Or perhaps, and this is just a suggestion, the OP was making an oblique reference to PAX. More specifically for Penny Arcade and one of its central founders of Jerry "Tycho" Holkins. Hence the clever substitution of "Tychoid" instead of "Typhoid".
My supervisor had that exact issue with their iPhone and Apple. They had taken the old 3G iPhone their daughter had and taken it to AT&T to get it switched over and activated. The AT&T tech realized that they had iTunes at home setup already and didn't need the full treatment so he yanked the cable out mid-sync without thinking and corrupted the phone's settings (Note: at the time they didn't realize that was the problem). Phone that was perfectly fine is hosed now but no worries, they thought, since they had AppleCare's extended warranty on it. My boss takes it to the Apple Store. Their tech stuck the magnifier near the sensor said "op, it's gotten wet so that's why it doesn't work and that's not covered under AppleCare" and sent them away.
Boss is furious and not caring anymore they hand it to our sysadmin who performs a simple restore OS (5 minutes, tops) and the phone is in perfect working order again. He pointed out that humidity can trip those moisture sensors since the air is in fact moist (our humidity hovers around 100% the entire summer) so that sensor is likely tripped on every phone in the area. Not sure that's true, but wouldn't it be handy for the companies to have such an easy way to deny repairs they would have to do otherwise?
Why would that be suspicious? Shock value and immediacy are well-known and often-used marketing ploys that would have a perfect application there while the loss is fresh in people's mind and the controversy would keep people buzzing about "the film that X was killed for" even if it was, in fact, completely baseless. Again, I'm noted for my lack of faith in humanity, so I might be overly cynical...
Heck, Uwe Boll tried to promote a movie via parody of 9/11, so I feel safe in saying there's no low a marketing agency won't stoop to if they think it will grab people's attention. I can even see completely innocent groups attempting tie-ins that even go so far as to try and cast doubt on their own innocence for the sake of buzz. Remember, this is a story about a company saying a movie series that likely had over a billion dollars in sales (tickets, DVDs, licensed products) made no money and is saying it with a straight face; conventional logic has no place here.
Murder is conveniently illegal, but that's never in the history of crime stopped those who profit from it. Al Capone ran an organized crime outfit likely responsible for many murders that he ordered to expand his business. He was never arrested nor tried for murder, even though it was an open secret he was behind many of them. Instead, he went to jail for tax evasion. So yeah, laws against murder won't accomplish much since they're rather irrelevant to those who would profit from an individual's death. Plus, Hollywood and organized crime have very similar thought processes...funnily enough.
As to the latter example, simply have a mechanism where they can call on a rights holder to prove they're still around either by recent public appearance or appearance before the court. Put in a certain "cooldown" time (a year or so from their last appearance) to prevent people from harassing a creator with constant defenses and away you go.
While I generally agree with that, I understand that having the works immediately available in the public domain could very well place undue hardship on the creator's family should the death be sudden and unexpected. "Normal" people have life insurance policies generally tuned to their income to provide for that, but in the case of a a professional "creator" of works, quantifying that income can be tricky, and I don't think the loss of rights should be immediate to the family of the creator if one exists.
Also, my utter lack of faith in humanity says that particularly unscrupulous individuals would "arrange" things so that an author who didn't want to sell the rights to their work would have the creator killed and poof! Public domain now for me to create my crappy movie and destroy the work. While I wish I could believe that people would never sink so low, this IS an article about movie studios trying to claim a major film trilogy made NO money at all. If they thought they could get away with it and make money, I don't doubt that some of them would do it.
I can see a 20 year period after death being reasonable as any children they had should be grown capable of self-support by then and the incentive of making a derivative work of something 20 years old will often lose its allure unless it's a seminal work of culture in which case that's EXACTLY the compact society has made with the creator...we get the stuff back to inspire the next generation of creators. The current system we have is simply abusive of society as a whole though.
