They were likely the only things of value in the building.
Correction: They were the only things of value that were highly visible, lightweight, and easily gathered and thrown in a car in a few minutes. You can bet there were also computers there. LCD monitors, boxes, etc., could all be dismantled and sold off for parts. The people who worked there likely also had personal electronics there -- laptops, cameras, mp3 players. And if it's anything like most corporate buildings, there were at least a few giant LCD/plasma screens in the lobby or in the meeting rooms, as well as A/V equipment for teleconferencing, etc.
I know of a person who cleaned out five floors of a skyscraper as part of a coordinated multi-person burglary, utilizing semitrucks, service elevators, and some very "Ocean's 11" social engineering. They were only caught because one of the guys wanted to get out of the criminal enterprise and turned state's evidence. So don't think it was the only thing of value -- no sir, it was just a crime of opportunity and our bundling thieves went for what they knew was valuable and in plain sight.
Adobe's creative suite has always had high piracy rates due to their high prices.
Which is irrelevant from a legal perspective. If you don't protect your copyright (intellectual property), then you lose it. It can legally become public domain then -- not that such a thing has ever happened in our twisted and convoluted legal system, but in principle it could. That said, they could give it away, or change the licensing terms, etc., but it seems highly unlikely for the reason you indicated: They know their prices are exorbinantly high. They also know that businesses who have to use those products will pay it. Those are the real customers, not you.
It was an R&D center for making Apple software, so there probably were no Surface tables around...
Unlikely. Microsoft sports a very aggressive corporate culture where if you don't use Microsoft for everything, you're "not a team player." This is the company that watched its entire mail service (Hotmail) implode because the edict from on high was they had to use IIS exclusively. It simply couldn't handle the load, regardless of the number of servers and load balancers they threw on... with much chagrin they rolled back to Apache. Linux is used on print servers internally to this day, though it's a dirty secret. They may have had iPads there for development work, but you can bet many of those developers also had Surface tablets because they have to develop for those as well.
Considering how few of them have sold so far, it's safe to say the product launch, er, exploded on the launch pad. But Microsoft, being Microsoft, will still demand their employees use them or else. I'm sure they'd still be demanding their employees avoid ipods and use Zunes, but we all know what happened there.:)
...where exactly were the private lenders willing to offer better rates and cut big, bad, Uncle Sam out of the picture?)
Er, AIG would typically be that private lender. You may recall that many banks and smaller firms went out of business due to the financial crisis, and a whole lot of illegal activity happened as they tried to stay afloat -- most recently in the news was how millions were foreclosed upon and even more threatened with foreclosure. Many billions have been shelled out by over a dozen major banks over this... though frankly, many billions more should have been fined against them since they're still coming out ahead.
Uncle Sam stepped in to prevent a domino effect; The entire market would have imploded and taken a significant chunk of the economy with it... or at least that was the rationale behind the bailouts. Whether that's true or not I'm not qualified to say. But if you agree with that rationale, then Uncle Sam really was the only party capable of stepping in and stabilizing the situation; All the other lenders AIG could have leaned on were also over-extended at the time. Liquidity in the markets was practically zero... There was no wiggle room.
The dreamliner turns into a nightmare. Film at 11.
The Dreamliner is one of the most sophisticated planes ever created. It's going to have problems. I don't think it's a "nightmare", as the FAA fully qualified it for flight. These are the kinds of problems you can only find when it's in production.
You sir, get it. Everyone else is busy banging pots and pans saying "We can do it ourselves!" but that's not really the point. Anytime you release an application onto a platform, you're going to get people who say everything else works just fine, so it must be your application. Enter technical support. Think about taking a phone call where the problem is that their video driver needs to be reinstalled. Under windows, this is merely painful and requires a couple reboots -- 15 minute call. Under Linux, it could require a kernel recompilation, editing files in/etc, and downloading and installing dozens of dependent packages ahead of that. That's two hours of work.
