Hardly. This is still about protecting the company. Blizzard, for a variety of reasons, does not condone real money trading. Not for gold, not for items, not for accounts. This last one sounds amenable to a dongle situation. Its much harder to sell accounts if you need to move a dongle for every transation.
Of course, it's also much harder to scam a transaction like that. My roommate recalled a tale from a dorm friend he had, that got tired of WoW, sold his account for 200, and someone apparently paid 500 for it, but failed to change the password for a month or so. Someone got screwed big time here, but that would be rather hard if you had to surrender your privledge to log in. But somehow, I don't think Blizzard cares whether this works or not.
Or, why not value it at marginal cost, and give it to users for free and write it off under goodwill? I'm no accountant, but it smells like something fishy is going on. Charging 5 dollars for what amounts to a software upgrade puts a huge dent in adoption rates; are they perhaps worried that some of their other devices without 802.11n support will be hurt against competition that does support n?
I think you over estimate the number of people involved in the Linux / BSD nvidia driver. If five people in the kernel can find and fix bugs, that's probably doubling nvidia's bug hunt task force. Not to mention the other valuable tasks that can be done with it, like fixing suspend / resume, or automated source code analysis tools like Coverity. At this point, nVidia shouldn't be worried that if they open the drivers, nobody will help and find bugs. They should be worried about what happens when people DO find bugs. Apparently bugs in nvidia drivers go back for years; I imagine that at least one vendor or render farm has negotiated some level of support that requires backporting security fixes. That sort of work is not easily outsourced to the community.
Of course, MPlayer is also legally unable to be as good as MPlayer. The w32codecs package they create is quite large but given out for free. It seems Fluendo aims to resolve this by making available many of the libraries previously used via w32codecs. As a result, they're probably going to pursue MPlayer on the subject. Many of the codecs are probably freely distributable, and I hope that doesn't change.
Of course, there is another reason one might buy this directly: non x86 platforms. Powerbook G4 users frequently find themselves shafted by binary only Linux projects, to the point where it might make sense to run OS X instead. MPlayer of course runs on OS X as well, but the codecs still don't work. I guess itunes / quicktime / whatever the hell apple gives people does the job as well, so people try linux, realize they're a second class citizen, and return to the land of Apple dissapointed. Fluendo may be able to help fix this. Currently, however, your choices are x86 and x86_64. Shame on them!
They went to the trouble of putting out waivers. If they didn't know there were going to be medical consequences, why would they have drawn these up and required they be signed? The fact that they went to the trouble suggests a willful disreguard for human life, likely grounds for a more serious charge.
Supposedly Stephenson is writing the screenplay, but you have to admit there's no way a 600 page book is going to survive the conversion wholly intact. At the very least, the idea of a distributed sexual computer's going to have to be presented differently!
I guess I'm missing the part where I claimed that they weren't building OS X on ARM. My point was just that Apple has the rights to withhold any and all source code. That they make an offer to other people (based on certain restrictions outlined on the APSL) is generous, but not required.
Just a theory, but perhaps fanboys recognize that a console is a long term investment, and that developers follow the money.
Following from this, they're also interested to hear how well their investment is doing, and how likely unanticipated games are to arrive in the future. Examples: nobody would have suspected RE4 would have been released on the gamecube, but not only was it, but it was also an exclusive for something like 8 months. Another one is the repeated rumor of MGS4 being moved from ps3 to 360.
Moreover, LUAs really hurt WildTangent's business techniques. If it were any other company, I might care, but if WildTangent is having problems with LUAs I can only assume they deserve it.
Yet another article comparing software with cars, claiming cars are so reliable and usable while his computer is not. He even uses cars as an analogy insight into programmers's minds. 15 percent of cars sold in the US have manual transmission, but how many among the 85 percent who bought an automatic would have claimed they prefer manual as well? Does the fact that most programmers are men influence the programmer's profession for "control" as represented by a manual transmission?
Additionally, cars aren't as fantastic as the author makes it sound: can anyone fix what's wrong with a car when the Engine light turns on, using only that knowledge? Cars are an old product. They have hundreds of similar features across models. Each year slight incremental changes are made, cupholders, a stronger or lighter part, a few more horsepower is added, etc. But by and large, when you design a new car, or put a huge redesign effort into an existing model, you have a frame of reference to start with. Writing software, on the other hand, usually involves creating a brand new product from scratch. When I write a calculator program, I don't view it as a new model of program, but a new kind of calculator implemented in software.
