It might not be laws, but it DOES violate the spirit of free speech.
No it doesn't. Consider:
A man knocks on your front door and asks if he can use your front lawn as a sitting area for talking to passersby. You agree, on the condition that he doesn't cause a commotion or damage your property. He proceeds to set up loudspeakers, shouts opinions with which you do not agree, riles up a crowd, and so on. Is it suppressing free speech if you kick him off your lawn? Of course not -- your front lawn is your private property, and he's only allowed to use it as long as you permit it.
Rackspace is in exactly that situation. They have private property -- servers -- which they rent to people who come up to them and ask for hosting. Rackspace agrees to provide servers for those people, provided they don't e.g. engage in hate speech using their services. When those people violate that agreement, they no longer have the right to use Rackspace's private property, and Rackspace is not suppressing anyone's freedom of speech by kicking them off their servers, any more than you would be suppressing that man's freedom of speech by kicking him off your lawn.
Uh, what exactly is news about that at all? He can burn books all day long as I care. Does it matter which ones, except for the fact that glossy paper doesn't burn as good?
The fact that you don't regard something as sacred does not mean other people should not either. More to the point, it's not the burned book itself that is offensive (to me, at least), it's the intent with which he did it. He didn't do it because he needed warmth, he did it because he wanted to express hatred toward Muslims. He's effectively trying to hold all the world's Muslims responsible for the actions of a few extremists on 9/11.
My question is not "why is it news that some idiot burned a Quran?", but rather "why is it news that Rackspace shut down a hate-filled website that violated its hosting contract?"
I'm surprised at what people will and will not believe is possible. People believe in extra terrestrial life, black holes, string theory, the big bang, an infinite universe, worm holes, the existence of other dimensions, that evolution sprang up out of nothing in spite of entropy...
But they won't believe that life exists in other dimensions... intelligent life... and that maybe there's an all-powerful inter-dimensional being who's responsible for creating everything in this dimension.
I am often surprised by this as well. How one can reconcile "aliens probably exist" with "a super-powerful alien we call God could not possibly exist" is beyond me.
You can make any position look insane if you adopt the position of some vocal minority extremists and ignore the important bits (Christ's birth, according to the scriptures, was neither arbitrary nor random, so your "for some reason" was either ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation)... How would you react if I used the amusingly absurd claims of the Flat Earth Society to mock various fields of modern science? That's essentially what you're doing.
I often hear non-Christians mock Christians for this supposed "six thousand year old Earth" belief, but the truth is, few Christians actually believe that, and those few haven't bothered studying the text they claim supports that belief.
I firmly believe that both science and religion can coexist without issue. Back on topic: it's entirely possible that Hawking is correct, that the Big Bang was caused by gravity. However, that does not speak as to the existence of God either way, and anyone who claims it does is just trying to argue -- the fact is, science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, and logically speaking, in order for a religion to be true, it must not attempt to contradict scientific fact. The sooner both sides of this argument understand those two facts, the better off we'll be.
I have often observed that science and religion seek to provide fundamentally different information: science attempts to determine causes and effects, whereas religion looks for purposes and reasons. There is no need for antagonism between science and religion; it only happens when misguided people take one and try to impose it on the other's territory (and to be clear, I'm referring to people on both sides of the fence).
Why should I reward Sony by buying a second console (ignoring for the moment whether they actually make a profit on console sales, at the very least it inflates their userbase numbers) just because they screwed me over by trying to remove features from my first console?
More to the point, why should the solution to "Sony is removing a feature" be "Spend another $300+ on Sony hardware"? I already bought Sony hardware that did both, I shouldn't have to buy more Sony hardware just to continue doing what my hardware did when I bought it.
It's a defective product and steam has a ton of third party developers that release poorly programmed games.
Two years ago or so, Steam was selling the original Commandos games. They were horribly broken; I couldn't even save my progress, and there's no way I was going to play the entire game in one sitting. After verifying the problem on several completely differently configured machines, I called Eidos technical support.
Eidos refused to support the games because they listed "Requires Windows 9x" on the product page and said they'd only help me if I had issues running the game on a Win9x machine (and even then, the machine must not be a laptop); in the meantime, Steam had explicitly disabled Win9x support (you can't even run Steam games in Win9x compatibility mode) so I couldn't comply even if I wanted to.
