Don't worry.. I'll be embarrassed for you, since he cannot seem to get the customs down while working and speaking with foreign dignitaries.
-His wife touches a queen
At least she didn't try to give her a massage. As for those other things, I just can't see them as being much of a big deal. Why should I give a damn whether he goes in first or last? It looks retarded when they compete to get the other in the door first, and in the end, it makes no difference at all to the negotiations. All I care about is that he does what's right for our country, not whether he abides by all the strange traditions all over the world. I wouldn't really give a damn if another foreign leader didn't abide by all of our traditions either, so I can't imagine that they feel all that much different about it.
Do you really think Obama would have made a different choice regarding Afghanistan? Things would be much better if Congress would (wo)man up and take back their power/responsibility to declare our wars.
Invading Afghanistan wasn't the stupid move. With all the backing we had at the time, we could have made a real difference there. Not saying it would have turned into a democratic utopia overnight or anything, but it could have been made a lot better and ended up being a lot less of a problem for the rest of the world. But then Bush had to go and invade Iraq for no conceivably good reason and throw away all the goodwill and support we had, leaving us with enormous expense in lives and treasure, while letting Afghanistan slide right back to where it was before. All for a war that has nothing at all to do with addressing terrorism problems.
Things would be much better if Congress would (wo)man up and take back their power/responsibility to declare our wars.
I doubt they would be any better. They mostly seem to care about covering their asses and pointing fingers at the other side. They're easily as dumb and panicky as any other group of humans, as we saw with the bailout bills. They can be stampeded off a cliff like lemmings if you preach enough doom and gloom. So they decide to pass bills to throw mountains of money at the problem with no oversight or control, or even protections against outright fraud. Yeah, I'd trust those guys to do the right thing. Ever watch CSPAN when they are debating these bills? It's like watching a Jr. High debate. Scary as hell to think those idiots are running things. All it seems to take is ambition and a willingness to throw your ethics to the wind to get elected. That's why we're so screwed.
Then you should consider listening to the conservatives next time, as they saw this coming a mile away.
We've had to listen to them for 8 years now. Look where that got us.
As a Libertarian, I'm not the slightest bit surprised to see Obama take this stance. His entire -- but brief -- political career is replete with examples of such opportunism.
As others have pointed out, there could be good reasons for what Bush did and for why Obama is continuing it. I don't happen to believe that those reasons could really justify wholesale spying on Americans, but apparently both administrations do. Please explain why this should be seen as opportunism rather than simply a reversal of opinion when presented with the all the information that most people will never know about. It seems to me that they've overstepped their authority granted by the Constitution. Makes me wonder what's going on that we don't know about and why they see something like this as necessary. Maybe we're in even worse shape than it looks.
ICANN has never given a damn what anybody says anyway. I was a member of the At-Large community that elected representatives to the At-Large Advisory Committee. Anyone remember how well that went? From Wikipedia:
"In the Memorandum of Understanding that set up the relationship between ICANN and the U.S. government, ICANN was given a mandate requiring that it operate "in a bottom up, consensus driven, democratic manner." However, the attempts that ICANN have made to set up an organizational structure that would allow wide input from the global Internet community did not produce results amenable to the current Board. As a result, the At-Large constituency and direct election of board members by the global Internet community were soon abandoned."
If they don't like what others have to say, regardless of how good the advice may be, they simply ignore you and proceed in whatever way they believe will gain them more power, influence and money. That's the simple explanation for this move.
It will do what all horrible ideas like this are really designed to do... ensure eternal employment for hordes of lawyers. I can't think of a single profession out there with a brighter future. Of course that bright future will be spent making life hell for the rest of us, but I guess if you want to make an omelet...
We'll have to cancel their cable service. Also, I wonder how this will affect existing customers, can they add a cap after the contract?
What contract? They don't have a contract like cell phone companies do. You just pay month-to-month for service. The service agreement says they can basically do anything they want and only provide electronic notification of it. You have no recourse but to cancel service. Not a great option in areas where you only have one or two choices for broadband service, both usually being equally craptastic. The lack of meaningful competition in the broadband market is really screwing us.
Truth be told, about 10% of the customers any ISP has will be screwed by this. I'm not going to deny that. Then again that 10% accounts for well over 80% of the network usage. Then again if you can get your heavy users to jump to your competitor, you've screwed them (your competitor) by being able to keep your prices low.
