No, that's certainly not reasonable. But then it's also not reasonable to believe that a company like this doesn't have email servers that can handle such a paltry load. There are plenty of free mail servers that can do it without any problem. Had they told me that a load of mere thousands of emails were causing them such severe problems, I wouldn't have believed it. We apparently still only have their word for it. Seems more likely that they just wanted them to shut up about it.
The court cited it and found so. In addition, they persisted once notified of the effects of their campaign.
Where did they state their intent to crash the servers? The court cited something that could be interpreted in a number of ways. That, combined with other bizarre interpretations is why I think this is a bad ruling. The robocalls are a separate issue covered under a separate law, and therefore shouldn't be used as evidence of intent either. Then there's the notion that the simple, unsubstantiated notification that something is inconveniencing them is enough to override free speech rights. I really hope that's not the case. I would like to see what kind of horribly misconfigured mail server they were using that could be overloaded by such a paltry number of emails.
I have no double standard. Show me a corporate executive doing RICO stuff and I'll support him going to jail.
Yeah, that's the thing. They make it damn near impossible to prove most of the time. In this case, even though no intent to crash servers was apparently stated, the CoA chose to interpret some language to mean that, and to interpret the use of robocalling as further evidence of intent, even though that makes no sense. If they were guilty of violating the robocalling law, why aren't they being charged with that? If they aren't guilty of violating the robocalling law, then how does it show intent? The court seems to have manufactured the intent in this case, which is usually the one thing missing in most corporate cases. This ruling is just all-around bad.
All attacks are relative. If you, by any means, flood a system with the knowledge that the flood is of sufficient strength to affect the availability of that system, and with the intent of hindering the availability of that system, then you are purposely performing a DOS. That is illegal.
Again, this goes to proving intent. I still don't see that being done. They were obviously trying to convey the outrage of their members at the company. The company may not have liked it, and it may have been some sort of burden for them to receive so many complaints, but the volume of mail we're talking about here isn't remotely close to being able to take down an email system unless it was set up horribly wrong. That's on the company. Just because they say it's overloading their system, doesn't mean that it actually is. If it actually was overloading the system, it's due to negligence on the company's part in not setting up their email server properly. This isn't some mom and pop operation we're talking about. Free speech should win out over inconvenience and negligence.
That it was coordinated among thousands should bring in RICO charges too. For once I'd like to see some modern union bosses go to jail for their tactics.
The intent was to convey the outrage of the union members and have their voices be heard by the management. Business-related emails sent to business email addresses. I've seen no real evidence of any other intent than that. Their free speech should trump the inconvenience to the company, especially for something as trivial to prevent as this. RICO charges for this would be complete bullshit. Hell, CEOs have to practically be caught red-handed eating live babies before they go to jail. Why should we have a double-standard here?
An "established business relationship" is a voluntary two-way communication which has not been previously terminated. If you tell them not to call you any more, they must stop.
Voluntary in the sense that they still have business dealings with the union? Sounds voluntary to me.
But use of the phone system is unauthorized EXPLICITLY once you've explicitly told them to stop calling you.
Only if you aren't covered by one of the exceptions.
I'm authorized implicitly to cut across your yard if you don't have a "no trespassing" sign, but I'm trespassing the instant you tell me to leave and I don't. The same principle applies here.
Not sure where you live, but that's not true in Texas.
A phone call is information. Inside the telephone system, it's just binary information. But I was referring more to the mass email campaign anyway, not the phone calls.
Like I said, pretty much anything can be described as information. It's not what this law was intended for. We already have laws that specifically cover what you can and can't do with robocalls, so trying to apply this one is just wrong. And if you don't describe the phone calls as information, then they aren't covered under this law.