I called Valve and complained; they gave me a refund for the purchase, removed it from my account, and a few weeks later they stopped selling the games on Steam. (They've since started selling them again, if I remember right, but I have no idea whether they've fixed the issues.)
Valve says they won't give refunds for Steam purchases, but if you complain properly, and have a good enough reason, they will;)
Steam provides for redownload, that's nifty. But it also prevents people from playing retail games they've paid for. It is designed to prevent you from exercising your rights under First Sale law. What is needed is an extension to first sale law which permits resale of any item for which real money was paid, and requires technical measures to be in place to permit it. That'll fix 'em.
While I agree with you, it would completely destroy the digital sales business Valve has going. Example: I buy a single-player game on Steam. I play it, enjoy it, and list it for resale by other Steam users using whatever means Steam could implement to do so - I'm imagining some sort of "Used Games Marketplace" where users can list their games for sale for whatever price they want. Perhaps Valve takes a cut of the resale price.
However, Steam lists $GAME for $50 (it just came out!), but you're listing it for $40... and so are 10,000 other gamers. Some of them don't really care what they sell it for, they just want a little extra money, so they list it for $5.
Valve stands to lose a lot of money if they implement that sort of system. (Even just allowing users to transfer licenses would have the same effect, only worse; some enterprising individual would create a website specializing in helping people resell their steam games, and Valve wouldn't get a cut at all.)
It would be nice if we could re-sell physical copies of e.g. Half-Life 2, but I'm not sure the first sale doctrine even applies to digital-only sales in a system like Steam... any lawyers want to comment?
McDonald's was SHOWN to be serving Coffee hotter than anybody around them, and shown that they KNEW it was causing injuries.
What has actually been shown is that:
- several other establishments sell coffee at that same temperature or higher - several home coffee brewers produce coffee at that temperature - the National Coffee Association of the USA recommends brewing coffee at that temperature - the Specialty Coffee Association supports improved packaging, rather than lower serving temperatures.
The fact of the matter is, Liebeck ordered hot coffee, and spilled it on herself because she precariously balanced an open cup of hot coffee between her knees.
Had the coffee been twenty degrees cooler, she still would have been burned, and she still would have filed the lawsuit. She wanted someone else to pay for her own stupid mistake, and she succeeded.
Anyone with the tiniest shred of common sense will recognize that this was her own fault. Had she not stupidly and precariously balanced the cup of hot liquid between her knees, she would not have spilled it all over herself.
Unfortunately, it appears common sense has no place in our justice system.
And no, I don't see why McDonald's should care that some tiny percentage of its customers are clumsy and spill hot coffee on themselves. If they order hot coffee, they should be careful with it, because they actually get what they order.
My reading of the Wikipedia article, which I did indeed Google after seeing your post, merely confirmed my existing knowledge of the lawsuit.
She orders hot coffee.
She balances it precariously between her knees as she opens it in an attempt to add cream.
Said precariously-balanced cup falls over, spilling into her lap and burning her.
What did she expect to happen if she balanced a cup of hot liquid precariously on her knees? Did she think she couldn't spill it? Did she really think "this can't possibly be hot enough to burn me", even though she had clearly been ordering hot coffee for many years and should have known, by common sense, that hot coffee is hot?
Had the cup been twenty degrees cooler, she still would have been burned. "It was too hot" is a stupid defense for her own careless mistake. (Her lawyers claimed it would have given her another 20 seconds before those burns became as severe, but a British court rejected that argument as having no scientific basis.)
She got hurt merely because she was careless, and she saw an opportunity to get someone else to pay for her mistake. That's exactly what I originally thought happened, and reading (and re-reading) the Wikipedia article on the lawsuit only confirms my understanding of the events.
at temperatures higher than the local law would allow. They were fined for it on numerous occasions, deciding that the fine was less troublesome than changing.
I see no mention of these supposed fines anywhere in the Wikipedia article on the case; Ms Liebeck appears to have made no claim that McDonald's was breaking any laws by serving coffee at that temperature. If there was such a law, then she stupidly ignored it in her lawsuit.
I do however see mention of several other establishments in the area that sell coffee at the same temperature, as well as home machines which brew coffee at that temperature. I also see that the National Coffee Association of the USA recommends brewing coffee at that temperature.