Television (from Merriam-Webster) - an electronic system of transmitting transient images of fixed or moving objects together with sound over a wire or through space by apparatus that converts light and sound into electrical waves and reconverts them into visible light rays and audible sound (emphasis mine)
televised over the internet - means that the television is going out over the Internet to computer endpoints. That the television SET is often abbreviated as television is simply laziness and a bastardization of the language, not that the usage in the summary is incorrect.
Off-topic a bit...but if you're looking for a more substantive method to kill trees for your bathroom reading now that EGM (and others) are gone, I would recommend Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series: www.bathroomreader.com Surprisingly good stuff, with an appropriate length on their stories for bathroom reading.
Back on topic, it is sad to see projects get shut down. I skimmed a few EGMs and every once in a while they would have some tidbit of information early. Still those exclusives were few and becoming farther between as more and more publishers shifted to the online format. As has been said many times already, print isn't the best way to reach most gamers these days, and that trend isn't going to suddenly reverse itself.
Still, good thoughts and well-wishes to those who've been adversely affected by this and their families.
Actually, he calls on Congress to review the penalties of the Copyright Act. The Act was intended to penalize "competitor's" who engaged in the infringement where income was earned on the enterprise, not so much a consumer who is actually getting nothing in the process. Hence why the damages seem so excessive, the law wasn't really designed to cope with these circumstances. The infringing party makes no money on the enterprise and are usually private individuals...applying a "business" penalty to an individual is why they seem so grossly out of proportion.
That said, the fact that the law wasn't designed with the situation in mind does not mean they can ignore it since there's no other law on the topic. So if she's found guilty again she will likely face the same "penalty" scheme that she had previously. Hence why he asks Congress to amend the law and is simply characterizing the judgment, not throwing it out. There's nothing truly unconstitutional about the law, it's just not being used against the targets that the writers had in mind when the law was written.
Really? A troll? Differing viewpoint sure...but I don't read it as trolling so much.
However, the issue at hand isn't so much the payment aspect. The RIAA has demonstrated that it is a cartel, engaged in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices. They have their business model from the 1950s and they will see everyone in the nation financially ruined before admitting it's outdated and they need to change it. It employs underhanded tactics that are an abuse of the legal system, use unlicensed investigators in clear violation of state laws, and show very little in the way of ethics in their prosecutions. Attempting to interview an underage child at their school in defiance of the parent's wishes can never be excused for a private entity.
Also bear in mind, NONE of the lawsuits filed target the people who downloaded the files. Their entire campaign relies on the "making available" theory that putting files into a download folder is copyright infringement, so these are the people providing the uploads. These people could very easily have full legal license to the music they are being sued for, and in fact many of them do. This is not a redistribution license, but to say they "stole" the music is to confuse the facts of the cases. Given the lack of computer saavy some people have, they might not have even realized they were sharing the files, as the courts have determined before in these cases. The RIAA simply doesn't care...
Throw on top of it the idea that copyright is intended to enhance SOCIETY in the long-term and the farce that idea has become and you see a strong civil disobedience movement against a system that long ago ceased serving the people's interests. When you don't serve the greater good, as it were, don't be surprised when things don't go the way you want them to go.
Additionally, having sex is not a crime and is indeed method by which we all arrived here. There are specific circumstances where having sex might be a crime (rape, age, "diminished capacity", etc.), but the act in and of itself is not. Robbing a bank, however, is more or less always illegal. I'm not sure there's ever circumstances that it's allowed.
So another key difference is that one is by default legal, and the other is by default illegal. You can of course make a movie about a bank robbery, but it better not be a real bank.
I believe the loophole here is that there's a story (albeit a terrible, perfunctory one usually) and the sex is part of the this story. So they are not being paid "just" to have sex...they're acting and are being paid to be actors. Since restricting filmmakers from recording graphic sex in the course of a story is considered an infringement of free speech, that's why what appears to be plain old prostitution is legal.
What I've always wondered is why prostitutes didn't set up a similar model. Obtain a business license to sell some sort of product like...I don't know...yarn. Have a certain price on the yarn like $300 and collect the appropriate taxes and what not on the yarn...after all, you're free to charge whatever you want for your products. After you sell an actual good, then have sex with the purchaser. They aren't paying you for sex, they bought item X and incidental to that purchase you decided to have sex with them. Much like the actresses in porn movies are not being paid to have sex, they're having sex incidental to their role as a character in a sexually-themed story.