Every year more and more software comes out, attacking more complex domains. Ten years ago there was not multimedia web pages to bitch about. I'm not even sure why programmers are considered responsible for flash intro pages, but I'm pretty sure someone paid for it, and probably wanted it. If the customer wants their web page to have an introductory animation, it's a much harder argument to blame them on programmers.
Yes, but why bother flushing anything to disk? If the write cache is permenent and the logic is stored on the controller not PC software, I contend that while you should definately worry about what happens at shutdown, it may not be necessary to wait. This logc stands for supend to RAM, however I do stand corrected on suspend to disk (hibernate).
A similar concept is on the way: drives with a few gigs of non-volatile flash on top of their usual magnetic medium. But there is a downside: while using flash for a write cache or boot cache or whatever else means lots of good things, it also means most of your data is still on spinning discs. Drop that thing once or twice and the only thing left might be that 2G. This drive will probably find first use in rugged devices, where they've already been looking for various methods of getting laptops that can survive being air dropped while running, etc. They'll be willing to throw down the cash because its one of the few options they have in the area.
In the consumer area, the price is probably too high currently to justify the benefits of faster shut down and hibernate times (no need to worry about flushing the on disk cache anymore), and lower average power usage (your solution might cut down on time spent with the HDD moving, but this one cuts the moving parts out entirely). I'd imagine in four years you'll be able to afford it. That should be long enough that drive capacity catches up, read/write speeds improve (I doubt they'll catch up), and the necessary manufacturing capacity increases to come online.
You give pagerank too little credit. It's already somewhat built to handle the proliferation of links. The more links a page has, the less page ranking each link contributes to the destination. I'm sure its successors both in and outside of google can handle the fact that slashdot has tons of links to itself without any great ordeal. The primary effect is that sites that only link to a few places will carry influence over rankings far better than they would otherwise. In essence, the more you wield the power of the link, the less effective a weapon it becomes.
Boehm GC is crap. Sometimes, its the best crap you can use, but that doesn't make it not crap. The basic idea is they scan the stack for potential indexes into the heap, and anything that could be a pointer to somewhere in the heap (as opposed to say, a dollar amount that happens to be expressed in signed ints or something) is considered a reference and the indexed object is kept. In this sense, Boehm is called a "conservative" collector. As far as automatic garbage collection without language support goes, it's tops. But it doesn't hold a candle to decent language analysis.
Fortunately, D does not use Boehm by default. Judging by the tips it has for pointers, it uses a copying garbage collector. The benefit is that it doesn't suffer memory leaks, but it does do a number on caching. There's other problems, some of which seem to be specific to D's desire to be compatible with C.
It's interesting that WPA didn't work out of the box; usually Ubuntu favors propriertary modules over inferior open ones for networking, simply because so much functionality relies on a working network connection that it's the only pragmatic thing to do. But I haven't tried WPA because I own some hardware (Nintendo DS) that doesn't support it yet, if ever. So maybe WPA's in a bad state and I don't know it.
On the subject of Ubuntu as a desktop contender, this is the wrong question; it's addressed to the wrong person, maybe even by the wrong person. The question, as asked, is "no". There's too many hardware support holes, multimedia support conflicts, and rough edges to justify Linux for everyone. Until I can reccomend Ubuntu without saying something along the lines of "that depends on what your computer has inside it," it won't be a serious desktop contender. Instead, the first, and tragically hardest, hurdle is whether Ubuntu is a contender for OEM's hardware. Ideally, they should be the one asking the question, because offering choices improve their customer's choices, and put price pressure on software suppliers.
This is the first hurdle, because most of the computers on the market go through the OEMs. They already spend effort and money ensuring their hardware works with Windows, and add support software of dubious quality (who doesn't remove most extra software from an OEM install). Getting OEMs interested in making Linux work on their hardware would be a significant step forward, and, unlike targeting specific chips or chip makers, would be a long lasting ally.
This is also the hardest, because OEMs preciously guard their shitty software as intellectual property and something that can differentiate them from competitors. Truth is, I'd rather have window's built in wifi management than D-Link's confusing software, or Toshiba's. Open source scares them. They worry not only that by spending money on software, their competitors will use it, and spend money on better hardware design instead, effectively burying the software authors, but also that making software source will allow new competitors into their market. Mix into this natural fear a strong incumbant who bullies its customers, and its no wonder that OEMs are afraid to even touch Linux publicly.
