Thank you. Its sad to see so many people buying the industries propoganda. Notice that states with "tort reform" haven't saved on insurance or medical costs at all.
If you don't make awards large enough to actually hurt, they'll be ignored. If an HMO will make $5 million by denying necessary procedures, they'll happily do so if they figure 5 patients will sue and be limited to $250,000 each. Or how bout that doctor in the article who was addicted to painkillers, left a sugical sponge inside a patient, operated on the wrong hip, and amputated the wrong leg? This guy probably makes a lot better money as a surgeon than he would at anything else he could do, so if he gets fined $250,000 every five years he'll just write it off as a cost of doing business.
What is "out of hand" is the amount of propoganda put out by the insurance industry. What is sad is the number of people who buy it. So called "tort reform" doesn't do jack to help the public, and states that have passed it haven't lowered their health care costs by a single cent.
All "tort reform" does is shield doctors and hospitals from responsiblity for their negligence. If you have a hypocrondriac (an exception, rather than the rule that some would have you believe) suing every doctor he sees, those cases will be dismissed rapidly for lack of grounds.
It is simply absurd that McDonnalds is held responsible for 1. the customer lacking the sense to go buy more decent coffee, 2. ignoring senses and repeated warnings of it being hot
So, just to be clear, you are perfectly a-ok with businesses knowingly selling you defective products that can cause serious injury or death? Remember, the lady wasn't scalded, she was burned to the bone.
As individuals, we pay consequences if we knowingly put someone in danger. Reckless or drunken driving comes to mind. But why should businesses be exempt from responsibility? Why don't you go to the homes of those people who's families were killed by faulty Firestone tires and tell them, "See, this is a capitalist country, so rather than suing Ford or Firestone for knowingly putting you at risk, just boycott the companies. That'll teach em!"
In the United States, the courts have found that a business has the same rights that an individual person would. But thanks to our Republican and Libertarian minded friends, regulations are hard to pass or enforce. And now thanks to the gullible and naive buying industry propoganda, companies will be shielded from any kind of meaningful responsibility by so called "tort reform". But tort reform doesn't do a shred of good for consumers, all it does is shield companies from paying for their negligence.
What about the idiot who won a lawsuit against McDonalds when she poured her own coffee on her crotch?
She didn't sue because she accidently dumped coffee on herself. She wanted reimbursement because the coffee was so hot it cause third degree burns, TO THE BONE, requiring $300,000 in surgery. She just wanted reimbursment for her medical bills, and only sued after McDonalds blew her off, even though the company had recieved hundereds of complaints from both customers and health inspectors across the country about the temperature of your coffee. And even then, McDonalds was only made to pay the amount they'd make from two days of profits from *just* coffee and only coffee, and even *then* the award was further reduced by a judge. So the Golden Arches were hardly hurting here.
What I don't understand is how people, upon learning of the facts, still insist that this is a frivolous lawsuit. Hello? You shouldn't have to worry about avoiding 3rd degree burns when you sit down at a restaurant, any more than it's your responsibility to worry if your car's gas tank will explode if you get in a crash at 5 mph.
Far from being a poster child of frivilous lawsuits, the McDonalds coffee is a perfect example of why we need lawyers and huge monetary awards. Because business are quite happy to screw you over and even put you in danger, if it makes then money and they can get away with it. What was the Slashdot story again? Something about EB games screwing a customer over?
Is that text macros like, "enemy taking our flag" are totally obsolete with standardized voice chat.
What about LAN parties, eh? If we're all playing Counter-Strike, I don't want to broadcast my super-secret-devious plan to go up the middle of de_dust2 to plant the bomb. Also, if you're in a large server with two teams of 12 each, its hard to communicate if 4 people are talking at the same time. And what about older games that don't have voice chat built in, like Quake II?
You free up the buttons you have for gaming, not for macros.