It'd be an interesting tactic, but meh...probably too much work for the average working girl I suppose. Easier to do it on the side and hope you don't get caught I guess.
I don't know for certain, but one would imagine that the competition level at such an event would put a tremendous amount of stress on someone, especially a gamer who is probably does not have an audience outside of fellow players normally. Much like in athletic sports when a professional makes one mistake in the actual game it generally snowballs into more and more of them simply due to the pressure that being on that stage causes (hence why they always say to have a short memory). In that regard, I can see it being beneficial as it relaxes the person and allows them to have less of a memory for mistakes. This in turn would improve their overall performance, in theory.
However, the dulled reaction times and giggle fits would seem to negate those advantages...in least in my way of thinking. Someone with genuine experience might be able to provide more insight. Of course, Cannabis may not be a great example as it's not illegal in every country of the world.
You're misreading his earlier statement. The termination fees are pro-rated, and flat rate termination fees (not plans) were ruled illegal. The reasoning behind the early termination fees is that in exchange for signing a long-term contract (we will make X dollars off of you), they subsidize the phone. If you leave the contract early, they make you pay the portion of that subsidy still owed. Sprint charged a flat rate, which the judge ruled to be solely a penalty for wanting to switch a provider and therefore an illegal trade practice.
However, the real scam, as it were, with this model is that if you provide your own phone or keep an old one, they generally do not discount your plan. This means the subsidy that the person with the new phone has is converted into pure profit for the cell phone provider with an old or customer-provided phone.
Proves the point that you're just trolling, perhaps. Firaxis is home to Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization series. If you have no idea what that series is (even if you don't necessarily like it)...yeah, PAX is not for you anyway...
Well, that IS the full list (including international "persons of interest") and names is just that, names. Not people. If your name is James Wright but you're also known as Jimmy W, Jimmy the Wright and the Wright Stuff that's actually four names on their list.
Again going back to the Daily Show quips, if this was a list of Mafia guys from Jersey a million names is about 20 people.:)
Ah, but here's the part you're overlooking, the police CAUGHT them. This is someone who had, to that date, eluded the police (I don't know their current status). Those who can do that tend to be cut from a different cloth than the bumbling ones you refer to.
Just like it's possible for an IT admin to set up 463 poorly indexed tables in a database to cock everything up is certainly a possibility and the "dumb" ones might very well end up doing such a thing. However, most admins employed by database companies would never make such a basic mistake...otherwise they would have been fired a long time ago and nobody would be hiring them. Just like the dumb criminals get caught and the police stop looking for them.
Mr. Stewart and his Daily Show summarized it well when the watch list hit 1,000,000 names:
"If you want to know if you're on the list just visit the website and start scrolling and by the time you get to the bottom you'll be on it."
My uncle had a similar experience to your relative when he was returning from Jamaica (he was there for his anniversary). He had the exact name (middle too) of a wanted felon and was detained in customs for hours before they finally figured out he was from the other side of the country as his evil name-twin. As he pointed out at the time, "If I was the person they were looking for, would I be quite so stupid as to travel under my real name with genuine IDs in my name?" It's not like the guy was just "suspected"...he was pretty much a known criminal/fugitive.
Actually, as in all the RIAA cases, she was sued for *distributing* the files by having them in a shared folder on Kazaa. The RIAA is not going after the people who download, they're going after those who "make available" whether the people legitimately purchased the music or not.
If the RIAA was conducting this campaign with so much as a shred of ethics and decency, I could go with it as they are, in one of thinking, attempting to defend their rights as redistribution is not a right you gain from purchase. However, the tactics that they resort to, the lack of sense or humanity they display in their conduct and the clear abuse of our court system disgusts me far too much for me to support them. It's one thing to stand up for your legal rights...it's entirely another to game the entire system (wasting taxpayer dollars as a result) and destroy innocent lives simply because you don't want the gravy train to end. It's hard to attribute morality to a corporate entity, but if it's possible then it's safe to say that the RIAA has long ago crossed the line into evil.