Unfortunately, while there's tons of schools and classes on how to design computer chips, write software, or built out a PC, there's not much information on how to custom design a laptop and get it made. Currently, the best Linux enthusiasts do is order laptops from OEMs / ODMs intended for sale to Windows users and see what sticks. I hope someone soon steps up from reselling hardware other people requested, designed and made. That's probably the best way to approach the OEM hurdle. I suppose Apple either discovered or stumbled upon this.
"Configuring suspend can be time consuming trial and error. What I think we need is a laptop distro, or at least some sort of app that sees what kind of laptop you have and automatically configures suspend, multimedia buttons, wireless, and other things that are peculiar to laptops."
I have a suspicion your recent Linux experiences have been colored by Gentoo, so I'll point out that Ubuntu's first goals were laptop related. The "laptop-detect" program is supposed to determine whether the system being installed to is a laptop or not. Suspend to swap works, suspend to RAM appears to not work at all on this hardware with nvidia modules installed. The wireless, the Fn-keys, and volume control all work out of the box for me, but understandably, these things are hit and miss. Testing laptops is expensive, hard, and even when you do find a bug, if you can't fix it, finding someone who has the hardware who can fix it may prove impossible.
There's still plenty of room for improvement, but I think you can accomplish the goals you're looking for without forking a yet another distro: the Ubuntu Laptop Testing Team aims to test, debug and improve laptop support on ubuntu. There's a already plenty of support infrastructure, so if anyone wants to help, there's the place to start. And if you need any help, it's also a good place to start!
Which of course is why the PTA meetings are always empty and impotent. And Parent-Teacher conferences ignored. Lets not overlook the facts, even when we can just make them up to support a Libertarian agenda instead!
I can afford to do so. It won't fund my retirement or raise a family on that; but that'd easily cover rent, food, etc for a year for me. Certainly I can and do earn more; but if these guys are doing what they love, they may feel satisfied taking the pay cut. The trick is to not live in highly populated costal areas, have roommates and don't live on credit. But really, the only people with the right to expect other volunteers to put in the same level of effort into Debian as people being paid to work on Debian are the people already volunteering on Debian. Which seems to be none of the people in this conversation.
Personally, I think that if Duc-Tank wakes a few developers up to the realization that they're overcommiting themselves to Debian, that's a good thing. We owe these people a good deal; I don't think they should necessarily be slaving on Debian out of a sense of duty, or volunteering more time than they feel they can afford. If Duc-Tank leads to a process by which Debian developers can be paid to work on the project, I'm all for such a thing.
What was the purpose of the wrist strap? When you compare the original Wiimote wrist strap to the one provided for the original DS (the DS Lite doesn't come with one), they appear nearly identical. I feel pretty confident that the DS wrist strap was not intended to prevent you from throwing your DS across the room, yet they felt confident enough to place it there. It seems that they didn't
I doubt Nintendo will lose, because it seems unlikely that this case will be settled in court. Maybe there's some rule about out of court settlements in a class action suit, but it just seems that a) Nintendo may be partly at fault for using an existing design for something it wasn't suited for and b) the cost of doing the few people who have a valid claim is negligable compared to a court proceeding dragging them through the mud. Nintendo has a history of serving customers well. They repair NES carts, they replaced DS's with dead pixels, etc. As you've pointed out, they have already fixed the current wrist strap and are offering free replacements.
You might argue that this is a class action lawsuit that will have the effects intended when class action lawsuits were invented: reduce court load and social costs associated with a firm implicated in several civil suits. Society wins because courts are less overloaded than they would be otherwise, the affected individuals win because they get a valid chance at damages, and Nintendo wins because the limited number of people affected will come forward together, reducing negotiation costs. This is only bad if you expect companies to break the law and get away with it.
But we won't know this for certain until the case is settled. All sorts of things could go awry: the lawyers could settle for coupons (usually I hate this, but it might work out in this case. A year's subscription to Nintendo Power however, would fall into the same "shitty resolution that gets the lawyers paid and saves the company millions" category), parents who's children threw Wiimotes at one another during a competitive game could claim the wrist strap broke and injured their child, etc.
"She warns against the use of GPS and says it will possibly affect the brain changes seen in this study."
So we shouldn't use technology because it interferes with their study? Or maybe they just think that somehow humanity will become smarter and more efficient as adults make new brain cells specific to a task? Darwinian natural selection issues aside, it sounds like something straight out of Frank Herbert's series.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. This is still about protecting the company. Blizzard, for a variety of reasons, does not condone real money trading. Not for gold, not for items, not for accounts. This last one sounds amenable to a dongle situation. Its much harder to sell accounts if you need to move a dongle for every transation.