Then you have a lot more buttons to work with, too. Counter-Strike and Halo work reasonably well because you can only have two weapons at any given time. But in games like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, you have a buttload of weapons to deal with, and its more effective to just bind a key to the weapon you want. So I can instantly select the grenade launcher, the rocket launcher, the shotgun, the railgun, or the lighting gun and be sure I'll have the right one selected.
Then why isn't the police department also guilty of extortion? "We know this is costing you money, but don't ask for compensation, and don't you dare shut the site off when you run out of money because we'll sieze your property and throw you in jail for 20 years."
Hard, not impossible. Skilled console FPS people can do it too. The thing is, everything's practice. You probably sucked at FPS on PC the first time you did it, but you did get better.
But if you did have somebody who was that good on a console, they'd be just that much better on a pc, because you just have that much more precision. Some games just work better with some types of controlers...I don't think anyone would argue that a joystick would be the best form of controler for a flight sim, for example. Can you play a FPS on a console and have fun? Sure thing, never said otherwise. But playing with a keyboard and mouse gives you so much more control, and many more buttons that you can push if you spend some time binding keys and extra mouse buttons.
Example: Quake 1. Left mouse button would fire rockets, left thumb button would pop off a grenade, right mouse button would switch to and fire the lightning gun, and the middle would use the sniper rifle or grappling hook (depending on the mod). Having my left hand on the keyboard, I have easy access to 19 keys which can be bound to whatever I want. say_team "enemy taking our flag down the middle" and so on. How would you remotely approach that with a gamepad?
If you can beat Halo on Legendary, that's something. Plenty of people can beat the Xbox one on Legendary, and it's because they spent more time practicing the game than whinning about it on the internet.
Whining, eh? You'd have a tough time saying I don't have an appreciation for Bungie's games, considering I've spent the last few days going through Oni again. But Halo was *supposed* to be a computer game, not a console one. FPS's will just be a better experience on pc's until you can play with a keyboard and mouse on a console, and have 1600x1200 tv's.
Without knowing more about the site and how much work it took to maintain, I don't think we could say that 300k was overcharging. I was objecting to the "it should only cost $100 a month to host!" arguments, because you can still make good money if you do professional work designing and updating a site.
Regardless, the moral of the story is: get a contract, and talk to a lawyer beforehand.
rather than trying to extort money from the sheriff's department
Again with the "extortion". Fine, it's extortion then. But then the sheriff's office is equally guilty of extortion, by demanding that he keep providing service or face extreme retaliation by the police department and prosecutor.
p.s. whoever modded you as "flamebait" is a jerkie
This guy was a moron plain and simple he had no written contract after 3 years.
Both parties are equally moronic for not having a contract, not just the web-dever. They should have sued him in civil court, rather than blatantly abusing their power to punish and intimidate him.
This is why we need severe limitations on the power of government
Why, so other individuals and businesses are free to screw you over the moment they see fit? I personally like being able to buy food and medicine at the grocery store without worring if its going to poison me, I like driving my car without worrying that its gas tank will blow up if I get in an accident at 10 mph, I like living in an apartment thats up to spec with fire codes, and I like it that the tire factory to the west can't dump as much pollution as it feels like into the air and river, thank you very much.
Government is supposed to look out for you. A business doens't give a rat's ass about you, because its first, middle, and last priorities are to make money. The only time a business ever gives a shit about individuals are if it gives them a compeditive advantage, or they are required to by laws and regulations.
By your logic, then the phone, electric, and cable companies are all committing "extortion" whenever they send you a notice saying "you're late, pay up x dollars by this date or your service will be cut off". If that were the case, you'd get everything for free, as no one could pay up without resorting to so called extortion.
In addition to the impounded equipment that the poster below mentioned, the guy is going to have to spend thousands of dollars on attourneys just to prove his innocence...and then thousands more if he wants to sue them for abuse of power and malicious prosecution.
You're comparing demanding compensation for a site that you completely own and maintain, to throwing someone in jail, seizing his equipment, and threatening him with a 20 year jail sentance? Get a sense of proportion, man. The most the sheriffs office should have done was tell him to go to hell, or take him to civil court.