The same that I've sadly come to the conclusion about many times. Your best bet is to buy the game, stick the box on the shelf and then use the pirated version. I'm all for creators receiving compensation for their work because they work hard and pour themselves into their work, but at the same time I'm not going to let their (or more correctly their publisher's) paranoia about what might happen to their software deny me the goods/service I paid for. As the a sage bit of advice goes, the people who were going to steal your product were never going to be your customers and generally going to draconian lengths to stop them will make your actual customers steal your product because it's less hassle than the legitimate version. SecuROM in particular has been a grievous offender in this regard.
I'm not sure where they got the idea that treating their legitimate customers to a worse experience than the ones who steal their product was all that smart, but I'm pretty sure it was from the same think tank that told the RIAA that suing their customers would be good for business.
It depends entirely on how fanatical there are to their beliefs. Some beliefs are held very deeply, and no amount of reason or logic will get them out. This is especially true of anything which has its basis in religion, as the Creationist movement shows clearly. No matter what evidence you produce, they will have an answer that fits their view of how things are and allows them to cling to their world view. Not calling out all religion there, but fanatics simply cannot be reasoned with...hence why they're fanatics. While we closely associate religion and fanaticism, it's quite possible for many other things to take on the same level of belief loyalty.
Assuming that you're not dealing with a die-hard fanatic of whatever you're dealing with, the best way is to illustrate where the belief was shown to be false, or unfounded. Ensure they understand the placebo effect and what double-blind testing means...also of great importance is that they understand "significant results" (i.e. - more than what simple chance would account for). For example, if a clip claims to improve the flavor of wine, locate a double-blind study that shows the tasters couldn't tell the difference. Or, better yet, conduct a double-blind test yourself if you have enough people.
In the case of things like "ghosts", have them explore other explanations. Oftentimes people cling to an idea because they didn't think of some other explanation. Giving them practice in looking for these alternate theories could help them elsewhere.
Finally, I'd work on demonstrating for them how easy it is to deceive people. Social engineering, techno-babble and even simple misdirection. The video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE is a wonderful demonstration of how easily we (as people) can be misdirected and miss blantantly obvious things when we aren't looking for them.
If all that doesn't take at least some root...repeat until it does I suppose. Though as I said, some people are beyond such help...
But you have to find someone who wants to live in a rational, logical world first. That's a lot harder than you might think, and probably explains why computer-saavy people tend to be more skeptical because logic is such a dominating facet of computing. "Normal" people, on the other hand, like their fairy tales and myths and "magic remedies" and so forth and tend to not appreciate it when you point out that what they're doing either doesn't work or has some other, more mundane, explanation...especially if that mundane explanation means they can't charge money for tours or Jesus-shaped bread.
Back to the question though, I find a healthy dose of skepticism from reading the various newsletters out there to be quite useful.
The James Randi Education Foundation (JREF) at http://www.randi.org/ has a weekly column they put out that is usually a good read discussing various "woo-woo" ideas and why, rationally, they fail as well as links to other such things. It's a decent enough starting point I suppose.
Actually, it will someday be "not a theory" I refer you to the example above of gravity. Newton proposed the Theory of Gravity, which has since been tested, observed, and (more or less) universally accepted as true by the scientific community. Hence it is currently the Law of Gravity. You also have the Laws of Thermodynamics from Sir Issac which have similarly been observed, tested and validated over the centuries.
When a theory is proved to be cogent, and repeatedly true in empirical testing over a long period of time it becomes a scientific law. Evolution is a long, long way from that status (given that biology is a much more "fluid" field compared to physics) but as the GP points out, this is another step closer.
Not to be overly pedantic, but it's not relegated to just being a theory forever.:)
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Or perhaps, and this is just a suggestion, the OP was making an oblique reference to PAX. More specifically for Penny Arcade and one of its central founders of Jerry "Tycho" Holkins. Hence the clever substitution of "Tychoid" instead of "Typhoid".