Of course, it's also much harder to scam a transaction like that. My roommate recalled a tale from a dorm friend he had, that got tired of WoW, sold his account for 200, and someone apparently paid 500 for it, but failed to change the password for a month or so. Someone got screwed big time here, but that would be rather hard if you had to surrender your privledge to log in. But somehow, I don't think Blizzard cares whether this works or not.
Or, why not value it at marginal cost, and give it to users for free and write it off under goodwill? I'm no accountant, but it smells like something fishy is going on. Charging 5 dollars for what amounts to a software upgrade puts a huge dent in adoption rates; are they perhaps worried that some of their other devices without 802.11n support will be hurt against competition that does support n?
I think you over estimate the number of people involved in the Linux / BSD nvidia driver. If five people in the kernel can find and fix bugs, that's probably doubling nvidia's bug hunt task force. Not to mention the other valuable tasks that can be done with it, like fixing suspend / resume, or automated source code analysis tools like Coverity. At this point, nVidia shouldn't be worried that if they open the drivers, nobody will help and find bugs. They should be worried about what happens when people DO find bugs. Apparently bugs in nvidia drivers go back for years; I imagine that at least one vendor or render farm has negotiated some level of support that requires backporting security fixes. That sort of work is not easily outsourced to the community.
Of course, MPlayer is also legally unable to be as good as MPlayer. The w32codecs package they create is quite large but given out for free. It seems Fluendo aims to resolve this by making available many of the libraries previously used via w32codecs. As a result, they're probably going to pursue MPlayer on the subject. Many of the codecs are probably freely distributable, and I hope that doesn't change.
Of course, there is another reason one might buy this directly: non x86 platforms. Powerbook G4 users frequently find themselves shafted by binary only Linux projects, to the point where it might make sense to run OS X instead. MPlayer of course runs on OS X as well, but the codecs still don't work. I guess itunes / quicktime / whatever the hell apple gives people does the job as well, so people try linux, realize they're a second class citizen, and return to the land of Apple dissapointed. Fluendo may be able to help fix this. Currently, however, your choices are x86 and x86_64. Shame on them!
They went to the trouble of putting out waivers. If they didn't know there were going to be medical consequences, why would they have drawn these up and required they be signed? The fact that they went to the trouble suggests a willful disreguard for human life, likely grounds for a more serious charge.
;)
IANAL, but I have played Phoenix Wright
Supposedly Stephenson is writing the screenplay, but you have to admit there's no way a 600 page book is going to survive the conversion wholly intact. At the very least, the idea of a distributed sexual computer's going to have to be presented differently!
I guess I'm missing the part where I claimed that they weren't building OS X on ARM. My point was just that Apple has the rights to withhold any and all source code. That they make an offer to other people (based on certain restrictions outlined on the APSL) is generous, but not required.
Surely Apple's free to do what they want with their source code, unless it OSX is substantially based on code from elsewhere.
Just a theory, but perhaps fanboys recognize that a console is a long term investment, and that developers follow the money.
Following from this, they're also interested to hear how well their investment is doing, and how likely unanticipated games are to arrive in the future. Examples: nobody would have suspected RE4 would have been released on the gamecube, but not only was it, but it was also an exclusive for something like 8 months. Another one is the repeated rumor of MGS4 being moved from ps3 to 360.
Moreover, LUAs really hurt WildTangent's business techniques. If it were any other company, I might care, but if WildTangent is having problems with LUAs I can only assume they deserve it.
Yet another article comparing software with cars, claiming cars are so reliable and usable while his computer is not. He even uses cars as an analogy insight into programmers's minds. 15 percent of cars sold in the US have manual transmission, but how many among the 85 percent who bought an automatic would have claimed they prefer manual as well? Does the fact that most programmers are men influence the programmer's profession for "control" as represented by a manual transmission?
Additionally, cars aren't as fantastic as the author makes it sound: can anyone fix what's wrong with a car when the Engine light turns on, using only that knowledge? Cars are an old product. They have hundreds of similar features across models. Each year slight incremental changes are made, cupholders, a stronger or lighter part, a few more horsepower is added, etc. But by and large, when you design a new car, or put a huge redesign effort into an existing model, you have a frame of reference to start with. Writing software, on the other hand, usually involves creating a brand new product from scratch. When I write a calculator program, I don't view it as a new model of program, but a new kind of calculator implemented in software.