As far as the email is concerned, I think that the free speech of individuals outweighs the inconvenience to the company. Especially since they could easily address it themselves if they had even a halfway competent admin. Judging by the quick overload of their system, under a rather paltry load by most standards, they don't currently have one. The servers at my office have to fend off millions of spam emails per day. The thousands that were being sent by the union would probably barely get noticed by the server, and would be quickly cut off from the mail recipients once the admins were alerted.
If you know something will cause harm, and you intentionally do it anyway, and it causes harm, you have intentionally caused harm.
Only if you define harm very broadly. Lots of things can be considered harm by someone. Me telling you that some restaurant stores their meat in the closet instead of the fridge harms that company, even if it's absolutely true. Just because it inconveniences the company doesn't mean that their employees shouldn't be allowed to send their complaints via email. Any halfway competent admin could have handled this volume easily.
It was employees complaining loudly and repeatedly about the actions of the company. It's free speech, and not their fault that the company's email servers were crappy and/or misconfigured. This was nothing like a real DDoS or spam attack. This was individuals clicking the buttons individually to send messages with their complaints, not millions of emails per hour being generated by a computer. Spam volumes are orders of magnitude greater. Something close to 300 billion spam emails are sent every day. Had they gone with the spam approach, they could have easily pumped out vastly more emails. From what I've read of this case, any halfway competent email server should have been able to handle it.
While the Republicans make a lot of noise about illegal immigration, they never seem to have the balls to really go after the consumption side of the equation and start prosecuting every company they can find that hires illegals. They're so gung-ho about it in the drug war, why not immigration as well? It's also kind of interesting that Obama is actually deporting more illegals per year than GWB did.
In the end, they stated their intent of disruption and didn't stop when told it was overloading systems. They're just as guilty as a DDOS or mass spammer.
No, because DDOS and spam originate from an individual and are completely automated. These were many individuals sending many emails containing their complaints against the company through their union's server. They wouldn't be able to generate anything even remotely approaching spam or DDOS levels of traffic. It's only due to the lousy quality and configuration of Pulte's email servers that they were able to cause such interruption. I certainly wouldn't have expected that to happen from mere thousands of emails being sent.
I saw no hard numbers as to how many emails were sent, or how many members participated. Either way, it is trivial to block email from a given server, and filter out form messages. I don't see that they have any legitimate right to prevent individuals from sending as many messages as they like to their publicly accessible email server. As long as they aren't automating the process such that they are sent without human interaction in each message. Shoehorning this law into this situation is going to end badly.
If you call me to solicit something, you must be prepared to give me your real name, your address or telephone number, and if I've told you to stop and you call me again any time within the next 5 years you'll be having an encounter with police shortly.
It's not a solicitation under the law, because calls "to any person with whom the caller has an established business relationship" are expressly excepted by the law. I assume that's why they tried to use the CFAA instead.
And why not? They violated the CFAA: "Whoever... knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to" "a computer... which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication". The CoA ruled that the union knew that the volume of information would be harmful, and it reversed the district court's dismissal of the lawsuit. And they specifically targeted the sales department, which indicates that they were trying to interfere with the business's ability to function.
Because use of the phone system is authorized implicitly for phone calls, subject to restrictions under laws such as the one I mentioned. Using the description of "a program, information, code, or command" to describe a phone call with an audio message is a stretch, and was not intended to be covered by that law. It only technically falls under it because practically anything can be classified as "information". The definition of "damage" is also ridiculously broad, to the point where it would plainly cover even minor inconvenience. Charge them under the law that was intended to cover this sort of behavior, don't make insanely broad interpretations of a law that was intended for this. That will not set a good precedent. Seems like we don't even need robocall laws anymore if this law is going to be interpreted in such an insanely broad way and applied to situations it was not intended to cover. The law of unintended consequences will certainly apply here.
You raise an excellent point about being in compliance with the law. And the robodialer is would probably be unrelated to the email CFAA charges. However, I have to wonder...if they were willing to robodial, whose to say they didn't sign up the email addresses on some high-volume spam lists? Not that you could really prove it, but it definitely lowers the ethical bar IMO.