My supervisor had that exact issue with their iPhone and Apple. They had taken the old 3G iPhone their daughter had and taken it to AT&T to get it switched over and activated. The AT&T tech realized that they had iTunes at home setup already and didn't need the full treatment so he yanked the cable out mid-sync without thinking and corrupted the phone's settings (Note: at the time they didn't realize that was the problem). Phone that was perfectly fine is hosed now but no worries, they thought, since they had AppleCare's extended warranty on it. My boss takes it to the Apple Store. Their tech stuck the magnifier near the sensor said "op, it's gotten wet so that's why it doesn't work and that's not covered under AppleCare" and sent them away.
Boss is furious and not caring anymore they hand it to our sysadmin who performs a simple restore OS (5 minutes, tops) and the phone is in perfect working order again. He pointed out that humidity can trip those moisture sensors since the air is in fact moist (our humidity hovers around 100% the entire summer) so that sensor is likely tripped on every phone in the area. Not sure that's true, but wouldn't it be handy for the companies to have such an easy way to deny repairs they would have to do otherwise?
Why would that be suspicious? Shock value and immediacy are well-known and often-used marketing ploys that would have a perfect application there while the loss is fresh in people's mind and the controversy would keep people buzzing about "the film that X was killed for" even if it was, in fact, completely baseless. Again, I'm noted for my lack of faith in humanity, so I might be overly cynical...
Heck, Uwe Boll tried to promote a movie via parody of 9/11, so I feel safe in saying there's no low a marketing agency won't stoop to if they think it will grab people's attention. I can even see completely innocent groups attempting tie-ins that even go so far as to try and cast doubt on their own innocence for the sake of buzz. Remember, this is a story about a company saying a movie series that likely had over a billion dollars in sales (tickets, DVDs, licensed products) made no money and is saying it with a straight face; conventional logic has no place here.
Murder is conveniently illegal, but that's never in the history of crime stopped those who profit from it. Al Capone ran an organized crime outfit likely responsible for many murders that he ordered to expand his business. He was never arrested nor tried for murder, even though it was an open secret he was behind many of them. Instead, he went to jail for tax evasion. So yeah, laws against murder won't accomplish much since they're rather irrelevant to those who would profit from an individual's death. Plus, Hollywood and organized crime have very similar thought processes...funnily enough.
As to the latter example, simply have a mechanism where they can call on a rights holder to prove they're still around either by recent public appearance or appearance before the court. Put in a certain "cooldown" time (a year or so from their last appearance) to prevent people from harassing a creator with constant defenses and away you go.
While I generally agree with that, I understand that having the works immediately available in the public domain could very well place undue hardship on the creator's family should the death be sudden and unexpected. "Normal" people have life insurance policies generally tuned to their income to provide for that, but in the case of a a professional "creator" of works, quantifying that income can be tricky, and I don't think the loss of rights should be immediate to the family of the creator if one exists.
Also, my utter lack of faith in humanity says that particularly unscrupulous individuals would "arrange" things so that an author who didn't want to sell the rights to their work would have the creator killed and poof! Public domain now for me to create my crappy movie and destroy the work. While I wish I could believe that people would never sink so low, this IS an article about movie studios trying to claim a major film trilogy made NO money at all. If they thought they could get away with it and make money, I don't doubt that some of them would do it.
I can see a 20 year period after death being reasonable as any children they had should be grown capable of self-support by then and the incentive of making a derivative work of something 20 years old will often lose its allure unless it's a seminal work of culture in which case that's EXACTLY the compact society has made with the creator...we get the stuff back to inspire the next generation of creators. The current system we have is simply abusive of society as a whole though.
Funny you should mention that...since that was what Mythic referenced in their pre-announcement materials. :)
http://www.walloftext.info/2009/01/mythic-was-right-no-official-forums.html An interesting way to do an announcement at least...