So one linux call costs the equivalent manpower of eight windows callers. For a support manager, that's a scary proposition, and they do not give a damn how many people know what they're doing -- those aren't the people they're going to be supporting! It's going to be the guy who just downloaded Debian because he heard "It supports world of warcraft" on the web forums, and by god, he's going to make it work now. And he doesn't have a clue.
Blizzard's target market is not slashdot readers who can list out all the arguments for the 'ls' command and can do sed and awk scripts in their sleep. Blizzard is looking at the guy who "heard about it on the internet"... and that guy's going to make some poor bastard in tech support utterly miserable.
Guys, you're missing the point being made here. It's not that the application can't run under different flavors -- it's about supporting them. Every distribution has its own quirks, its own packaging manager, its own set of libraries that are included (and some that aren't). It's a support nightmare. Rather than writing installation instructions once, you have to write it a dozen times. Versions change constantly. Everybody here has experienced the joys of googling for someone's hack script to get something working... a patch here, a tweak there... yes, it's possible.
But from a support perspective, it's difficulty level = nightmare trying to help these people. And they'll expect your help. You just gave them a major application and said it works with Linux... so you better know every flavor, every variation, every configuration possible. And that, right there, is why Blizzard hasn't jumped on the Linux bandwagon -- too many support variables.
You provide little actual security within your primary area of focus. Confinscating water bottles, nail clippers, groping little boys and girls, strip-searching people and putting unsolicited fingers on and in their privates, and using technology that your own people are now developing cancer from being near. You talk about terrorist threats, but how many terrorists have gotten away with irradiating our citizens? How many terrorists have stolen millions in camcorders, cell phones, and other electronics? How many terrorists have smuggled drugs onto commercial airlines? And the real kicker: Compared to those numbers, how many TSA agents have been caught doing the same?
You bring a level of institutional incompetence to the show that makes the current fiscal cliff negotiations look like someone forgetting to give the change back after buying a candy bar... you're overpriced, underwhelming, and frankly... the "cure" you provide is worse than the disease. And the only reason the TSA hasn't been drop-kicked out the door is because the media keeps people in perpetual ignorance of just how incompetent you guys truly are.
So when you come into my town and say "this will be the norm", I can't help but wonder how long until nobody flies, goes to public events, or even leaves their fucking house-- not because of terrorists, but because of the inconvenience of having to deal with your bullshit. Your organization is incompetent and useless. Go away.
Linking to "Canada's Best Satirical Newspaper". Really sir, an article stating "Cucumbers Cause Genital Baldness" didn't trigger your skepticism?
Satire often hints at a deeper truth; Namely, we don't know what GMO crops do to the human body for sure because it hasn't been studied. We're making assumptions about its safety. Historically, this rarely ends well.
Give me a good reason why someone shouldn't be using DNS instead of direct IP address, other than lazy programmers.
Not every address needs to be in DNS, or should be. DNS has no security safeguards -- it's meant to be public. Putting records in DNS can allow additional information to leak about your network, for example, the IP address of the management interfaces for your managed switches. These typically have very little in the way of access controls -- you can brute the password without audit alarms triggering in some cases. So giving everything a DNS record means every device on your network is now recorded for a potential intruder, by design.
GMO crops aren't universally good, and they have a lack of oversight to the same degree drugs do. For something that can affect the human body just as much, this is irresponsible. Montsano recently created a variety of cucumber that results in genital baldness. We're not used to thinking of our food as drugs, or causing side effects, but given the sharp rise in the prevalence of food allergies and stuff like this, the obvious conclusion is that this is a technology we don't fully understand and has the potential to kill if misused.
More oversight is required, and blaming activists for the startup costs is stupid -- it's the patent law system that's broken, and the activists have a point regarding the safety of GMO products, even if they have been focusing on the wrong reasons.
And how many drone strikes have been carried out over the past 10 years?