Given the apparently lousy email servers and poor configuration, it doesn't sound like it would take much at all to flood them anyway. A few hundred pissed off employees sending multiple emails would probably be more than sufficient. I wouldn't speculate about any other tactics since none were even alleged by the company.
fafaforza asked if they used a spam bot. I don't know if they used a spam bot to send e-mails, but do know that they hired an auto-dialer to make phone calls.
There are laws to cover that. Using the computer crime law seems inappropriate since there are already state and federal laws that are specifically targeted at robocalls. Such calls are legal if they comply with those laws.
As long as they did it in compliance with federal and state laws, then I don't see a problem with it. If they didn't, then that's the law that they should be pursuing them under, not some computer crime law. If they were in compliance, then I don't think they really have a case.
The union continued and a lawsuit resulted. The intent was clear to cause harm, not merely to communicate. Fair ruling.
I still haven't seen real evidence that the intent was to cause harm. The intent seems to have been to communicate the level of outrage by the employees by letting them send as many emails as they wanted to. As near as I can tell from the articles, each of those emails was sent by an individual, even though each individual was likely sending multiple emails. They were not just being cranked out by the millions like a spam server does. Seems like a legitimate use of a publicly accessible email system. I'm still rather amazed that their system was impared by this. I think they need to hire a sys admin that knows how to configure their email servers.
You might consider installing a carbon monoxide detector near whereyou're sitting. You're actually suggesting that individual people sending a single post card or single e-mail is EXACTLY the same as people in a coordinated group, EACH sending several thousand emails to impede function.
If it's a coordinated campaign by millions of people to send their complaint by postcard, what law would it violate, exactly? I don't know of one, and the court in this case apparently didn't know of one that they were violating by sending the emails either. I don't think there is such a law.
You put your server on the public internet to receive email. You get email pertinent to your business, namely complaints from employees or former employees, or customers. Under the law that you're imagining, I could sue people simply for sending me email that I didn't like. Maybe The Consumerist tells people about some crappy product I'm selling and posts an email for my company so that my customers can contact me to complain. I can sue them? I'm seriously glad we don't (yet) live in a world where the law and the courts agree with you.
You're wrong - it's an invitation to send you e-mail that might be of interest to you, but not an invitation for mailbombing. And even if you were right, in this case it was the unpublished e-mail addresses of three executives.
So, what was your point again?
Whether it's published or not, it's a publicly-accessible email address. There's simply no law such as you're describing. It doesn't exist. The court ruled this way as well. They made authorized use of the system.
Um, no, random idiot blogger might have thought the e-mails were the only problem but if you read the actual ruling everything was all factored into it like any sane person would expect.
They are two separate systems, and whether one or the other might be considered as an attack, the effects would have to be considered on a system by system basis. I can understand their phone system being tied up, as that happens all the time, simply due to the nature of the phone system. Robocalls, while regulated in some places, are generally not illegal uses of the phone system. Both email and phone methods were making authorized uses of the systems, so the court correctly found that they were not violating the law.
The calls aren't what supposedly violated the law here though, so that's not relevant. The instructions to send thousands of emails sounds perfectly legitimate, as this is the same thing that countless organizations do all the time. It's how they show that lots of people are mad and care about whatever the issue is. I surely wouldn't expect mere thousands of emails to cause havoc with a company's mail system. That's actually rather ridiculous. In this case it only did so because they apparently had it configured in a way that would be highly likely to suffer service problems from receiving mere thousands of emails.
I still don't see anything more than assumptions and conjecture to support your claim of intentional overloading of their mail system. I'm not saying that they definitely didn't have that intention. I'm just saying that you haven't provided any real evidence that they did. Presumed innocent and all that.
The union specifically told people to send emails, multiple emails, keep sending them so that they are overloaded. That's close enough to a DDOS to me.