In fact the only thing the article mentions that is even vaguely similar to your comments here is that McDonalds had been involved in lawsuits before for the same issue, and that it settled some of them. However, that is not the same thing as being fined repeatedly for violating an actual law, as you claim.
Do you have any evidence that at the time, local law prohibited selling coffee at those temperatures?
If so, do you have any evidence that that particular restaurant had been fined for violating that local law prior to the lawsuit in question?
A customer orders hot coffee and spills it on herself while trying to add cream, which causes severe burns, because after all, the coffee was hot.
She then sues McDonald's for their supposed gross negligence in selling coffee that was "unreasonably dangerous" and "defectively manufactured". (In other words, she ordered hot coffee, but she didn't expect it to be hot!)
I don't really see how I got the major details wrong. This is what I said:
Apparently the buyer ordered hot coffee but did not realize that dumping said coffee on his or her lap would result in painful burns.
The fact that the dumping was accidental is irrelevant. If you do something you know is dangerous - like open a hot cup of liquid balanced precariously on the edge of your seat - then you should take better precautions to make sure it doesn't spill. Suing the people who did no more than sell you what you ordered is idiotic.
What if the ice cream company added a substance that provided no change in the taste, smell, or texture whatsoever, but was naturally addictive?
Are you arguing that Coca-cola has done something wrong by adding caffeine to their sodas? (And don't try to tell me caffeine is not addictive. I've been addicted to it myself.)
plenty of people play MMOs and do not realize they are addicted because they do not recognize that spending 25-50 hours per week has moved your hobby into an obsession.
Your statement and mine are not mutually exclusive...
There must be a way to determine whether or not a product has been maliciously designed to control you. And I would like to know what it is.
With physically addicting products like cigarettes, it's easy, because there are physical substances we can measure. With games or ads or whatever else companies research in order to get people to buy, it's not so easy.
Should ads be illegal, just because companies spend countless millions on market research trying to figure out what type of ad will generate the most revenue? That's the entire purpose of an ad - to entice you to spend your money on a product you would probably not otherwise buy.
Games are no different in that regard. The entire purpose of MMOs is to get you to give the company money every month. Why is it any different than a subscription to Time or Playboy? I'm sure those companies spend lots of money determining how they can keep their subscribers subscribing...
My point is, it's stupid to single out game companies, when in reality it's an attribute common to all companies that have a product to sell.
What if they commissioned a psychological research study on how to make their games more addictive, and made major alterations to the gameplay based on the results? What if they made it a primary goal to target certain segments of the population, what you would call the weak-willed and easily manipulated, what others might call aged 18-25 unmarried males?
So you'd say an ice cream company doing research into making their ice cream more enjoyable to their target audience is doing something wrong by making changes based on that research? Unless they're lacing their ice cream with cocaine, no change is inherently wrong.
Plenty of people play MMOs without being addicted. The whole point of a game is that it should be fun - if a game developer is not researching ways to make the game more fun, they're not doing their job, and their customers are not getting what they're paying for.
Even if NCSoft did what you hypothesize, it would still not be wrong - if it were, then the mere act of making a game fun would be wrong, because somebody somewhere could get addicted to it. (It doesn't even have to be *fun* to be addicting - look at all the stupid Facebook games that people spend 12 hours a day playing...)
but you don't see people suing McDonalds for posting ad with a picture of a burger that looked so tasty they just had to go buy it.
No, people set the bar a lot lower for McDonalds'. See, McDonalds sold hot coffee, but neglected to actually label the cup to say "HOT". Apparently the buyer ordered hot coffee but did not realize that dumping said coffee on his or her lap would result in painful burns. If it's not labeled "hot", it must be cool, right? Doesn't matter what you ordered... (I may have the minor details of that case wrong, but it's close enough.)
My point is, I fear common sense lost its place in our society a long time ago. This "oh no the MMO is too fun" lawsuit is just another step along that path... *sigh*
That's all well and good, but the stated reason for releasing episodic content was so they could get shorter games out more frequently. Instead, we get shorter games that take forever to come out just like the longer games did. I get the feeling that Valve is fantastic at game development and unbelievably shitty at project management.