Every year more and more software comes out, attacking more complex domains. Ten years ago there was not multimedia web pages to bitch about. I'm not even sure why programmers are considered responsible for flash intro pages, but I'm pretty sure someone paid for it, and probably wanted it. If the customer wants their web page to have an introductory animation, it's a much harder argument to blame them on programmers.
no offense, but do you really expect sandisk to create a new filesystem for windows and have it not suck?
Yes, but why bother flushing anything to disk? If the write cache is permenent and the logic is stored on the controller not PC software, I contend that while you should definately worry about what happens at shutdown, it may not be necessary to wait. This logc stands for supend to RAM, however I do stand corrected on suspend to disk (hibernate).
A similar concept is on the way: drives with a few gigs of non-volatile flash on top of their usual magnetic medium. But there is a downside: while using flash for a write cache or boot cache or whatever else means lots of good things, it also means most of your data is still on spinning discs. Drop that thing once or twice and the only thing left might be that 2G. This drive will probably find first use in rugged devices, where they've already been looking for various methods of getting laptops that can survive being air dropped while running, etc. They'll be willing to throw down the cash because its one of the few options they have in the area.
In the consumer area, the price is probably too high currently to justify the benefits of faster shut down and hibernate times (no need to worry about flushing the on disk cache anymore), and lower average power usage (your solution might cut down on time spent with the HDD moving, but this one cuts the moving parts out entirely). I'd imagine in four years you'll be able to afford it. That should be long enough that drive capacity catches up, read/write speeds improve (I doubt they'll catch up), and the necessary manufacturing capacity increases to come online.
Well, we use the gcc inline asm facilities often enough where I work. It doesn't complain at least.
You give pagerank too little credit. It's already somewhat built to handle the proliferation of links. The more links a page has, the less page ranking each link contributes to the destination. I'm sure its successors both in and outside of google can handle the fact that slashdot has tons of links to itself without any great ordeal. The primary effect is that sites that only link to a few places will carry influence over rankings far better than they would otherwise. In essence, the more you wield the power of the link, the less effective a weapon it becomes.
Boehm GC is crap. Sometimes, its the best crap you can use, but that doesn't make it not crap. The basic idea is they scan the stack for potential indexes into the heap, and anything that could be a pointer to somewhere in the heap (as opposed to say, a dollar amount that happens to be expressed in signed ints or something) is considered a reference and the indexed object is kept. In this sense, Boehm is called a "conservative" collector. As far as automatic garbage collection without language support goes, it's tops. But it doesn't hold a candle to decent language analysis.
Fortunately, D does not use Boehm by default. Judging by the tips it has for pointers, it uses a copying garbage collector. The benefit is that it doesn't suffer memory leaks, but it does do a number on caching. There's other problems, some of which seem to be specific to D's desire to be compatible with C.
But what do you do when you need to revoke the cert? The problem is that they want authentication without the rigor of.. authentication.
It's interesting that WPA didn't work out of the box; usually Ubuntu favors propriertary modules over inferior open ones for networking, simply because so much functionality relies on a working network connection that it's the only pragmatic thing to do. But I haven't tried WPA because I own some hardware (Nintendo DS) that doesn't support it yet, if ever. So maybe WPA's in a bad state and I don't know it.
On the subject of Ubuntu as a desktop contender, this is the wrong question; it's addressed to the wrong person, maybe even by the wrong person. The question, as asked, is "no". There's too many hardware support holes, multimedia support conflicts, and rough edges to justify Linux for everyone. Until I can reccomend Ubuntu without saying something along the lines of "that depends on what your computer has inside it," it won't be a serious desktop contender. Instead, the first, and tragically hardest, hurdle is whether Ubuntu is a contender for OEM's hardware. Ideally, they should be the one asking the question, because offering choices improve their customer's choices, and put price pressure on software suppliers.
This is the first hurdle, because most of the computers on the market go through the OEMs. They already spend effort and money ensuring their hardware works with Windows, and add support software of dubious quality (who doesn't remove most extra software from an OEM install). Getting OEMs interested in making Linux work on their hardware would be a significant step forward, and, unlike targeting specific chips or chip makers, would be a long lasting ally.
This is also the hardest, because OEMs preciously guard their shitty software as intellectual property and something that can differentiate them from competitors. Truth is, I'd rather have window's built in wifi management than D-Link's confusing software, or Toshiba's. Open source scares them. They worry not only that by spending money on software, their competitors will use it, and spend money on better hardware design instead, effectively burying the software authors, but also that making software source will allow new competitors into their market. Mix into this natural fear a strong incumbant who bullies its customers, and its no wonder that OEMs are afraid to even touch Linux publicly.
