a purchase.

Actually, FYI, you can do that for a large percentage of Steam games, maybe even most, if you use the Goldberg Emulator that replaces the steamapi DLL.

Steam DRM is one of the easiest to bypass around, and I like to think that's very much a purposeful choice.

However, the entire thing is designed for it not to be easy to do for somebody with the technical know-how of the average gamer, plus it's not reliably possible and there's no way to know upfront if it will work or not when making a purchasing decision on a game in Steam.

Meanwhile "No DRM and with downloadable Offline Installers" is literally the Unique Value Proposition of GOG as a games store - access to download offline installers is there in the games page after purchase and that installer is guaranteed to work forever and ever if you still have the hardware and OS version supported by the game.

Not reliably as in Steam there is no contractual limitation on games having their own phone-home DRM plus some games are tightly integrated with Steam features (which Steam incentivizes) and don't work well offline, plus you need to known were the installers are cached as you can't just download them to a location of your choice and how to use stuff like the Goldberg Emulator otherwise only games which have ZERO integration with Steam will fully install and run offline.

In GOG, access to download the offline installers is right there in the product page in your library and contractually the games can't have any DRM as "No DRM" is GOG's unique value proposition as a games store.

Steam doesn't make it too hard to go around the phone-home DRM they put in place (making it better than just about all other phone-home DRM out there) but that's not at all the same as "here are the installers for you to use whenever you want online or offline and they're guaranteed to have no DRM".