I'm a rather heavy user by the standards that TW is using. On a busy month I will easily clear 50 to 75GB of transfers. Some months I may only do 25 to 30GB though. But guess who practically everyone I know of goes to for advice about their cable and internet service?:)
So sure, they can decide to change the game and not provide me with reasonable levels of service, even given that other companies providing such services are setting their caps much higher (AT&T is 150GB, Comcast is 250GB). But I can then recommend that people use anything but TW for their service, since other services will allow them to begin using their VOD services, game consoles and online media to the fullest without fear of exceeding the ridiculously low caps that TW sets.
Wonder how many cash cow customers they'll lose along with me? I'll be going out of my way to make sure it's a lot:)
Neither of these do more harm than good. If you had content (a song for example) that was a method for you to put food on the table, you would be thinking differently about copyright laws. Similarly, if you had really been affected by drug abuse whether personally or by those close to you, you wouldn't be spouting such jibberish about ending it.
Right. If you've been affected by drug abuse, then you should realize exactly how useless and counter-productive drug prohibition is. As for copyright, there's a huge gap between what serves artists and the ridiculous laws we have today. I believe there's a place for copyright law, but that it needs to be made sensible again before anyone will respect it.
Maybe I don't understand regulation and deregulation, but wouldn't regulation enforce even more service monopolies?
How would regulation help add more contenders to the pool of service providers?
That would depend entirely on what sort of regulation is passed. The problem is that there is no real free market for these services. There are regional monopolies and duopolies, which means that competition is scarce or artificial and consumers pay the price if the government doesn't keep the companies from exploiting their positions.
Given the infrastructure dependencies, I think that it should be considered a utility like water or electricity. You can't just have any new startup come along and start plowing up streets to lay new lines. I think the cities and counties need to own the infrastructure and contract out the maintenance of it, while allowing any provider to do business over that infrastructure.
Democrats have been running the show for 2 years now, yet all that this congress and Obama can do is lay blame on Bush and Republicans on this current mess.
Running the show? With Bush threatening to veto any legislation that Republicans don't like? Whatever lets you sleep at night I guess...
Democrats and their liberal policies are 100% to blame for this. Notice that when they blame Bush and company they're never specific, just vagaries about deregulation, free-market failing us, etc. Nothing but an assault and lie against capitalism. Look up Community Reinvestment Act when you get a chance if you're interested in the truth.
Wow. You rail against vagaries and then point at a single piece of legislation from 30+ years ago as the source of all our troubles? WTF? I could just as easily point at Phil Gramm's Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 and trump you with something that actually had a huge tangible impact (remember AIG?). You obviously haven't done any real research into this, so you're just latching onto whatever talking point you probably heard from Limbaugh and his ilk.
Those affected will lose Comedy Central. Daily Show, Colbert Report, South Park, Futurama, Reno 911, etc. While you can watch them online, not everyone wants to do this.
So, in order: Valuable; valuable; passed its prime about five years ago, if not more, if it even HAD a "prime" to pass; everyone who wants it has it on DVD already; oh boy more jokes about cops breaking in on bizarre fetishists and homosexual encounters how original.
Well, that's two for five. Better than you can expect from most TV channels.:-)
Anonymous Coward: Final arbiter of all entertainment value.
That's a gross misunderstanding of how both copyright and creativity work. You cannot copyright an idea - in fact, it is very specifically written into the Berne Convention that only specific implementations of an idea can be copyrighted. Don't take my word for that, though - look it up yourself. You'll find it laid out in Article 2, with subsection 3 containing a statement protecting the rights of others to create derivative works: http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#P85_10661 [wipo.int]
Yes, and it's been upheld in courts that something as small as a few notes of music can be enough to constitute infringement. Things have gotten ridiculously out of hand.
I still don't see anyone giving any good reason why these monopolies should be granted for such ridiculous amounts of time.
Disney may be very protective of its trademarks, but there are plenty of other adaptations of fairy tales out there. So that doesn't actually hold true.
And why was Disney able to create its classics? Because those fairy tales weren't copyrighted, so Disney just did what they wanted with them, with no restrictions or payment needed. That doesn't hold true for practically anything created in the last 70 years or so.
I've yet to hear a good argument for why anyone should be granted such a long-term monopoly on an intellectual work, especially considering how counter-intuitive it is in this age. It's certainly not needed to provide an incentive to create the works, as most people and corporations which create the work do not project profits for more than a handful of years. Anything beyond that doesn't really factor into the decision of whether to create something or not.