Unfortunately, while there's tons of schools and classes on how to design computer chips, write software, or built out a PC, there's not much information on how to custom design a laptop and get it made. Currently, the best Linux enthusiasts do is order laptops from OEMs / ODMs intended for sale to Windows users and see what sticks. I hope someone soon steps up from reselling hardware other people requested, designed and made. That's probably the best way to approach the OEM hurdle. I suppose Apple either discovered or stumbled upon this.
"Configuring suspend can be time consuming trial and error. What I think we need is a laptop distro, or at least some sort of app that sees what kind of laptop you have and automatically configures suspend, multimedia buttons, wireless, and other things that are peculiar to laptops."
I have a suspicion your recent Linux experiences have been colored by Gentoo, so I'll point out that Ubuntu's first goals were laptop related. The "laptop-detect" program is supposed to determine whether the system being installed to is a laptop or not. Suspend to swap works, suspend to RAM appears to not work at all on this hardware with nvidia modules installed. The wireless, the Fn-keys, and volume control all work out of the box for me, but understandably, these things are hit and miss. Testing laptops is expensive, hard, and even when you do find a bug, if you can't fix it, finding someone who has the hardware who can fix it may prove impossible.
There's still plenty of room for improvement, but I think you can accomplish the goals you're looking for without forking a yet another distro: the Ubuntu Laptop Testing Team aims to test, debug and improve laptop support on ubuntu. There's a already plenty of support infrastructure, so if anyone wants to help, there's the place to start. And if you need any help, it's also a good place to start!
Which of course is why the PTA meetings are always empty and impotent. And Parent-Teacher conferences ignored. Lets not overlook the facts, even when we can just make them up to support a Libertarian agenda instead!
I can afford to do so. It won't fund my retirement or raise a family on that; but that'd easily cover rent, food, etc for a year for me. Certainly I can and do earn more; but if these guys are doing what they love, they may feel satisfied taking the pay cut. The trick is to not live in highly populated costal areas, have roommates and don't live on credit. But really, the only people with the right to expect other volunteers to put in the same level of effort into Debian as people being paid to work on Debian are the people already volunteering on Debian. Which seems to be none of the people in this conversation.
Personally, I think that if Duc-Tank wakes a few developers up to the realization that they're overcommiting themselves to Debian, that's a good thing. We owe these people a good deal; I don't think they should necessarily be slaving on Debian out of a sense of duty, or volunteering more time than they feel they can afford. If Duc-Tank leads to a process by which Debian developers can be paid to work on the project, I'm all for such a thing.
What was the purpose of the wrist strap? When you compare the original Wiimote wrist strap to the one provided for the original DS (the DS Lite doesn't come with one), they appear nearly identical. I feel pretty confident that the DS wrist strap was not intended to prevent you from throwing your DS across the room, yet they felt confident enough to place it there. It seems that they didn't
I doubt Nintendo will lose, because it seems unlikely that this case will be settled in court. Maybe there's some rule about out of court settlements in a class action suit, but it just seems that a) Nintendo may be partly at fault for using an existing design for something it wasn't suited for and b) the cost of doing the few people who have a valid claim is negligable compared to a court proceeding dragging them through the mud. Nintendo has a history of serving customers well. They repair NES carts, they replaced DS's with dead pixels, etc. As you've pointed out, they have already fixed the current wrist strap and are offering free replacements.
You might argue that this is a class action lawsuit that will have the effects intended when class action lawsuits were invented: reduce court load and social costs associated with a firm implicated in several civil suits. Society wins because courts are less overloaded than they would be otherwise, the affected individuals win because they get a valid chance at damages, and Nintendo wins because the limited number of people affected will come forward together, reducing negotiation costs. This is only bad if you expect companies to break the law and get away with it.
But we won't know this for certain until the case is settled. All sorts of things could go awry: the lawyers could settle for coupons (usually I hate this, but it might work out in this case. A year's subscription to Nintendo Power however, would fall into the same "shitty resolution that gets the lawyers paid and saves the company millions" category), parents who's children threw Wiimotes at one another during a competitive game could claim the wrist strap broke and injured their child, etc.
"She warns against the use of GPS and says it will possibly affect the brain changes seen in this study."
So we shouldn't use technology because it interferes with their study? Or maybe they just think that somehow humanity will become smarter and more efficient as adults make new brain cells specific to a task? Darwinian natural selection issues aside, it sounds like something straight out of Frank Herbert's series.