Or it's possible they changed their mind and decided that the whole episodic content thing was a bad idea for them (for whatever reason). Maybe they just suck at doing things with a known time frame, but honestly I'd rather get a good game late than an unfinished game early (Star Trek Online, I'm looking at you).
Google Maps didn't do much that mapquest and others weren't already doing. And their mapping data is so full of errors I've started using OpenStreetMap instead - at least if their mapping data is nonsense, I can potentially fix it...
About six months ago, Google refreshed their map data, and suddenly (according to their software) it was impossible to leave my apartment complex. I simply flagged the location where they were missing a street connection, and it was fixed a week or two later. So... just because it's Google doesn't mean you can't get errors corrected.
I can see that the concept might be a little intimidating to the less technically inclined, but the process was really easy & both times resulted in a few hours of the number being unreachable. I'm sure mistakes happen, but in general porting seems to be pretty smooth.
I have to second this. I've done three number ports (two from Verizon to AT&T, one from Net9 or whatever that name is to AT&T), and only had issues with one - and that one only because my phone call dropped at the worst possible moment. (Note to self: do not arrange number ports while you're driving on the freeway.) Because of the point at which the call dropped, the rep ported my wife's Verizon number but replaced *my* AT&T number with it, instead of attaching it to my wife's AT&T phone. It only took another half-hour phone call to fix, though.
I'm not sure what you mean. Apple can easily scan for which iOS functions a particular app is linking against. If that list includes APIs which are not on Apple's official "approved" list, then they can reject the app on that basis alone. That part could easily be entirely automated.
At this point, it's clear *you're* not a programmer, so please, just stop. (For the record, I am a programmer, and apparently a better one than you.)
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It might not be laws, but it DOES violate the spirit of free speech.
No it doesn't. Consider:
A man knocks on your front door and asks if he can use your front lawn as a sitting area for talking to passersby. You agree, on the condition that he doesn't cause a commotion or damage your property. He proceeds to set up loudspeakers, shouts opinions with which you do not agree, riles up a crowd, and so on. Is it suppressing free speech if you kick him off your lawn? Of course not -- your front lawn is your private property, and he's only allowed to use it as long as you permit it.
Rackspace is in exactly that situation. They have private property -- servers -- which they rent to people who come up to them and ask for hosting. Rackspace agrees to provide servers for those people, provided they don't e.g. engage in hate speech using their services. When those people violate that agreement, they no longer have the right to use Rackspace's private property, and Rackspace is not suppressing anyone's freedom of speech by kicking them off their servers, any more than you would be suppressing that man's freedom of speech by kicking him off your lawn.
Uh, what exactly is news about that at all? He can burn books all day long as I care. Does it matter which ones, except for the fact that glossy paper doesn't burn as good?
The fact that you don't regard something as sacred does not mean other people should not either. More to the point, it's not the burned book itself that is offensive (to me, at least), it's the intent with which he did it. He didn't do it because he needed warmth, he did it because he wanted to express hatred toward Muslims. He's effectively trying to hold all the world's Muslims responsible for the actions of a few extremists on 9/11.
My question is not "why is it news that some idiot burned a Quran?", but rather "why is it news that Rackspace shut down a hate-filled website that violated its hosting contract?"
I wasn't aware observing hypocrisy among our atheist population was sufficient to constitute trolling...
I'm surprised at what people will and will not believe is possible. People believe in extra terrestrial life, black holes, string theory, the big bang, an infinite universe, worm holes, the existence of other dimensions, that evolution sprang up out of nothing in spite of entropy...
But they won't believe that life exists in other dimensions... intelligent life... and that maybe there's an all-powerful inter-dimensional being who's responsible for creating everything in this dimension.
I am often surprised by this as well. How one can reconcile "aliens probably exist" with "a super-powerful alien we call God could not possibly exist" is beyond me.
You can make any position look insane if you adopt the position of some vocal minority extremists and ignore the important bits (Christ's birth, according to the scriptures, was neither arbitrary nor random, so your "for some reason" was either ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation)... How would you react if I used the amusingly absurd claims of the Flat Earth Society to mock various fields of modern science? That's essentially what you're doing.
I often hear non-Christians mock Christians for this supposed "six thousand year old Earth" belief, but the truth is, few Christians actually believe that, and those few haven't bothered studying the text they claim supports that belief.