Television (from Merriam-Webster) - an electronic system of transmitting transient images of fixed or moving objects together with sound over a wire or through space by apparatus that converts light and sound into electrical waves and reconverts them into visible light rays and audible sound (emphasis mine)
televised over the internet - means that the television is going out over the Internet to computer endpoints. That the television SET is often abbreviated as television is simply laziness and a bastardization of the language, not that the usage in the summary is incorrect.
Off-topic a bit...but if you're looking for a more substantive method to kill trees for your bathroom reading now that EGM (and others) are gone, I would recommend Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series: www.bathroomreader.com Surprisingly good stuff, with an appropriate length on their stories for bathroom reading.
Back on topic, it is sad to see projects get shut down. I skimmed a few EGMs and every once in a while they would have some tidbit of information early. Still those exclusives were few and becoming farther between as more and more publishers shifted to the online format. As has been said many times already, print isn't the best way to reach most gamers these days, and that trend isn't going to suddenly reverse itself.
Still, good thoughts and well-wishes to those who've been adversely affected by this and their families.
With apologies to Ron White:
"Real life driving is not like a racing game, and I'm quoting a judge on this one"
Agreed. I think the RIAA took the stupid route here of suing the "distributors" rather than the people who actually make the copies.
Of course, nothing about suing your own customer base seems like a smart idea, so I suppose it's really just par for the course.
Actually, he calls on Congress to review the penalties of the Copyright Act. The Act was intended to penalize "competitor's" who engaged in the infringement where income was earned on the enterprise, not so much a consumer who is actually getting nothing in the process. Hence why the damages seem so excessive, the law wasn't really designed to cope with these circumstances. The infringing party makes no money on the enterprise and are usually private individuals...applying a "business" penalty to an individual is why they seem so grossly out of proportion.
That said, the fact that the law wasn't designed with the situation in mind does not mean they can ignore it since there's no other law on the topic. So if she's found guilty again she will likely face the same "penalty" scheme that she had previously. Hence why he asks Congress to amend the law and is simply characterizing the judgment, not throwing it out. There's nothing truly unconstitutional about the law, it's just not being used against the targets that the writers had in mind when the law was written.
Really? A troll? Differing viewpoint sure...but I don't read it as trolling so much.
However, the issue at hand isn't so much the payment aspect. The RIAA has demonstrated that it is a cartel, engaged in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices. They have their business model from the 1950s and they will see everyone in the nation financially ruined before admitting it's outdated and they need to change it. It employs underhanded tactics that are an abuse of the legal system, use unlicensed investigators in clear violation of state laws, and show very little in the way of ethics in their prosecutions. Attempting to interview an underage child at their school in defiance of the parent's wishes can never be excused for a private entity.
Also bear in mind, NONE of the lawsuits filed target the people who downloaded the files. Their entire campaign relies on the "making available" theory that putting files into a download folder is copyright infringement, so these are the people providing the uploads. These people could very easily have full legal license to the music they are being sued for, and in fact many of them do. This is not a redistribution license, but to say they "stole" the music is to confuse the facts of the cases. Given the lack of computer saavy some people have, they might not have even realized they were sharing the files, as the courts have determined before in these cases. The RIAA simply doesn't care...
Throw on top of it the idea that copyright is intended to enhance SOCIETY in the long-term and the farce that idea has become and you see a strong civil disobedience movement against a system that long ago ceased serving the people's interests. When you don't serve the greater good, as it were, don't be surprised when things don't go the way you want them to go.
Additionally, having sex is not a crime and is indeed method by which we all arrived here. There are specific circumstances where having sex might be a crime (rape, age, "diminished capacity", etc.), but the act in and of itself is not. Robbing a bank, however, is more or less always illegal. I'm not sure there's ever circumstances that it's allowed.
So another key difference is that one is by default legal, and the other is by default illegal. You can of course make a movie about a bank robbery, but it better not be a real bank.
I believe the loophole here is that there's a story (albeit a terrible, perfunctory one usually) and the sex is part of the this story. So they are not being paid "just" to have sex...they're acting and are being paid to be actors. Since restricting filmmakers from recording graphic sex in the course of a story is considered an infringement of free speech, that's why what appears to be plain old prostitution is legal.