I haven't seen any evidence that that's what they stated the overloading of servers as a goal. Is there some evidence of that? From what I read, they asked people to "fight back" by calling and emailing them and complaining, not by crashing their servers. I can see them wanting to generate a high volume, but that's true of any protest.
Basically, the spirit of the law makes it illegal to demand someone to do something (such as paying up), using some kind of threat to increase the chances of them actually paying up.
Of course such tactics are SOP for attorneys general everywhere.
Back in.. oh, I suppose 2009 they WERE pretty hard on Republicans and their spending
Like he said, they were WAY late to the party if they were concerned about deficit spending. That was the M.O. for pretty much the entire GWB presidency. Then when they finally do start complaining, they go all crazy about it and try to do things that will send us into an even worse tailspin. It's one thing to have your concerns addressed and to come up with a plan that will work for both the short and long term. It's quite another to come in as a minority group and insist that everything must be done your way or you'll make sure that the country will burn. That's the Tea Party method, and it's both senseless and undemocratic. A bi-partisan plan has been put forth that would address the debt and deficit, but because it's not exactly what they want, they will ignore it and insist that nothing will be done until it's done their way. Yet they have the audacity to say that they're the ones behaving like adults. It's both hilarious and frightening.
If you can accept a much lower amount of detail in the console version than the PC version, then sure. Unfortunately the consoles end up being the development target and the level of detail that could be displayed on PCs is often not even pursued. So we end up with muddy, low-res textures and models, low LOD on most objects, and a fairly hard limit on the number of objects that can be displayed or the distance that can be rendered. Yes, they could possibly overcome these things, but most publishers don't seem to want to put in the extra work to create the higher res textures and models that won't get used in the console version, and the other issues remain as well.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's certainly not reasonable. But then it's also not reasonable to believe that a company like this doesn't have email servers that can handle such a paltry load. There are plenty of free mail servers that can do it without any problem. Had they told me that a load of mere thousands of emails were causing them such severe problems, I wouldn't have believed it. We apparently still only have their word for it. Seems more likely that they just wanted them to shut up about it.
The court cited it and found so. In addition, they persisted once notified of the effects of their campaign.
Where did they state their intent to crash the servers? The court cited something that could be interpreted in a number of ways. That, combined with other bizarre interpretations is why I think this is a bad ruling. The robocalls are a separate issue covered under a separate law, and therefore shouldn't be used as evidence of intent either. Then there's the notion that the simple, unsubstantiated notification that something is inconveniencing them is enough to override free speech rights. I really hope that's not the case. I would like to see what kind of horribly misconfigured mail server they were using that could be overloaded by such a paltry number of emails.
I have no double standard. Show me a corporate executive doing RICO stuff and I'll support him going to jail.
Yeah, that's the thing. They make it damn near impossible to prove most of the time. In this case, even though no intent to crash servers was apparently stated, the CoA chose to interpret some language to mean that, and to interpret the use of robocalling as further evidence of intent, even though that makes no sense. If they were guilty of violating the robocalling law, why aren't they being charged with that? If they aren't guilty of violating the robocalling law, then how does it show intent? The court seems to have manufactured the intent in this case, which is usually the one thing missing in most corporate cases. This ruling is just all-around bad.
All attacks are relative. If you, by any means, flood a system with the knowledge that the flood is of sufficient strength to affect the availability of that system, and with the intent of hindering the availability of that system, then you are purposely performing a DOS. That is illegal.
Again, this goes to proving intent. I still don't see that being done. They were obviously trying to convey the outrage of their members at the company. The company may not have liked it, and it may have been some sort of burden for them to receive so many complaints, but the volume of mail we're talking about here isn't remotely close to being able to take down an email system unless it was set up horribly wrong. That's on the company. Just because they say it's overloading their system, doesn't mean that it actually is. If it actually was overloading the system, it's due to negligence on the company's part in not setting up their email server properly. This isn't some mom and pop operation we're talking about. Free speech should win out over inconvenience and negligence.