The drones aren't connected to the internet, only military networks. Any peripheral traffic that happens to route anywhere out into the internet is on a secured VPN... and at that, it's only sensitive material, nothing that'll say, start world war three. The same cannot be said for, say, nuclear reactors and related industrial equipment (like centrifuges)... which apparently are. All that out of the way, who really cares what a couple of rich dudes do with their gambling money? But in the larger sense, yes, it will happen eventually as if there's one thing you can bet on long-term is that we'll find more creative ways to kill each other...
All this boils down to is one person betting on "sooner" and the other on "later".
Your parenting skills would appear to be dreadful. Have you considered seeking help?
Not really... the kids I take care of are real, not imaginary. I've met dozens of geek parents. Not one of them had children that enjoyed or preferred linux. If your children exist, they're so far outside the envelope of normal everyday experience as to be a statistical fluke.
Game companies inflicting emotional pain on kids is unacceptable. Perhaps a new payroll tax?
Sure! I'm all for government regulation, but I think you're working the deal all crabbed: A sarcastic asshole tax would probably earn more revenue, and pay for therapy for the emotional pain of said kids many times over. With the excess revenue, we could go on to fund research on it as an alternative energy source. I don't know how many watts a mlookaba can generate, but I'd love to find out.
But you have no idea how to properly deal with yours.
You assume they're my children. Strangely enough, other family members have a desire to breed as well, and even stranger... my reputation as a computer geek makes my phone ring when things like this happen. And the worst of it is, being that they're family and have done so very many thing to help me out over the years, it's not like I can say no. But you go ahead and rock the condescending angle, man.
Running each scanner one at a time, plus cleaning whatever is missed, takes many hours. After doing this a few times, it becomes easier to just build an image backup/restore. Of course, you, having apparently no family, social obligations, or desire to help anyone but yourself, would never consider the benefits of being able to tell said teenager(s) to "press F12 and wait" and then reaping the favor of others, perhaps leading them to say, replace that water pump on your car that died, etc.
It's the fact that they can't continue to use the good independently of the vendor they bought it from.
Web-based games like the kind Zynga produces use a lightweight client (Flash) because many of the platforms it develops for are resource-constrained. iPads, hand-me-down laptops from the parents, smartphones, etc. As a result, a lot of the processing has been moved to the server to enable that functionality. It's a rational design trade-off. Of course, when the server costs more to maintain than the income generated by keeping it on, it's time to shut it down. And yes, it is possible to port the application to run standalone, and even add certain community-features at a very low pricepoint -- but it costs money.
That's the downside of Web 2.0. It's a cost tradeoff -- you can spread your costs to millions of people to enable things like Google Mail, giving people gigabytes of free-to-access e-mail storage and a number of added features beyond that, in exchange for advertising revenue. It's economy of scale -- there are business models for which the margins are so tiny, that it takes millions of customers to make it viable. So if the breakeven ever falls under a certain point, it's no longer economical.
Killing off some kids virtual pet is fairly compassionate in comparison to any other teachable moment...
This isn't education. This is a company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars by preying on children and teenagers selling them products and services that have little value and are grossly over-priced. Using greater evils in the world to justify a lesser evil is morally questionable. Let's say I crash into you in my car. You drive a very nice car, obviously a person of means. In my defense, I say I shouldn't have to pay as much in repairs, because it didn't hurt you as much as if I'd run into a poor person's car. You can get a rental, buy a new car, etc., so the proportional harm is less than the guy who's crappy buick I just wrecked and he has no money for repairs, or a rental, etc., and now may very well lose his job. This is the moral equivalent to the argument you're making, but with the roles reversed.
You're making an argument here based on your own emotional needs; Namely that you dealt with worse as a child and therefore these kids should "toughen up a bit". Take yourself out of the equation and evaluate objectively.
My spidey senses say that there will soon be an "OpenPets" github project, coupled with the obligatory web2.0 homepage. Essentially the nextgen version of virtual pets.
My common sense is tingling, and it says lawsuitilarity will ensue if this is attempted.
Cancelling a game is "inflicting emotional pain"? You need to get your kids out more.