You are absolutely right, $300K for bandwidth costs for a small-to-medium size site is crazy. But its not just for bandwidth, its also for labor! Bandwidth costs + hardware costs + 3 years salary for a professional web dever to design, update and maintain a site could easily be $300,000.
Maybe your time is worthless and you work for nothing, but most of the rest of us like to be compensated for our work. Did the guy origionaly agree to so this for free! Sure he did. Was he working without a contract? Sure he was. But the site was his, and as there was no contract he had the right to take it down at a whim, and ask whatever price he wanted for to maintain it. If the county didn't want to pony up the money, the most they should have done was tell him to go to hell. NOT arrest him, impound his equipment, press bogus criminal charges against him, and threaten to send him to jail for 20 years.
This was nothing more than a huge abuse of authority by the county and the sheriffs office.
They guy was frikkin arrested, his equipment impounded, and he's being threatened with 20 years in jail. For a dispute that should be settled in civil court. Is the guy snow white innocent in the whole affair? Probably not. Is the police department committing a huge abuse of authority? Hell yes!
How'd he get $300,000? Easy: aside from the hardware and software costs, there was unpaid labor. All that time he spent on this free site was time he could have spent on other work; so yes doing stuff for free was costing him money. As there was no contract the sheriffs office could have argued that he knew what he was getting into, but that's a question for civil court. However, by impounding his equipment, arresting him, and threatening 20 years in prison, they have committed a HUGE abuse of authority. I hope the responsible officials are a) fired b) sued into the ground and c) sent to a pound-me-in-the-ass prison for as long as they're trying to send this guy there.
The guy couldn't jail county officials or seize their property. This is a perfect example of why we need lawyers and huge damage awards, contrary to businesses and Republicans would have you believe.
Every five years or so when the makers of Beanie Babies threaten to stop making them, then change their minds "due to popular demand". Or the way Disney advertises that this is the last time you'll be able to buy Sleeping Beauty for the next five years, only they do it for real as they have a large enough film library to cycle through them.
Ah, the wanton ravings of a clueless peckerhead. While I can't do anything about the fact that your head is shaped like a dick, I can give you a clue on consoles: yes I have played first person shooters on consoles, several of them, and there is no way a game pad is going to give you a percentage of a fraction of the control and precision that you get with a keyboard and mouse.
Why? Because you have a little stub of a stick that you can move, at most, a half an inch in any direction. Compare that to a mouse, which you might typically move three inches in any direction. That's six times the precision that you can get with a control stick, not even counting how much easier it is to control your speed. As the other poster pointed out, pulling a 180, aiming up 30 degrees, and shooting someone 100 yards away in an 8th of a second is pretty standard fair for talented players on pc's. Good frikkin luck doing that on a console.
The Xbox controller is fantastic for it, since the sticks feel right (resistance and thumb sensitivity wise) for FPS. Halo's a great example of a game with a well-written control scheme
Well written, huh? Then how do you aim, punch, and move at the same time, beyach?
So suck it up, Princess! If you want to play games, you have to stop whinning and play them.
Uh-huh. The reason you can't play PC Halo with X-Box Halo is because the company knows that the X-Box guys would be slaughtered. If they ever make multiplayer cross platform without crippling the PC side, lets go play a game and I'll watch you take it up the ass like a squirrel being gang raped by a herd of elephants.
like i said, 3 million dead iraqis is not a "better thing"
For the Iraqi's, obviously not. But then I wasn't talking about them, as I made perfectly clear. But then, you are really, really stupid.
Re:Would you like some cheese to go with your whin
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Thief 3 Website Goes Live
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· Score: 2, Informative
People can whine about PC version all they want, but if they really want to play some Deus Ex, they should sit down and play it on the Xbox.
A first person shooter? On a console? Do you have any idea how painful that is? Some games work better on consols with controlers - fighting games for example - but it should be a capitol offense to release a first person shooter on any system that doens't come with a keyboard and mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the nice debunking. So many people have just bought the insurance industries like about "frivilous lawsuits" without any question.