What I've always wondered is why prostitutes didn't set up a similar model. Obtain a business license to sell some sort of product like...I don't know...yarn. Have a certain price on the yarn like $300 and collect the appropriate taxes and what not on the yarn...after all, you're free to charge whatever you want for your products. After you sell an actual good, then have sex with the purchaser. They aren't paying you for sex, they bought item X and incidental to that purchase you decided to have sex with them. Much like the actresses in porn movies are not being paid to have sex, they're having sex incidental to their role as a character in a sexually-themed story.
It'd be an interesting tactic, but meh...probably too much work for the average working girl I suppose. Easier to do it on the side and hope you don't get caught I guess.
I don't know for certain, but one would imagine that the competition level at such an event would put a tremendous amount of stress on someone, especially a gamer who is probably does not have an audience outside of fellow players normally. Much like in athletic sports when a professional makes one mistake in the actual game it generally snowballs into more and more of them simply due to the pressure that being on that stage causes (hence why they always say to have a short memory). In that regard, I can see it being beneficial as it relaxes the person and allows them to have less of a memory for mistakes. This in turn would improve their overall performance, in theory.
However, the dulled reaction times and giggle fits would seem to negate those advantages...in least in my way of thinking. Someone with genuine experience might be able to provide more insight. Of course, Cannabis may not be a great example as it's not illegal in every country of the world.
You're misreading his earlier statement. The termination fees are pro-rated, and flat rate termination fees (not plans) were ruled illegal. The reasoning behind the early termination fees is that in exchange for signing a long-term contract (we will make X dollars off of you), they subsidize the phone. If you leave the contract early, they make you pay the portion of that subsidy still owed. Sprint charged a flat rate, which the judge ruled to be solely a penalty for wanting to switch a provider and therefore an illegal trade practice.
However, the real scam, as it were, with this model is that if you provide your own phone or keep an old one, they generally do not discount your plan. This means the subsidy that the person with the new phone has is converted into pure profit for the cell phone provider with an old or customer-provided phone.
Proves the point that you're just trolling, perhaps. Firaxis is home to Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization series. If you have no idea what that series is (even if you don't necessarily like it)...yeah, PAX is not for you anyway...
Well, that IS the full list (including international "persons of interest") and names is just that, names. Not people. If your name is James Wright but you're also known as Jimmy W, Jimmy the Wright and the Wright Stuff that's actually four names on their list.
:)
Again going back to the Daily Show quips, if this was a list of Mafia guys from Jersey a million names is about 20 people.
Ah, but here's the part you're overlooking, the police CAUGHT them. This is someone who had, to that date, eluded the police (I don't know their current status). Those who can do that tend to be cut from a different cloth than the bumbling ones you refer to.
Just like it's possible for an IT admin to set up 463 poorly indexed tables in a database to cock everything up is certainly a possibility and the "dumb" ones might very well end up doing such a thing. However, most admins employed by database companies would never make such a basic mistake...otherwise they would have been fired a long time ago and nobody would be hiring them. Just like the dumb criminals get caught and the police stop looking for them.
My uncle had a similar experience to your relative when he was returning from Jamaica (he was there for his anniversary). He had the exact name (middle too) of a wanted felon and was detained in customs for hours before they finally figured out he was from the other side of the country as his evil name-twin. As he pointed out at the time, "If I was the person they were looking for, would I be quite so stupid as to travel under my real name with genuine IDs in my name?" It's not like the guy was just "suspected"...he was pretty much a known criminal/fugitive.
Actually, as in all the RIAA cases, she was sued for *distributing* the files by having them in a shared folder on Kazaa. The RIAA is not going after the people who download, they're going after those who "make available" whether the people legitimately purchased the music or not.