Yes, it's inflicting emotional pain. Not harm, pain. In the same way that stubbing your toe hurts and getting your dick chopped off by a robot purpose-built to hunt down asshat slashdot posters hurts. Pain is pain. I said nothing about the amount. Now go drink some water, eat a candy bar, or whatever the hell you do so you can be less of an asshole.
You clearly don't have children. You will learn what a Bieber is, and why iTunes gift cards and not the President, is the current incarnation of the anti-christ. You will discover the joys of cleaning out a malware infested computer in your teenager's bedroom on a biweekly basis, to the point that you, in a fit of anger, spend a weekend building a vm image with a pxe server and restoration image so your solution to their pepetual inability to listen to you and then try to actively override any security features designed to keep them from screwing it up is "press f12 and wait an hour, and no bitching about your 'lost music', dumbass." And you will also learn why a random sampling of teenager's glowy rectangles show that Facebook is almost always on it... and thus, Zynga is as well.
Let this be a lesson to people that haven't learned it yet.
In other news, you're a heartless bastard... And so is Zynga. True as it may be, teaching our children and teenagers (the main market for Zynga games), and to a lesser extent young adults, the harsh reality of capitalism by inflicting emotional pain is not socially acceptable. They don't know any better and have had precious little opportunity at this point to learn that. The "lesson to people" attitude is mean-spirited and absolves Zynga of its higher level of social responsibility because its primary audience are people who simply don't know any better. It's no different than scammers preying on the elderly to extract money from them; It's going after people who are vulnerable and defenseless.
Saying this is just a "lesson" is a moral justification for predatory social behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Iger sat upon a chair made of the late Congressman Sonny Bono's remains while...
Stop. Cut. I'm sold.
Emacs can already make cell phone calls. It's been built-in since 1980.
Yup, and its implimentation inspired Mick Jagger to scream into the microphone "You make a grown man cry" a year later.
>call -n 8005551234 -calrid 0 | foneaudapp -spkr 1 -micr 1
Typical noob...
cat ~/mail/contacts/* | grep "[CONTACT_NAME]" | grep [0-9]???-[0-9]???-[0-9]???? | awk BEGIN { FS="," } { print $2 } | call -calrid 0 -n & ; foneaudapp -spkr /udev/audio/default/out -micr /udev/audio/default/in
They were likely the only things of value in the building.
Correction: They were the only things of value that were highly visible, lightweight, and easily gathered and thrown in a car in a few minutes. You can bet there were also computers there. LCD monitors, boxes, etc., could all be dismantled and sold off for parts. The people who worked there likely also had personal electronics there -- laptops, cameras, mp3 players. And if it's anything like most corporate buildings, there were at least a few giant LCD/plasma screens in the lobby or in the meeting rooms, as well as A/V equipment for teleconferencing, etc.
I know of a person who cleaned out five floors of a skyscraper as part of a coordinated multi-person burglary, utilizing semitrucks, service elevators, and some very "Ocean's 11" social engineering. They were only caught because one of the guys wanted to get out of the criminal enterprise and turned state's evidence. So don't think it was the only thing of value -- no sir, it was just a crime of opportunity and our bundling thieves went for what they knew was valuable and in plain sight.
Adobe's creative suite has always had high piracy rates due to their high prices.
Which is irrelevant from a legal perspective. If you don't protect your copyright (intellectual property), then you lose it. It can legally become public domain then -- not that such a thing has ever happened in our twisted and convoluted legal system, but in principle it could. That said, they could give it away, or change the licensing terms, etc., but it seems highly unlikely for the reason you indicated: They know their prices are exorbinantly high. They also know that businesses who have to use those products will pay it. Those are the real customers, not you.
It was an R&D center for making Apple software, so there probably were no Surface tables around...
Unlikely. Microsoft sports a very aggressive corporate culture where if you don't use Microsoft for everything, you're "not a team player." This is the company that watched its entire mail service (Hotmail) implode because the edict from on high was they had to use IIS exclusively. It simply couldn't handle the load, regardless of the number of servers and load balancers they threw on... with much chagrin they rolled back to Apache. Linux is used on print servers internally to this day, though it's a dirty secret. They may have had iPads there for development work, but you can bet many of those developers also had Surface tablets because they have to develop for those as well.