I firmly believe that both science and religion can coexist without issue. Back on topic: it's entirely possible that Hawking is correct, that the Big Bang was caused by gravity. However, that does not speak as to the existence of God either way, and anyone who claims it does is just trying to argue -- the fact is, science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, and logically speaking, in order for a religion to be true, it must not attempt to contradict scientific fact. The sooner both sides of this argument understand those two facts, the better off we'll be.
I have often observed that science and religion seek to provide fundamentally different information: science attempts to determine causes and effects, whereas religion looks for purposes and reasons. There is no need for antagonism between science and religion; it only happens when misguided people take one and try to impose it on the other's territory (and to be clear, I'm referring to people on both sides of the fence).
Why should I reward Sony by buying a second console (ignoring for the moment whether they actually make a profit on console sales, at the very least it inflates their userbase numbers) just because they screwed me over by trying to remove features from my first console?
More to the point, why should the solution to "Sony is removing a feature" be "Spend another $300+ on Sony hardware"? I already bought Sony hardware that did both, I shouldn't have to buy more Sony hardware just to continue doing what my hardware did when I bought it.
Now how many centuries do you think you could run Al Gore's home on the fuel GWB used to regularly commute to his green ranch in his 747?
You act like Gore doesn't fly around in a private jet.
Oh, wait. He buys imaginary "carbon credits", so it's ok, right?
It's a defective product and steam has a ton of third party developers that release poorly programmed games.
Two years ago or so, Steam was selling the original Commandos games. They were horribly broken; I couldn't even save my progress, and there's no way I was going to play the entire game in one sitting. After verifying the problem on several completely differently configured machines, I called Eidos technical support.
Eidos refused to support the games because they listed "Requires Windows 9x" on the product page and said they'd only help me if I had issues running the game on a Win9x machine (and even then, the machine must not be a laptop); in the meantime, Steam had explicitly disabled Win9x support (you can't even run Steam games in Win9x compatibility mode) so I couldn't comply even if I wanted to.
I called Valve and complained; they gave me a refund for the purchase, removed it from my account, and a few weeks later they stopped selling the games on Steam. (They've since started selling them again, if I remember right, but I have no idea whether they've fixed the issues.)
Valve says they won't give refunds for Steam purchases, but if you complain properly, and have a good enough reason, they will ;)
Steam provides for redownload, that's nifty. But it also prevents people from playing retail games they've paid for. It is designed to prevent you from exercising your rights under First Sale law. What is needed is an extension to first sale law which permits resale of any item for which real money was paid, and requires technical measures to be in place to permit it. That'll fix 'em.
While I agree with you, it would completely destroy the digital sales business Valve has going. Example: I buy a single-player game on Steam. I play it, enjoy it, and list it for resale by other Steam users using whatever means Steam could implement to do so - I'm imagining some sort of "Used Games Marketplace" where users can list their games for sale for whatever price they want. Perhaps Valve takes a cut of the resale price.
However, Steam lists $GAME for $50 (it just came out!), but you're listing it for $40... and so are 10,000 other gamers. Some of them don't really care what they sell it for, they just want a little extra money, so they list it for $5.
Valve stands to lose a lot of money if they implement that sort of system. (Even just allowing users to transfer licenses would have the same effect, only worse; some enterprising individual would create a website specializing in helping people resell their steam games, and Valve wouldn't get a cut at all.)
It would be nice if we could re-sell physical copies of e.g. Half-Life 2, but I'm not sure the first sale doctrine even applies to digital-only sales in a system like Steam... any lawyers want to comment?
McDonald's was SHOWN to be serving Coffee hotter than anybody around them, and shown that they KNEW it was causing injuries.
What has actually been shown is that:
- several other establishments sell coffee at that same temperature or higher
- several home coffee brewers produce coffee at that temperature
- the National Coffee Association of the USA recommends brewing coffee at that temperature
- the Specialty Coffee Association supports improved packaging, rather than lower serving temperatures.
The fact of the matter is, Liebeck ordered hot coffee, and spilled it on herself because she precariously balanced an open cup of hot coffee between her knees.
Had the coffee been twenty degrees cooler, she still would have been burned, and she still would have filed the lawsuit. She wanted someone else to pay for her own stupid mistake, and she succeeded.