Vast amounts of work and very restrictive controls are needed to help prevent these works from being freely distributed, which leads me to believe that it may not be worth the effort and expense. I think many are coming to that conclusion, which is why we've seen DRM dropped from so many services lately. I believe we should go back to something more closely resembling the original copyright terms. Maybe 15 years. That's more than enough time to reap the profits. The government shouldn't be handing out monopolies as it does now because they are not benefiting the public, but they are certainly restricting people from building upon the ideas that have come before. Disney being the classic example of a company that made its fortune on the work of those who came before, and then proceeded to ensure that none would come after.
For starters, consider that Sarah Palin is actually Governor of Alaska, in addition to having been a Mayor once. But people forget about that point. They'd rather focus on how little responsibility a Mayor has in comparison to VP.
Karl Rove lambasted Tim Kaine for lack of experience despite his being governor of Virginia, a much more populous state, and formerly mayor of a much larger city. Then he turns around and tries to play up how experienced Palin is. How hypocritical is that?
And say what you will about Alaska, but last time I checked, a governor is not only over the people in the state, but is essentially in charge of the lands of the state, and makes decisions about it too. That makes Sarah Palin in charge of more land than any other governor in the U.S.
Actually I believe the federal government controls 60% of the land in Alaska.
Being complicit is not entrapment. Though I find it odd that people are speculating and arguing about an anecdote that is largely secondhand (and I'm not completely innocent in this regard).
I know it's not entrapment, which is why I didn't say it was. Like you, I am simply going on what was said, which I suspect is only part of the real story. That the father would be that involved in and aware of the relationship, and then later press charges, seems rather suspect to me.
Wouldn't the father be complicit in the crime by offering them their own tent and generally consenting to their relationship? I wouldn't expect him to be convicted or anything, as it would probably be his and his daughter's word against the guy, and the judge and jury tend to give law enforcement the benefit of any doubt, but based on the story, it seems that he was complicit to me.
Then the author gets off on some soapbox about people being accused of crimes, and how their information shouldn't be published... you know, we should just arrest them all Gestapo style, and when their wife/family asks what happened to them, "sorry, we're not allowed to discuss that in order to protect the accused from social embarrassment."
Now you're just putting words in his mouth and being ridiculous. Families would always be informed. Do you think the victim's family isn't informed just because they wouldn't print her name? If the suspect is presumed innocent, then that person's name should be protected as well unless and until they are convicted. Do you believe that's wrong?
Jeez, that amounted to 'Nya-nya, we're in Sweden and you can't get us.' Are they trying to make the --AAs look good with that page?
Never hurts to point out that just because they can buy laws like the DMCA in most countries, they don't have that control everywhere yet. Copyright law is so ridiculously out of whack, only countries with very corrupt governments or very ignorant governments (or both), could possibly still believe that it is in the public's best interest to award practically perpetual monopolies on information.
1) The games industry is already shifting away from the PC to closed platforms like consoles because they claim they make more profit due to not having the piracy issues they get on the PC. To them, this would be seen as a step backwards.
And given that the PC game market is just a market like any other, as some developers leave, others will enter the market which suddenly had more opportunities for them. PC gaming isn't dying. Especially as the console market becomes fully saturated, it will start looking more appealing to some developers. As long as they recognize that PC gamers have different tastes and expectations than console gamers, they should be able to do just fine.
It also comes in handy when you need to bypass a bug in the game, such as when a quest doesn't advance as it should or an NPC doesn't appear as they should. Without a console you'd be fairly screwed, as Oblivion players are well aware.
I consider this spam. She sent this to almost 400 instructors. When I went I had maybe 25 instructors.
If it was something that she believed was relevant to all instructors, then it doesn't seem like spam. 400 is hardly an outlandish number when discussing email.
Now it appears that she did violate the school's email policies, but those policies seem extremely conservative. One of the things she was writing about was the very limited time to comment on the issues that she was addressing. The email policies seem to contribute to that problem. So yeah, she violated the policies. She'll have to face the consequences for that. The school deserves the spotlight on its policies too though. Looks like she gets to be a martyr.
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Don't worry.. I'll be embarrassed for you, since he cannot seem to get the customs down while working and speaking with foreign dignitaries.