Thank you. Its sad to see so many people buying the industries propoganda. Notice that states with "tort reform" haven't saved on insurance or medical costs at all.
If you don't make awards large enough to actually hurt, they'll be ignored. If an HMO will make $5 million by denying necessary procedures, they'll happily do so if they figure 5 patients will sue and be limited to $250,000 each. Or how bout that doctor in the article who was addicted to painkillers, left a sugical sponge inside a patient, operated on the wrong hip, and amputated the wrong leg? This guy probably makes a lot better money as a surgeon than he would at anything else he could do, so if he gets fined $250,000 every five years he'll just write it off as a cost of doing business.
Malpractice litigation is far too out of hand.
What is "out of hand" is the amount of propoganda put out by the insurance industry. What is sad is the number of people who buy it. So called "tort reform" doesn't do jack to help the public, and states that have passed it haven't lowered their health care costs by a single cent.
All "tort reform" does is shield doctors and hospitals from responsiblity for their negligence. If you have a hypocrondriac (an exception, rather than the rule that some would have you believe) suing every doctor he sees, those cases will be dismissed rapidly for lack of grounds.
It is simply absurd that McDonnalds is held responsible for 1. the customer lacking the sense to go buy more decent coffee, 2. ignoring senses and repeated warnings of it being hot
So, just to be clear, you are perfectly a-ok with businesses knowingly selling you defective products that can cause serious injury or death? Remember, the lady wasn't scalded, she was burned to the bone.
As individuals, we pay consequences if we knowingly put someone in danger. Reckless or drunken driving comes to mind. But why should businesses be exempt from responsibility? Why don't you go to the homes of those people who's families were killed by faulty Firestone tires and tell them, "See, this is a capitalist country, so rather than suing Ford or Firestone for knowingly putting you at risk, just boycott the companies. That'll teach em!"
In the United States, the courts have found that a business has the same rights that an individual person would. But thanks to our Republican and Libertarian minded friends, regulations are hard to pass or enforce. And now thanks to the gullible and naive buying industry propoganda, companies will be shielded from any kind of meaningful responsibility by so called "tort reform". But tort reform doesn't do a shred of good for consumers, all it does is shield companies from paying for their negligence.
What about the idiot who won a lawsuit against McDonalds when she poured her own coffee on her crotch?
She didn't sue because she accidently dumped coffee on herself. She wanted reimbursement because the coffee was so hot it cause third degree burns, TO THE BONE, requiring $300,000 in surgery. She just wanted reimbursment for her medical bills, and only sued after McDonalds blew her off, even though the company had recieved hundereds of complaints from both customers and health inspectors across the country about the temperature of your coffee. And even then, McDonalds was only made to pay the amount they'd make from two days of profits from *just* coffee and only coffee, and even *then* the award was further reduced by a judge. So the Golden Arches were hardly hurting here.
What I don't understand is how people, upon learning of the facts, still insist that this is a frivolous lawsuit. Hello? You shouldn't have to worry about avoiding 3rd degree burns when you sit down at a restaurant, any more than it's your responsibility to worry if your car's gas tank will explode if you get in a crash at 5 mph.
Far from being a poster child of frivilous lawsuits, the McDonalds coffee is a perfect example of why we need lawyers and huge monetary awards. Because business are quite happy to screw you over and even put you in danger, if it makes then money and they can get away with it. What was the Slashdot story again? Something about EB games screwing a customer over?
2) Holm isn't a knight
Yes he is. Don't feel bad, I had no idea he played the priest dude in Fifth Element and the robot dude in Alien.
Is that text macros like, "enemy taking our flag" are totally obsolete with standardized voice chat.
What about LAN parties, eh? If we're all playing Counter-Strike, I don't want to broadcast my super-secret-devious plan to go up the middle of de_dust2 to plant the bomb. Also, if you're in a large server with two teams of 12 each, its hard to communicate if 4 people are talking at the same time. And what about older games that don't have voice chat built in, like Quake II?
You free up the buttons you have for gaming, not for macros.