That it was coordinated among thousands should bring in RICO charges too. For once I'd like to see some modern union bosses go to jail for their tactics.
The intent was to convey the outrage of the union members and have their voices be heard by the management. Business-related emails sent to business email addresses. I've seen no real evidence of any other intent than that. Their free speech should trump the inconvenience to the company, especially for something as trivial to prevent as this. RICO charges for this would be complete bullshit. Hell, CEOs have to practically be caught red-handed eating live babies before they go to jail. Why should we have a double-standard here?
An "established business relationship" is a voluntary two-way communication which has not been previously terminated. If you tell them not to call you any more, they must stop.
Voluntary in the sense that they still have business dealings with the union? Sounds voluntary to me.
But use of the phone system is unauthorized EXPLICITLY once you've explicitly told them to stop calling you.
Only if you aren't covered by one of the exceptions.
I'm authorized implicitly to cut across your yard if you don't have a "no trespassing" sign, but I'm trespassing the instant you tell me to leave and I don't. The same principle applies here.
Not sure where you live, but that's not true in Texas.
A phone call is information. Inside the telephone system, it's just binary information. But I was referring more to the mass email campaign anyway, not the phone calls.
Like I said, pretty much anything can be described as information. It's not what this law was intended for. We already have laws that specifically cover what you can and can't do with robocalls, so trying to apply this one is just wrong. And if you don't describe the phone calls as information, then they aren't covered under this law.
As far as the email is concerned, I think that the free speech of individuals outweighs the inconvenience to the company. Especially since they could easily address it themselves if they had even a halfway competent admin. Judging by the quick overload of their system, under a rather paltry load by most standards, they don't currently have one. The servers at my office have to fend off millions of spam emails per day. The thousands that were being sent by the union would probably barely get noticed by the server, and would be quickly cut off from the mail recipients once the admins were alerted.
If you know something will cause harm, and you intentionally do it anyway, and it causes harm, you have intentionally caused harm.
Only if you define harm very broadly. Lots of things can be considered harm by someone. Me telling you that some restaurant stores their meat in the closet instead of the fridge harms that company, even if it's absolutely true. Just because it inconveniences the company doesn't mean that their employees shouldn't be allowed to send their complaints via email. Any halfway competent admin could have handled this volume easily.
It was employees complaining loudly and repeatedly about the actions of the company. It's free speech, and not their fault that the company's email servers were crappy and/or misconfigured. This was nothing like a real DDoS or spam attack. This was individuals clicking the buttons individually to send messages with their complaints, not millions of emails per hour being generated by a computer. Spam volumes are orders of magnitude greater. Something close to 300 billion spam emails are sent every day. Had they gone with the spam approach, they could have easily pumped out vastly more emails. From what I've read of this case, any halfway competent email server should have been able to handle it.
While the Republicans make a lot of noise about illegal immigration, they never seem to have the balls to really go after the consumption side of the equation and start prosecuting every company they can find that hires illegals. They're so gung-ho about it in the drug war, why not immigration as well? It's also kind of interesting that Obama is actually deporting more illegals per year than GWB did.
In the end, they stated their intent of disruption and didn't stop when told it was overloading systems. They're just as guilty as a DDOS or mass spammer.
No, because DDOS and spam originate from an individual and are completely automated. These were many individuals sending many emails containing their complaints against the company through their union's server. They wouldn't be able to generate anything even remotely approaching spam or DDOS levels of traffic. It's only due to the lousy quality and configuration of Pulte's email servers that they were able to cause such interruption. I certainly wouldn't have expected that to happen from mere thousands of emails being sent.
I saw no hard numbers as to how many emails were sent, or how many members participated. Either way, it is trivial to block email from a given server, and filter out form messages. I don't see that they have any legitimate right to prevent individuals from sending as many messages as they like to their publicly accessible email server. As long as they aren't automating the process such that they are sent without human interaction in each message. Shoehorning this law into this situation is going to end badly.