-His wife touches a queen
At least she didn't try to give her a massage. As for those other things, I just can't see them as being much of a big deal. Why should I give a damn whether he goes in first or last? It looks retarded when they compete to get the other in the door first, and in the end, it makes no difference at all to the negotiations. All I care about is that he does what's right for our country, not whether he abides by all the strange traditions all over the world. I wouldn't really give a damn if another foreign leader didn't abide by all of our traditions either, so I can't imagine that they feel all that much different about it.
Do you really think Obama would have made a different choice regarding Afghanistan? Things would be much better if Congress would (wo)man up and take back their power/responsibility to declare our wars.
Invading Afghanistan wasn't the stupid move. With all the backing we had at the time, we could have made a real difference there. Not saying it would have turned into a democratic utopia overnight or anything, but it could have been made a lot better and ended up being a lot less of a problem for the rest of the world. But then Bush had to go and invade Iraq for no conceivably good reason and throw away all the goodwill and support we had, leaving us with enormous expense in lives and treasure, while letting Afghanistan slide right back to where it was before. All for a war that has nothing at all to do with addressing terrorism problems.
Things would be much better if Congress would (wo)man up and take back their power/responsibility to declare our wars.
I doubt they would be any better. They mostly seem to care about covering their asses and pointing fingers at the other side. They're easily as dumb and panicky as any other group of humans, as we saw with the bailout bills. They can be stampeded off a cliff like lemmings if you preach enough doom and gloom. So they decide to pass bills to throw mountains of money at the problem with no oversight or control, or even protections against outright fraud. Yeah, I'd trust those guys to do the right thing. Ever watch CSPAN when they are debating these bills? It's like watching a Jr. High debate. Scary as hell to think those idiots are running things. All it seems to take is ambition and a willingness to throw your ethics to the wind to get elected. That's why we're so screwed.
Then you should consider listening to the conservatives next time, as they saw this coming a mile away.
We've had to listen to them for 8 years now. Look where that got us.
As a Libertarian, I'm not the slightest bit surprised to see Obama take this stance. His entire -- but brief -- political career is replete with examples of such opportunism.
As others have pointed out, there could be good reasons for what Bush did and for why Obama is continuing it. I don't happen to believe that those reasons could really justify wholesale spying on Americans, but apparently both administrations do. Please explain why this should be seen as opportunism rather than simply a reversal of opinion when presented with the all the information that most people will never know about. It seems to me that they've overstepped their authority granted by the Constitution. Makes me wonder what's going on that we don't know about and why they see something like this as necessary. Maybe we're in even worse shape than it looks.
ICANN has never given a damn what anybody says anyway. I was a member of the At-Large community that elected representatives to the At-Large Advisory Committee. Anyone remember how well that went? From Wikipedia:
"In the Memorandum of Understanding that set up the relationship between ICANN and the U.S. government, ICANN was given a mandate requiring that it operate "in a bottom up, consensus driven, democratic manner." However, the attempts that ICANN have made to set up an organizational structure that would allow wide input from the global Internet community did not produce results amenable to the current Board. As a result, the At-Large constituency and direct election of board members by the global Internet community were soon abandoned."
If they don't like what others have to say, regardless of how good the advice may be, they simply ignore you and proceed in whatever way they believe will gain them more power, influence and money. That's the simple explanation for this move.
It will do what all horrible ideas like this are really designed to do... ensure eternal employment for hordes of lawyers. I can't think of a single profession out there with a brighter future. Of course that bright future will be spent making life hell for the rest of us, but I guess if you want to make an omelet...
We'll have to cancel their cable service. Also, I wonder how this will affect existing customers, can they add a cap after the contract?
What contract? They don't have a contract like cell phone companies do. You just pay month-to-month for service. The service agreement says they can basically do anything they want and only provide electronic notification of it. You have no recourse but to cancel service. Not a great option in areas where you only have one or two choices for broadband service, both usually being equally craptastic. The lack of meaningful competition in the broadband market is really screwing us.
Truth be told, about 10% of the customers any ISP has will be screwed by this. I'm not going to deny that. Then again that 10% accounts for well over 80% of the network usage. Then again if you can get your heavy users to jump to your competitor, you've screwed them (your competitor) by being able to keep your prices low.
I'm a rather heavy user by the standards that TW is using. On a busy month I will easily clear 50 to 75GB of transfers. Some months I may only do 25 to 30GB though. But guess who practically everyone I know of goes to for advice about their cable and internet service? :)
So sure, they can decide to change the game and not provide me with reasonable levels of service, even given that other companies providing such services are setting their caps much higher (AT&T is 150GB, Comcast is 250GB). But I can then recommend that people use anything but TW for their service, since other services will allow them to begin using their VOD services, game consoles and online media to the fullest without fear of exceeding the ridiculously low caps that TW sets.