Considering how few of them have sold so far, it's safe to say the product launch, er, exploded on the launch pad. But Microsoft, being Microsoft, will still demand their employees use them or else. I'm sure they'd still be demanding their employees avoid ipods and use Zunes, but we all know what happened there. :)
...where exactly were the private lenders willing to offer better rates and cut big, bad, Uncle Sam out of the picture?)
Er, AIG would typically be that private lender. You may recall that many banks and smaller firms went out of business due to the financial crisis, and a whole lot of illegal activity happened as they tried to stay afloat -- most recently in the news was how millions were foreclosed upon and even more threatened with foreclosure. Many billions have been shelled out by over a dozen major banks over this... though frankly, many billions more should have been fined against them since they're still coming out ahead.
Uncle Sam stepped in to prevent a domino effect; The entire market would have imploded and taken a significant chunk of the economy with it... or at least that was the rationale behind the bailouts. Whether that's true or not I'm not qualified to say. But if you agree with that rationale, then Uncle Sam really was the only party capable of stepping in and stabilizing the situation; All the other lenders AIG could have leaned on were also over-extended at the time. Liquidity in the markets was practically zero... There was no wiggle room.
The dreamliner turns into a nightmare. Film at 11.
The Dreamliner is one of the most sophisticated planes ever created. It's going to have problems. I don't think it's a "nightmare", as the FAA fully qualified it for flight. These are the kinds of problems you can only find when it's in production.
...when SGI used to be cool.
"Captain, I'm sensing a bitter old man. I suggest caution."
You sir, get it. Everyone else is busy banging pots and pans saying "We can do it ourselves!" but that's not really the point. Anytime you release an application onto a platform, you're going to get people who say everything else works just fine, so it must be your application. Enter technical support. Think about taking a phone call where the problem is that their video driver needs to be reinstalled. Under windows, this is merely painful and requires a couple reboots -- 15 minute call. Under Linux, it could require a kernel recompilation, editing files in /etc, and downloading and installing dozens of dependent packages ahead of that. That's two hours of work.
So one linux call costs the equivalent manpower of eight windows callers. For a support manager, that's a scary proposition, and they do not give a damn how many people know what they're doing -- those aren't the people they're going to be supporting! It's going to be the guy who just downloaded Debian because he heard "It supports world of warcraft" on the web forums, and by god, he's going to make it work now. And he doesn't have a clue.
Blizzard's target market is not slashdot readers who can list out all the arguments for the 'ls' command and can do sed and awk scripts in their sleep. Blizzard is looking at the guy who "heard about it on the internet"... and that guy's going to make some poor bastard in tech support utterly miserable.
Guys, you're missing the point being made here. It's not that the application can't run under different flavors -- it's about supporting them. Every distribution has its own quirks, its own packaging manager, its own set of libraries that are included (and some that aren't). It's a support nightmare. Rather than writing installation instructions once, you have to write it a dozen times. Versions change constantly. Everybody here has experienced the joys of googling for someone's hack script to get something working... a patch here, a tweak there... yes, it's possible.
But from a support perspective, it's difficulty level = nightmare trying to help these people. And they'll expect your help. You just gave them a major application and said it works with Linux... so you better know every flavor, every variation, every configuration possible. And that, right there, is why Blizzard hasn't jumped on the Linux bandwagon -- too many support variables.
You provide little actual security within your primary area of focus. Confinscating water bottles, nail clippers, groping little boys and girls, strip-searching people and putting unsolicited fingers on and in their privates, and using technology that your own people are now developing cancer from being near. You talk about terrorist threats, but how many terrorists have gotten away with irradiating our citizens? How many terrorists have stolen millions in camcorders, cell phones, and other electronics? How many terrorists have smuggled drugs onto commercial airlines? And the real kicker: Compared to those numbers, how many TSA agents have been caught doing the same?