If you call me to solicit something, you must be prepared to give me your real name, your address or telephone number, and if I've told you to stop and you call me again any time within the next 5 years you'll be having an encounter with police shortly.
It's not a solicitation under the law, because calls "to any person with whom the caller has an established business relationship" are expressly excepted by the law. I assume that's why they tried to use the CFAA instead.
And why not? They violated the CFAA: "Whoever ... knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to" "a computer ... which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication". The CoA ruled that the union knew that the volume of information would be harmful, and it reversed the district court's dismissal of the lawsuit. And they specifically targeted the sales department, which indicates that they were trying to interfere with the business's ability to function.
Because use of the phone system is authorized implicitly for phone calls, subject to restrictions under laws such as the one I mentioned. Using the description of "a program, information, code, or command" to describe a phone call with an audio message is a stretch, and was not intended to be covered by that law. It only technically falls under it because practically anything can be classified as "information". The definition of "damage" is also ridiculously broad, to the point where it would plainly cover even minor inconvenience. Charge them under the law that was intended to cover this sort of behavior, don't make insanely broad interpretations of a law that was intended for this. That will not set a good precedent. Seems like we don't even need robocall laws anymore if this law is going to be interpreted in such an insanely broad way and applied to situations it was not intended to cover. The law of unintended consequences will certainly apply here.
You raise an excellent point about being in compliance with the law. And the robodialer is would probably be unrelated to the email CFAA charges. However, I have to wonder...if they were willing to robodial, whose to say they didn't sign up the email addresses on some high-volume spam lists? Not that you could really prove it, but it definitely lowers the ethical bar IMO.
Given the apparently lousy email servers and poor configuration, it doesn't sound like it would take much at all to flood them anyway. A few hundred pissed off employees sending multiple emails would probably be more than sufficient. I wouldn't speculate about any other tactics since none were even alleged by the company.
No, auto-dialing = telephone spam.
fafaforza asked if they used a spam bot. I don't know if they used a spam bot to send e-mails, but do know that they hired an auto-dialer to make phone calls.
There are laws to cover that. Using the computer crime law seems inappropriate since there are already state and federal laws that are specifically targeted at robocalls. Such calls are legal if they comply with those laws.
Not a bot, but they had their own mail server mass-spamming the company.
From the article, it sounds like they were allowing people to send the emails from their server, the emails were not being automatically generated.
They did in fact use an outside robo-dialer to flood the phone system with voice mails. http://computerfraud.us/articles/can-a-labor-union-be-sued-under-the-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act-for-spamming-an-employer%E2%80%99s-voice-and-email-systems
As long as they did it in compliance with federal and state laws, then I don't see a problem with it. If they didn't, then that's the law that they should be pursuing them under, not some computer crime law. If they were in compliance, then I don't think they really have a case.
The union continued and a lawsuit resulted. The intent was clear to cause harm, not merely to communicate. Fair ruling.
I still haven't seen real evidence that the intent was to cause harm. The intent seems to have been to communicate the level of outrage by the employees by letting them send as many emails as they wanted to. As near as I can tell from the articles, each of those emails was sent by an individual, even though each individual was likely sending multiple emails. They were not just being cranked out by the millions like a spam server does. Seems like a legitimate use of a publicly accessible email system. I'm still rather amazed that their system was impared by this. I think they need to hire a sys admin that knows how to configure their email servers.
That should have read "The district court ruled this way as well." Not referring to the CoA ruling.
You might consider installing a carbon monoxide detector near whereyou're sitting. You're actually suggesting that individual people sending a single post card or single e-mail is EXACTLY the same as people in a coordinated group, EACH sending several thousand emails to impede function.
If it's a coordinated campaign by millions of people to send their complaint by postcard, what law would it violate, exactly? I don't know of one, and the court in this case apparently didn't know of one that they were violating by sending the emails either. I don't think there is such a law.