Wonder how many cash cow customers they'll lose along with me? I'll be going out of my way to make sure it's a lot :)
What browser? Working fine for me in Firefox 3.0.6. Wide story column and everything else seems fine once I turned off the stupid Beta index option.
Neither of these do more harm than good. If you had content (a song for example) that was a method for you to put food on the table, you would be thinking differently about copyright laws. Similarly, if you had really been affected by drug abuse whether personally or by those close to you, you wouldn't be spouting such jibberish about ending it.
Right. If you've been affected by drug abuse, then you should realize exactly how useless and counter-productive drug prohibition is.
As for copyright, there's a huge gap between what serves artists and the ridiculous laws we have today. I believe there's a place for copyright law, but that it needs to be made sensible again before anyone will respect it.
Not exactly dissent, but it's certainly something that the government doesn't like seeing released.
Maybe I don't understand regulation and deregulation, but wouldn't regulation enforce even more service monopolies?
How would regulation help add more contenders to the pool of service providers?
That would depend entirely on what sort of regulation is passed. The problem is that there is no real free market for these services. There are regional monopolies and duopolies, which means that competition is scarce or artificial and consumers pay the price if the government doesn't keep the companies from exploiting their positions.
Given the infrastructure dependencies, I think that it should be considered a utility like water or electricity. You can't just have any new startup come along and start plowing up streets to lay new lines. I think the cities and counties need to own the infrastructure and contract out the maintenance of it, while allowing any provider to do business over that infrastructure.
so that American ISPs can deter child pornography, copyright infringement, and other unlawful activity by way of "reasonable network management."
Everything sounds better when you tack on the word "reasonable".
Democrats have been running the show for 2 years now, yet all that this congress and Obama can do is lay blame on Bush and Republicans on this current mess.
Running the show? With Bush threatening to veto any legislation that Republicans don't like? Whatever lets you sleep at night I guess...
Democrats and their liberal policies are 100% to blame for this. Notice that when they blame Bush and company they're never specific, just vagaries about deregulation, free-market failing us, etc. Nothing but an assault and lie against capitalism. Look up Community Reinvestment Act when you get a chance if you're interested in the truth.
Wow. You rail against vagaries and then point at a single piece of legislation from 30+ years ago as the source of all our troubles? WTF? I could just as easily point at Phil Gramm's Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 and trump you with something that actually had a huge tangible impact (remember AIG?). You obviously haven't done any real research into this, so you're just latching onto whatever talking point you probably heard from Limbaugh and his ilk.
Those affected will lose Comedy Central. Daily Show, Colbert Report, South Park, Futurama, Reno 911, etc. While you can watch them online, not everyone wants to do this.
So, in order: Valuable; valuable; passed its prime about five years ago, if not more, if it even HAD a "prime" to pass; everyone who wants it has it on DVD already; oh boy more jokes about cops breaking in on bizarre fetishists and homosexual encounters how original.
Well, that's two for five. Better than you can expect from most TV channels. :-)
Anonymous Coward: Final arbiter of all entertainment value.
It was a bit off-topic, but it's not viral marketing, I'm an actual customer of theirs.
You are a customer talking about a product you use. That is one of the forms of Viral Marketing.
Back since I was a youngster, we just called it "word of mouth". Worked pretty well for good companies.
That's a gross misunderstanding of how both copyright and creativity work. You cannot copyright an idea - in fact, it is very specifically written into the Berne Convention that only specific implementations of an idea can be copyrighted. Don't take my word for that, though - look it up yourself. You'll find it laid out in Article 2, with subsection 3 containing a statement protecting the rights of others to create derivative works: http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#P85_10661 [wipo.int]
Yes, and it's been upheld in courts that something as small as a few notes of music can be enough to constitute infringement. Things have gotten ridiculously out of hand.
I still don't see anyone giving any good reason why these monopolies should be granted for such ridiculous amounts of time.
Disney may be very protective of its trademarks, but there are plenty of other adaptations of fairy tales out there. So that doesn't actually hold true.
And why was Disney able to create its classics? Because those fairy tales weren't copyrighted, so Disney just did what they wanted with them, with no restrictions or payment needed. That doesn't hold true for practically anything created in the last 70 years or so.