Anyone with the tiniest shred of common sense will recognize that this was her own fault. Had she not stupidly and precariously balanced the cup of hot liquid between her knees, she would not have spilled it all over herself.
Unfortunately, it appears common sense has no place in our justice system.
And no, I don't see why McDonald's should care that some tiny percentage of its customers are clumsy and spill hot coffee on themselves. If they order hot coffee, they should be careful with it, because they actually get what they order.
My reading of the Wikipedia article, which I did indeed Google after seeing your post, merely confirmed my existing knowledge of the lawsuit.
She orders hot coffee.
She balances it precariously between her knees as she opens it in an attempt to add cream.
Said precariously-balanced cup falls over, spilling into her lap and burning her.
What did she expect to happen if she balanced a cup of hot liquid precariously on her knees? Did she think she couldn't spill it? Did she really think "this can't possibly be hot enough to burn me", even though she had clearly been ordering hot coffee for many years and should have known, by common sense, that hot coffee is hot?
Had the cup been twenty degrees cooler, she still would have been burned. "It was too hot" is a stupid defense for her own careless mistake. (Her lawyers claimed it would have given her another 20 seconds before those burns became as severe, but a British court rejected that argument as having no scientific basis.)
She got hurt merely because she was careless, and she saw an opportunity to get someone else to pay for her mistake. That's exactly what I originally thought happened, and reading (and re-reading) the Wikipedia article on the lawsuit only confirms my understanding of the events.
at temperatures higher than the local law would allow. They were fined for it on numerous occasions, deciding that the fine was less troublesome than changing.
I see no mention of these supposed fines anywhere in the Wikipedia article on the case; Ms Liebeck appears to have made no claim that McDonald's was breaking any laws by serving coffee at that temperature. If there was such a law, then she stupidly ignored it in her lawsuit.
I do however see mention of several other establishments in the area that sell coffee at the same temperature, as well as home machines which brew coffee at that temperature. I also see that the National Coffee Association of the USA recommends brewing coffee at that temperature.
In fact the only thing the article mentions that is even vaguely similar to your comments here is that McDonalds had been involved in lawsuits before for the same issue, and that it settled some of them. However, that is not the same thing as being fined repeatedly for violating an actual law, as you claim.
Do you have any evidence that at the time, local law prohibited selling coffee at those temperatures?
If so, do you have any evidence that that particular restaurant had been fined for violating that local law prior to the lawsuit in question?
I guess I was wrong... there *was* a warning on the cup.
"Though there was a warning on the coffee cup, the jury decided that the warning was neither large enough nor sufficient."
I guess I read the facts of the case differently than you, then. Can you point me to what I'm not seeing?
I suggest you peruse the details of the case in question:
A customer orders hot coffee and spills it on herself while trying to add cream, which causes severe burns, because after all, the coffee was hot.
She then sues McDonald's for their supposed gross negligence in selling coffee that was "unreasonably dangerous" and "defectively manufactured". (In other words, she ordered hot coffee, but she didn't expect it to be hot!)
I don't really see how I got the major details wrong. This is what I said:
Apparently the buyer ordered hot coffee but did not realize that dumping said coffee on his or her lap would result in painful burns.
The fact that the dumping was accidental is irrelevant. If you do something you know is dangerous - like open a hot cup of liquid balanced precariously on the edge of your seat - then you should take better precautions to make sure it doesn't spill. Suing the people who did no more than sell you what you ordered is idiotic.
What if the ice cream company added a substance that provided no change in the taste, smell, or texture whatsoever, but was naturally addictive?
Are you arguing that Coca-cola has done something wrong by adding caffeine to their sodas? (And don't try to tell me caffeine is not addictive. I've been addicted to it myself.)
plenty of people play MMOs and do not realize they are addicted because they do not recognize that spending 25-50 hours per week has moved your hobby into an obsession.
Your statement and mine are not mutually exclusive...
There must be a way to determine whether or not a product has been maliciously designed to control you. And I would like to know what it is.
With physically addicting products like cigarettes, it's easy, because there are physical substances we can measure. With games or ads or whatever else companies research in order to get people to buy, it's not so easy.
Should ads be illegal, just because companies spend countless millions on market research trying to figure out what type of ad will generate the most revenue? That's the entire purpose of an ad - to entice you to spend your money on a product you would probably not otherwise buy.