If the RIAA was conducting this campaign with so much as a shred of ethics and decency, I could go with it as they are, in one of thinking, attempting to defend their rights as redistribution is not a right you gain from purchase. However, the tactics that they resort to, the lack of sense or humanity they display in their conduct and the clear abuse of our court system disgusts me far too much for me to support them. It's one thing to stand up for your legal rights...it's entirely another to game the entire system (wasting taxpayer dollars as a result) and destroy innocent lives simply because you don't want the gravy train to end. It's hard to attribute morality to a corporate entity, but if it's possible then it's safe to say that the RIAA has long ago crossed the line into evil.
The same that I've sadly come to the conclusion about many times. Your best bet is to buy the game, stick the box on the shelf and then use the pirated version. I'm all for creators receiving compensation for their work because they work hard and pour themselves into their work, but at the same time I'm not going to let their (or more correctly their publisher's) paranoia about what might happen to their software deny me the goods/service I paid for. As the a sage bit of advice goes, the people who were going to steal your product were never going to be your customers and generally going to draconian lengths to stop them will make your actual customers steal your product because it's less hassle than the legitimate version. SecuROM in particular has been a grievous offender in this regard.
I'm not sure where they got the idea that treating their legitimate customers to a worse experience than the ones who steal their product was all that smart, but I'm pretty sure it was from the same think tank that told the RIAA that suing their customers would be good for business.
It depends entirely on how fanatical there are to their beliefs. Some beliefs are held very deeply, and no amount of reason or logic will get them out. This is especially true of anything which has its basis in religion, as the Creationist movement shows clearly. No matter what evidence you produce, they will have an answer that fits their view of how things are and allows them to cling to their world view. Not calling out all religion there, but fanatics simply cannot be reasoned with...hence why they're fanatics. While we closely associate religion and fanaticism, it's quite possible for many other things to take on the same level of belief loyalty.
Assuming that you're not dealing with a die-hard fanatic of whatever you're dealing with, the best way is to illustrate where the belief was shown to be false, or unfounded. Ensure they understand the placebo effect and what double-blind testing means...also of great importance is that they understand "significant results" (i.e. - more than what simple chance would account for). For example, if a clip claims to improve the flavor of wine, locate a double-blind study that shows the tasters couldn't tell the difference. Or, better yet, conduct a double-blind test yourself if you have enough people.
In the case of things like "ghosts", have them explore other explanations. Oftentimes people cling to an idea because they didn't think of some other explanation. Giving them practice in looking for these alternate theories could help them elsewhere.
Finally, I'd work on demonstrating for them how easy it is to deceive people. Social engineering, techno-babble and even simple misdirection. The video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE is a wonderful demonstration of how easily we (as people) can be misdirected and miss blantantly obvious things when we aren't looking for them.
If all that doesn't take at least some root...repeat until it does I suppose. Though as I said, some people are beyond such help...
But you have to find someone who wants to live in a rational, logical world first. That's a lot harder than you might think, and probably explains why computer-saavy people tend to be more skeptical because logic is such a dominating facet of computing. "Normal" people, on the other hand, like their fairy tales and myths and "magic remedies" and so forth and tend to not appreciate it when you point out that what they're doing either doesn't work or has some other, more mundane, explanation...especially if that mundane explanation means they can't charge money for tours or Jesus-shaped bread.
Back to the question though, I find a healthy dose of skepticism from reading the various newsletters out there to be quite useful.
The James Randi Education Foundation (JREF) at http://www.randi.org/ has a weekly column they put out that is usually a good read discussing various "woo-woo" ideas and why, rationally, they fail as well as links to other such things. It's a decent enough starting point I suppose.
Actually, it will someday be "not a theory" I refer you to the example above of gravity. Newton proposed the Theory of Gravity, which has since been tested, observed, and (more or less) universally accepted as true by the scientific community. Hence it is currently the Law of Gravity. You also have the Laws of Thermodynamics from Sir Issac which have similarly been observed, tested and validated over the centuries.
:)
When a theory is proved to be cogent, and repeatedly true in empirical testing over a long period of time it becomes a scientific law. Evolution is a long, long way from that status (given that biology is a much more "fluid" field compared to physics) but as the GP points out, this is another step closer.
Not to be overly pedantic, but it's not relegated to just being a theory forever.