I've yet to hear a good argument for why anyone should be granted such a long-term monopoly on an intellectual work, especially considering how counter-intuitive it is in this age. It's certainly not needed to provide an incentive to create the works, as most people and corporations which create the work do not project profits for more than a handful of years. Anything beyond that doesn't really factor into the decision of whether to create something or not.
Vast amounts of work and very restrictive controls are needed to help prevent these works from being freely distributed, which leads me to believe that it may not be worth the effort and expense. I think many are coming to that conclusion, which is why we've seen DRM dropped from so many services lately. I believe we should go back to something more closely resembling the original copyright terms. Maybe 15 years. That's more than enough time to reap the profits. The government shouldn't be handing out monopolies as it does now because they are not benefiting the public, but they are certainly restricting people from building upon the ideas that have come before. Disney being the classic example of a company that made its fortune on the work of those who came before, and then proceeded to ensure that none would come after.
For starters, consider that Sarah Palin is actually Governor of Alaska, in addition to having been a Mayor once. But people forget about that point. They'd rather focus on how little responsibility a Mayor has in comparison to VP.
Karl Rove lambasted Tim Kaine for lack of experience despite his being governor of Virginia, a much more populous state, and formerly mayor of a much larger city. Then he turns around and tries to play up how experienced Palin is. How hypocritical is that?
And say what you will about Alaska, but last time I checked, a governor is not only over the people in the state, but is essentially in charge of the lands of the state, and makes decisions about it too. That makes Sarah Palin in charge of more land than any other governor in the U.S.
Actually I believe the federal government controls 60% of the land in Alaska.
Being complicit is not entrapment. Though I find it odd that people are speculating and arguing about an anecdote that is largely secondhand (and I'm not completely innocent in this regard).
I know it's not entrapment, which is why I didn't say it was. Like you, I am simply going on what was said, which I suspect is only part of the real story. That the father would be that involved in and aware of the relationship, and then later press charges, seems rather suspect to me.
Wouldn't the father be complicit in the crime by offering them their own tent and generally consenting to their relationship? I wouldn't expect him to be convicted or anything, as it would probably be his and his daughter's word against the guy, and the judge and jury tend to give law enforcement the benefit of any doubt, but based on the story, it seems that he was complicit to me.
Then the author gets off on some soapbox about people being accused of crimes, and how their information shouldn't be published... you know, we should just arrest them all Gestapo style, and when their wife/family asks what happened to them, "sorry, we're not allowed to discuss that in order to protect the accused from social embarrassment."
Now you're just putting words in his mouth and being ridiculous. Families would always be informed. Do you think the victim's family isn't informed just because they wouldn't print her name? If the suspect is presumed innocent, then that person's name should be protected as well unless and until they are convicted. Do you believe that's wrong?
May I redirect you to The Pirate Bay's legal department?
Jeez, that amounted to 'Nya-nya, we're in Sweden and you can't get us.' Are they trying to make the --AAs look good with that page?
Never hurts to point out that just because they can buy laws like the DMCA in most countries, they don't have that control everywhere yet. Copyright law is so ridiculously out of whack, only countries with very corrupt governments or very ignorant governments (or both), could possibly still believe that it is in the public's best interest to award practically perpetual monopolies on information.
1) The games industry is already shifting away from the PC to closed platforms like consoles because they claim they make more profit due to not having the piracy issues they get on the PC. To them, this would be seen as a step backwards.
And given that the PC game market is just a market like any other, as some developers leave, others will enter the market which suddenly had more opportunities for them. PC gaming isn't dying. Especially as the console market becomes fully saturated, it will start looking more appealing to some developers. As long as they recognize that PC gamers have different tastes and expectations than console gamers, they should be able to do just fine.
It also comes in handy when you need to bypass a bug in the game, such as when a quest doesn't advance as it should or an NPC doesn't appear as they should. Without a console you'd be fairly screwed, as Oblivion players are well aware.
I consider this spam. She sent this to almost 400 instructors. When I went I had maybe 25 instructors.
If it was something that she believed was relevant to all instructors, then it doesn't seem like spam. 400 is hardly an outlandish number when discussing email.
Now it appears that she did violate the school's email policies, but those policies seem extremely conservative. One of the things she was writing about was the very limited time to comment on the issues that she was addressing. The email policies seem to contribute to that problem. So yeah, she violated the policies. She'll have to face the consequences for that. The school deserves the spotlight on its policies too though. Looks like she gets to be a martyr.