You put your server on the public internet to receive email. You get email pertinent to your business, namely complaints from employees or former employees, or customers. Under the law that you're imagining, I could sue people simply for sending me email that I didn't like. Maybe The Consumerist tells people about some crappy product I'm selling and posts an email for my company so that my customers can contact me to complain. I can sue them? I'm seriously glad we don't (yet) live in a world where the law and the courts agree with you.
You're wrong - it's an invitation to send you e-mail that might be of interest to you, but not an invitation for mailbombing. And even if you were right, in this case it was the unpublished e-mail addresses of three executives. So, what was your point again?
Whether it's published or not, it's a publicly-accessible email address. There's simply no law such as you're describing. It doesn't exist. The court ruled this way as well. They made authorized use of the system.
Um, no, random idiot blogger might have thought the e-mails were the only problem but if you read the actual ruling everything was all factored into it like any sane person would expect.
They are two separate systems, and whether one or the other might be considered as an attack, the effects would have to be considered on a system by system basis. I can understand their phone system being tied up, as that happens all the time, simply due to the nature of the phone system. Robocalls, while regulated in some places, are generally not illegal uses of the phone system. Both email and phone methods were making authorized uses of the systems, so the court correctly found that they were not violating the law.
The calls aren't what supposedly violated the law here though, so that's not relevant. The instructions to send thousands of emails sounds perfectly legitimate, as this is the same thing that countless organizations do all the time. It's how they show that lots of people are mad and care about whatever the issue is. I surely wouldn't expect mere thousands of emails to cause havoc with a company's mail system. That's actually rather ridiculous. In this case it only did so because they apparently had it configured in a way that would be highly likely to suffer service problems from receiving mere thousands of emails.
I still don't see anything more than assumptions and conjecture to support your claim of intentional overloading of their mail system. I'm not saying that they definitely didn't have that intention. I'm just saying that you haven't provided any real evidence that they did. Presumed innocent and all that.
The union specifically told people to send emails, multiple emails, keep sending them so that they are overloaded. That's close enough to a DDOS to me.
I haven't seen any evidence that that's what they stated the overloading of servers as a goal. Is there some evidence of that? From what I read, they asked people to "fight back" by calling and emailing them and complaining, not by crashing their servers. I can see them wanting to generate a high volume, but that's true of any protest.
Of course such tactics are SOP for attorneys general everywhere.
*sigh* That should say "district attorneys".
Basically, the spirit of the law makes it illegal to demand someone to do something (such as paying up), using some kind of threat to increase the chances of them actually paying up.
Of course such tactics are SOP for attorneys general everywhere.
Back in.. oh, I suppose 2009 they WERE pretty hard on Republicans and their spending
Like he said, they were WAY late to the party if they were concerned about deficit spending. That was the M.O. for pretty much the entire GWB presidency. Then when they finally do start complaining, they go all crazy about it and try to do things that will send us into an even worse tailspin. It's one thing to have your concerns addressed and to come up with a plan that will work for both the short and long term. It's quite another to come in as a minority group and insist that everything must be done your way or you'll make sure that the country will burn. That's the Tea Party method, and it's both senseless and undemocratic. A bi-partisan plan has been put forth that would address the debt and deficit, but because it's not exactly what they want, they will ignore it and insist that nothing will be done until it's done their way. Yet they have the audacity to say that they're the ones behaving like adults. It's both hilarious and frightening.
If you can accept a much lower amount of detail in the console version than the PC version, then sure. Unfortunately the consoles end up being the development target and the level of detail that could be displayed on PCs is often not even pursued. So we end up with muddy, low-res textures and models, low LOD on most objects, and a fairly hard limit on the number of objects that can be displayed or the distance that can be rendered. Yes, they could possibly overcome these things, but most publishers don't seem to want to put in the extra work to create the higher res textures and models that won't get used in the console version, and the other issues remain as well.