Then you have a lot more buttons to work with, too. Counter-Strike and Halo work reasonably well because you can only have two weapons at any given time. But in games like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, you have a buttload of weapons to deal with, and its more effective to just bind a key to the weapon you want. So I can instantly select the grenade launcher, the rocket launcher, the shotgun, the railgun, or the lighting gun and be sure I'll have the right one selected.
Then why isn't the police department also guilty of extortion? "We know this is costing you money, but don't ask for compensation, and don't you dare shut the site off when you run out of money because we'll sieze your property and throw you in jail for 20 years."
Hard, not impossible. Skilled console FPS people can do it too. The thing is, everything's practice. You probably sucked at FPS on PC the first time you did it, but you did get better.
But if you did have somebody who was that good on a console, they'd be just that much better on a pc, because you just have that much more precision. Some games just work better with some types of controlers...I don't think anyone would argue that a joystick would be the best form of controler for a flight sim, for example. Can you play a FPS on a console and have fun? Sure thing, never said otherwise. But playing with a keyboard and mouse gives you so much more control, and many more buttons that you can push if you spend some time binding keys and extra mouse buttons.
Example: Quake 1. Left mouse button would fire rockets, left thumb button would pop off a grenade, right mouse button would switch to and fire the lightning gun, and the middle would use the sniper rifle or grappling hook (depending on the mod). Having my left hand on the keyboard, I have easy access to 19 keys which can be bound to whatever I want. say_team "enemy taking our flag down the middle" and so on. How would you remotely approach that with a gamepad?
If you can beat Halo on Legendary, that's something. Plenty of people can beat the Xbox one on Legendary, and it's because they spent more time practicing the game than whinning about it on the internet.
Whining, eh? You'd have a tough time saying I don't have an appreciation for Bungie's games, considering I've spent the last few days going through Oni again. But Halo was *supposed* to be a computer game, not a console one. FPS's will just be a better experience on pc's until you can play with a keyboard and mouse on a console, and have 1600x1200 tv's.
Without knowing more about the site and how much work it took to maintain, I don't think we could say that 300k was overcharging. I was objecting to the "it should only cost $100 a month to host!" arguments, because you can still make good money if you do professional work designing and updating a site.
Regardless, the moral of the story is: get a contract, and talk to a lawyer beforehand.
rather than trying to extort money from the sheriff's department
Again with the "extortion". Fine, it's extortion then. But then the sheriff's office is equally guilty of extortion, by demanding that he keep providing service or face extreme retaliation by the police department and prosecutor.
p.s.
whoever modded you as "flamebait" is a jerkie
This guy was a moron plain and simple he had no written contract after 3 years.
Both parties are equally moronic for not having a contract, not just the web-dever. They should have sued him in civil court, rather than blatantly abusing their power to punish and intimidate him.
This is why we need severe limitations on the power of government
Why, so other individuals and businesses are free to screw you over the moment they see fit? I personally like being able to buy food and medicine at the grocery store without worring if its going to poison me, I like driving my car without worrying that its gas tank will blow up if I get in an accident at 10 mph, I like living in an apartment thats up to spec with fire codes, and I like it that the tire factory to the west can't dump as much pollution as it feels like into the air and river, thank you very much.
Government is supposed to look out for you. A business doens't give a rat's ass about you, because its first, middle, and last priorities are to make money. The only time a business ever gives a shit about individuals are if it gives them a compeditive advantage, or they are required to by laws and regulations.
By your logic, then the phone, electric, and cable companies are all committing "extortion" whenever they send you a notice saying "you're late, pay up x dollars by this date or your service will be cut off". If that were the case, you'd get everything for free, as no one could pay up without resorting to so called extortion.
In addition to the impounded equipment that the poster below mentioned, the guy is going to have to spend thousands of dollars on attourneys just to prove his innocence...and then thousands more if he wants to sue them for abuse of power and malicious prosecution.