Games are no different in that regard. The entire purpose of MMOs is to get you to give the company money every month. Why is it any different than a subscription to Time or Playboy? I'm sure those companies spend lots of money determining how they can keep their subscribers subscribing...
My point is, it's stupid to single out game companies, when in reality it's an attribute common to all companies that have a product to sell.
What if they commissioned a psychological research study on how to make their games more addictive, and made major alterations to the gameplay based on the results? What if they made it a primary goal to target certain segments of the population, what you would call the weak-willed and easily manipulated, what others might call aged 18-25 unmarried males?
So you'd say an ice cream company doing research into making their ice cream more enjoyable to their target audience is doing something wrong by making changes based on that research? Unless they're lacing their ice cream with cocaine, no change is inherently wrong.
Plenty of people play MMOs without being addicted. The whole point of a game is that it should be fun - if a game developer is not researching ways to make the game more fun, they're not doing their job, and their customers are not getting what they're paying for.
Even if NCSoft did what you hypothesize, it would still not be wrong - if it were, then the mere act of making a game fun would be wrong, because somebody somewhere could get addicted to it. (It doesn't even have to be *fun* to be addicting - look at all the stupid Facebook games that people spend 12 hours a day playing...)
but you don't see people suing McDonalds for posting ad with a picture of a burger that looked so tasty they just had to go buy it.
No, people set the bar a lot lower for McDonalds'. See, McDonalds sold hot coffee, but neglected to actually label the cup to say "HOT". Apparently the buyer ordered hot coffee but did not realize that dumping said coffee on his or her lap would result in painful burns. If it's not labeled "hot", it must be cool, right? Doesn't matter what you ordered... (I may have the minor details of that case wrong, but it's close enough.)
My point is, I fear common sense lost its place in our society a long time ago. This "oh no the MMO is too fun" lawsuit is just another step along that path... *sigh*
That's all well and good, but the stated reason for releasing episodic content was so they could get shorter games out more frequently. Instead, we get shorter games that take forever to come out just like the longer games did. I get the feeling that Valve is fantastic at game development and unbelievably shitty at project management.
Or it's possible they changed their mind and decided that the whole episodic content thing was a bad idea for them (for whatever reason). Maybe they just suck at doing things with a known time frame, but honestly I'd rather get a good game late than an unfinished game early (Star Trek Online, I'm looking at you).
Google Maps didn't do much that mapquest and others weren't already doing. And their mapping data is so full of errors I've started using OpenStreetMap instead - at least if their mapping data is nonsense, I can potentially fix it...
About six months ago, Google refreshed their map data, and suddenly (according to their software) it was impossible to leave my apartment complex. I simply flagged the location where they were missing a street connection, and it was fixed a week or two later. So... just because it's Google doesn't mean you can't get errors corrected.
Of course he did it, otherwise he'd run out, but it is more interesting to see him stabbing orcs than collecting arrows.
I could swear you see him doing it once, in the background...
I can see that the concept might be a little intimidating to the less technically inclined, but the process was really easy & both times resulted in a few hours of the number being unreachable. I'm sure mistakes happen, but in general porting seems to be pretty smooth.
I have to second this. I've done three number ports (two from Verizon to AT&T, one from Net9 or whatever that name is to AT&T), and only had issues with one - and that one only because my phone call dropped at the worst possible moment. (Note to self: do not arrange number ports while you're driving on the freeway.) Because of the point at which the call dropped, the rep ported my wife's Verizon number but replaced *my* AT&T number with it, instead of attaching it to my wife's AT&T phone. It only took another half-hour phone call to fix, though.
Wave? Nobody cares.
Not even Google, it would seem.
and PRIVATE corporations are making all the profit on them
I was under the impression that proceeds from toll roads go to the government (like any other tax)... am I missing something?
If I'm right, then clearly the analogy doesn't hold.
I'm not sure what you mean. Apple can easily scan for which iOS functions a particular app is linking against. If that list includes APIs which are not on Apple's official "approved" list, then they can reject the app on that basis alone. That part could easily be entirely automated.
At this point, it's clear *you're* not a programmer, so please, just stop. (For the record, I am a programmer, and apparently a better one than you.)