You bring a level of institutional incompetence to the show that makes the current fiscal cliff negotiations look like someone forgetting to give the change back after buying a candy bar... you're overpriced, underwhelming, and frankly... the "cure" you provide is worse than the disease. And the only reason the TSA hasn't been drop-kicked out the door is because the media keeps people in perpetual ignorance of just how incompetent you guys truly are.
So when you come into my town and say "this will be the norm", I can't help but wonder how long until nobody flies, goes to public events, or even leaves their fucking house-- not because of terrorists, but because of the inconvenience of having to deal with your bullshit. Your organization is incompetent and useless. Go away.
Linking to "Canada's Best Satirical Newspaper". Really sir, an article stating "Cucumbers Cause Genital Baldness" didn't trigger your skepticism?
Satire often hints at a deeper truth; Namely, we don't know what GMO crops do to the human body for sure because it hasn't been studied. We're making assumptions about its safety. Historically, this rarely ends well.
Give me a good reason why someone shouldn't be using DNS instead of direct IP address, other than lazy programmers.
Not every address needs to be in DNS, or should be. DNS has no security safeguards -- it's meant to be public. Putting records in DNS can allow additional information to leak about your network, for example, the IP address of the management interfaces for your managed switches. These typically have very little in the way of access controls -- you can brute the password without audit alarms triggering in some cases. So giving everything a DNS record means every device on your network is now recorded for a potential intruder, by design.
GMO crops aren't universally good, and they have a lack of oversight to the same degree drugs do. For something that can affect the human body just as much, this is irresponsible. Montsano recently created a variety of cucumber that results in genital baldness. We're not used to thinking of our food as drugs, or causing side effects, but given the sharp rise in the prevalence of food allergies and stuff like this, the obvious conclusion is that this is a technology we don't fully understand and has the potential to kill if misused.
More oversight is required, and blaming activists for the startup costs is stupid -- it's the patent law system that's broken, and the activists have a point regarding the safety of GMO products, even if they have been focusing on the wrong reasons.
And how many drone strikes have been carried out over the past 10 years?
The drones aren't connected to the internet, only military networks. Any peripheral traffic that happens to route anywhere out into the internet is on a secured VPN... and at that, it's only sensitive material, nothing that'll say, start world war three. The same cannot be said for, say, nuclear reactors and related industrial equipment (like centrifuges)... which apparently are. All that out of the way, who really cares what a couple of rich dudes do with their gambling money? But in the larger sense, yes, it will happen eventually as if there's one thing you can bet on long-term is that we'll find more creative ways to kill each other...
All this boils down to is one person betting on "sooner" and the other on "later".
Your parenting skills would appear to be dreadful. Have you considered seeking help?
Not really... the kids I take care of are real, not imaginary. I've met dozens of geek parents. Not one of them had children that enjoyed or preferred linux. If your children exist, they're so far outside the envelope of normal everyday experience as to be a statistical fluke.
Game companies inflicting emotional pain on kids is unacceptable. Perhaps a new payroll tax?
Sure! I'm all for government regulation, but I think you're working the deal all crabbed: A sarcastic asshole tax would probably earn more revenue, and pay for therapy for the emotional pain of said kids many times over. With the excess revenue, we could go on to fund research on it as an alternative energy source. I don't know how many watts a mlookaba can generate, but I'd love to find out.
But you have no idea how to properly deal with yours.
You assume they're my children. Strangely enough, other family members have a desire to breed as well, and even stranger... my reputation as a computer geek makes my phone ring when things like this happen. And the worst of it is, being that they're family and have done so very many thing to help me out over the years, it's not like I can say no. But you go ahead and rock the condescending angle, man.
Blah blah blah PXE blah blah saved image blah blah.