You're comparing demanding compensation for a site that you completely own and maintain, to throwing someone in jail, seizing his equipment, and threatening him with a 20 year jail sentance? Get a sense of proportion, man. The most the sheriffs office should have done was tell him to go to hell, or take him to civil court.
You are absolutely right, $300K for bandwidth costs for a small-to-medium size site is crazy. But its not just for bandwidth, its also for labor! Bandwidth costs + hardware costs + 3 years salary for a professional web dever to design, update and maintain a site could easily be $300,000.
Maybe your time is worthless and you work for nothing, but most of the rest of us like to be compensated for our work. Did the guy origionaly agree to so this for free! Sure he did. Was he working without a contract? Sure he was. But the site was his, and as there was no contract he had the right to take it down at a whim, and ask whatever price he wanted for to maintain it. If the county didn't want to pony up the money, the most they should have done was tell him to go to hell. NOT arrest him, impound his equipment, press bogus criminal charges against him, and threaten to send him to jail for 20 years.
This was nothing more than a huge abuse of authority by the county and the sheriffs office.
They guy was frikkin arrested, his equipment impounded, and he's being threatened with 20 years in jail. For a dispute that should be settled in civil court. Is the guy snow white innocent in the whole affair? Probably not. Is the police department committing a huge abuse of authority? Hell yes!
No foil hat needed.
How'd he get $300,000? Easy: aside from the hardware and software costs, there was unpaid labor. All that time he spent on this free site was time he could have spent on other work; so yes doing stuff for free was costing him money. As there was no contract the sheriffs office could have argued that he knew what he was getting into, but that's a question for civil court. However, by impounding his equipment, arresting him, and threatening 20 years in prison, they have committed a HUGE abuse of authority. I hope the responsible officials are a) fired b) sued into the ground and c) sent to a pound-me-in-the-ass prison for as long as they're trying to send this guy there.
The guy couldn't jail county officials or seize their property. This is a perfect example of why we need lawyers and huge damage awards, contrary to businesses and Republicans would have you believe.
Every five years or so when the makers of Beanie Babies threaten to stop making them, then change their minds "due to popular demand". Or the way Disney advertises that this is the last time you'll be able to buy Sleeping Beauty for the next five years, only they do it for real as they have a large enough film library to cycle through them.
Ah, the wanton ravings of a clueless peckerhead. While I can't do anything about the fact that your head is shaped like a dick, I can give you a clue on consoles: yes I have played first person shooters on consoles, several of them, and there is no way a game pad is going to give you a percentage of a fraction of the control and precision that you get with a keyboard and mouse.
Why? Because you have a little stub of a stick that you can move, at most, a half an inch in any direction. Compare that to a mouse, which you might typically move three inches in any direction. That's six times the precision that you can get with a control stick, not even counting how much easier it is to control your speed. As the other poster pointed out, pulling a 180, aiming up 30 degrees, and shooting someone 100 yards away in an 8th of a second is pretty standard fair for talented players on pc's. Good frikkin luck doing that on a console.
The Xbox controller is fantastic for it, since the sticks feel right (resistance and thumb sensitivity wise) for FPS. Halo's a great example of a game with a well-written control scheme
Well written, huh? Then how do you aim, punch, and move at the same time, beyach?
So suck it up, Princess! If you want to play games, you have to stop whinning and play them.
Uh-huh. The reason you can't play PC Halo with X-Box Halo is because the company knows that the X-Box guys would be slaughtered. If they ever make multiplayer cross platform without crippling the PC side, lets go play a game and I'll watch you take it up the ass like a squirrel being gang raped by a herd of elephants.
like i said, 3 million dead iraqis is not a "better thing"
For the Iraqi's, obviously not. But then I wasn't talking about them, as I made perfectly clear. But then, you are really, really stupid.
People can whine about PC version all they want, but if they really want to play some Deus Ex, they should sit down and play it on the Xbox.
A first person shooter? On a console? Do you have any idea how painful that is? Some games work better on consols with controlers - fighting games for example - but it should be a capitol offense to release a first person shooter on any system that doens't come with a keyboard and mouse.