Running each scanner one at a time, plus cleaning whatever is missed, takes many hours. After doing this a few times, it becomes easier to just build an image backup/restore. Of course, you, having apparently no family, social obligations, or desire to help anyone but yourself, would never consider the benefits of being able to tell said teenager(s) to "press F12 and wait" and then reaping the favor of others, perhaps leading them to say, replace that water pump on your car that died, etc.
It's the fact that they can't continue to use the good independently of the vendor they bought it from.
Web-based games like the kind Zynga produces use a lightweight client (Flash) because many of the platforms it develops for are resource-constrained. iPads, hand-me-down laptops from the parents, smartphones, etc. As a result, a lot of the processing has been moved to the server to enable that functionality. It's a rational design trade-off. Of course, when the server costs more to maintain than the income generated by keeping it on, it's time to shut it down. And yes, it is possible to port the application to run standalone, and even add certain community-features at a very low pricepoint -- but it costs money.
That's the downside of Web 2.0. It's a cost tradeoff -- you can spread your costs to millions of people to enable things like Google Mail, giving people gigabytes of free-to-access e-mail storage and a number of added features beyond that, in exchange for advertising revenue. It's economy of scale -- there are business models for which the margins are so tiny, that it takes millions of customers to make it viable. So if the breakeven ever falls under a certain point, it's no longer economical.
Killing off some kids virtual pet is fairly compassionate in comparison to any other teachable moment...
This isn't education. This is a company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars by preying on children and teenagers selling them products and services that have little value and are grossly over-priced. Using greater evils in the world to justify a lesser evil is morally questionable. Let's say I crash into you in my car. You drive a very nice car, obviously a person of means. In my defense, I say I shouldn't have to pay as much in repairs, because it didn't hurt you as much as if I'd run into a poor person's car. You can get a rental, buy a new car, etc., so the proportional harm is less than the guy who's crappy buick I just wrecked and he has no money for repairs, or a rental, etc., and now may very well lose his job. This is the moral equivalent to the argument you're making, but with the roles reversed.
You're making an argument here based on your own emotional needs; Namely that you dealt with worse as a child and therefore these kids should "toughen up a bit". Take yourself out of the equation and evaluate objectively.
My spidey senses say that there will soon be an "OpenPets" github project, coupled with the obligatory web2.0 homepage. Essentially the nextgen version of virtual pets.
My common sense is tingling, and it says lawsuitilarity will ensue if this is attempted.
Cancelling a game is "inflicting emotional pain"? You need to get your kids out more.
Yes, it's inflicting emotional pain. Not harm, pain. In the same way that stubbing your toe hurts and getting your dick chopped off by a robot purpose-built to hunt down asshat slashdot posters hurts. Pain is pain. I said nothing about the amount. Now go drink some water, eat a candy bar, or whatever the hell you do so you can be less of an asshole.
And why should we care about this fluff, anyway?
You clearly don't have children. You will learn what a Bieber is, and why iTunes gift cards and not the President, is the current incarnation of the anti-christ. You will discover the joys of cleaning out a malware infested computer in your teenager's bedroom on a biweekly basis, to the point that you, in a fit of anger, spend a weekend building a vm image with a pxe server and restoration image so your solution to their pepetual inability to listen to you and then try to actively override any security features designed to keep them from screwing it up is "press f12 and wait an hour, and no bitching about your 'lost music', dumbass." And you will also learn why a random sampling of teenager's glowy rectangles show that Facebook is almost always on it... and thus, Zynga is as well.
Let this be a lesson to people that haven't learned it yet.
In other news, you're a heartless bastard... And so is Zynga. True as it may be, teaching our children and teenagers (the main market for Zynga games), and to a lesser extent young adults, the harsh reality of capitalism by inflicting emotional pain is not socially acceptable. They don't know any better and have had precious little opportunity at this point to learn that. The "lesson to people" attitude is mean-spirited and absolves Zynga of its higher level of social responsibility because its primary audience are people who simply don't know any better. It's no different than scammers preying on the elderly to extract money from them; It's going after people who are vulnerable and defenseless.
Saying this is just a "lesson" is a moral justification for predatory social behavior.