Sounds like a cel-phone. Are we over-engineering the problem?
Nope. Take a cellphone with a power crank, and extend it to have a larger screen (so you can see what you're doing) and a full keyboard (so that you can type comfortably).
Q: What have you got? A: More or less the same thing as the $100 laptop.
I think what he meant was that handing computers to poor uneducated people in third world countries is not magic pixie dust
Be careful here. While I'm still reserving judgement on how well the $100 laptop will accomplish its goals, keep in mind that a laptop like this would probably be distributed in conjunction with the educational services that organizations like Christian Children's Fund provide. Thus the laptop could be a tool to further the education they're already recieving.
That computer may one day help an adult better plan his farming techiniques using satellite images, or track the finances and stock of his small market business, help him compute fair prices for the things he farmed/fished/made, and otherwise generally help him to become economically prosperous. The more people who make that step towards economic prosperity, the more jobs that will be created for those less fortunate. In addition, the education provided could help these people change their governments, and create a better society for themselves.
It's a long-shot that a computer would help make these things possible, but it's nice to know that people are trying.
His quote is actually a Chinese Proverb. (Reference Link) The Bible talks heavily about giving to the poor. In my interpretation, this is because the poor are not always a result of their own doing, but may be born into a situation that takes a lot of time and effort to get out of. The poorer parts of Africa are a fairly good example of this. None of those children asked to be born into their situation. But given the chance for an education (which requires food and medicine so that they may stay alive) they may very well learn to "fish for themselves".:-)
I do have to say, though, I've often heard Biblical Proverbs misattributed as "old sayings" or said by famous figures like dead Presidents, but this is only the second time I've heard it the other way around. The first time was the Greek Proverb, "everything in moderation."
It seems like Gates is walking up to someone who desperately needs just basic transportation and telling them that a $1,000 junker isn't what they need. They need a high performance Dodge Viper with a personal mechanic to maintain it. Broadband connection? Why? I thought I read that these $100 laptops were going to have radio frequency repeaters so that information could be sent from laptop to laptop and act as routers for each other.
The key thing to understand about Bill Gates is that he isn't a technologist. Sure, the general populace believes that he's the smartest man in the world, but the truth is that he has absolutely no vision what-so-ever. If you read his books (e.g. The Road Ahead), he proposes mostly fanciful ideas that might have come out of a SciFi article from 30 years ago. Actual concepts about why his ideas are useful, the reasons why the implementation will work, etc. are all missing from his books.
What people need to realize is that Bill Gates is a ruthless business man who knows how to be in the right place at the right time. He made his entire fortune by embracing other people's ideas and extending them to be successful in the market. Everything from the Altair port of BASIC, to purchasing a CP/M ripoff to sell IBM as DOS, to announcing a non-existant "Windows" to compete with VisiOn, to cheating Spyglass out of a web browser to compete with Netscape. He doesn't know what will work until someone else shows him how. Then, and only then, does he make sure he nails the market before anyone else does.
Don't listen to Bill Gates. He has nothing useful or insightful to say. And I sincerely doubt that most people here really want to follow in his footsteps, even if it does mean becoming one of the richest men in the world.
I've tried out Mandrake/Mandriva a number of times in the past. (I even did a review on version 10 here.) While they gained a lot of good will for being "user friendly", I always found them to be not worth the effort. The desktop feels nice and all, but the system always had some sort of problems that could never quite be resolved. It's hard to say why Mandrake always was so difficult to work with, but if I were to take a guess, I'd point a finger at their bleeding edge software. They are infamous for always packing in the latest and greatest. That same bleeding edge mentality is what got them in trouble with version 9.2.
That's also a very good point. However, with the current crop of commercial space vehicles, this probably doesn't matter quite as much. Once these vehicles start obtaining footprints similar to that of the Space Shuttle, then the width of the runway will probably matter a lot more.
Edwards Airforce Base has a paved runway about 15,000 feet long, but there is an additional 10 miles or so of marked dry lake bed suitable for landing a wide range of aircraft
Good point. I used to use that runway in X-Plane to take off custom spaceplanes. The extra runway was extremely helpful in getting the vehicle off the ground. Especially when I equipped the craft with ejectable JATO bottles in lieu of a proper Solid Rocket Booster.:-)
(In case anyone is wondering: No, I never made it to orbit. As soon as I hit Mach 5, I overstress the frame and lose a wing or somesuch. If I don't hit Mach 5, I run out of fuel before I obtain orbit. Even in the simulated NASP craft that is supposed to be able to make it to orbit. Guess I better let a real pilot at the controls.)
I have been told that SVN is good at handling binary files. So TortoiseSVN can conceivably work for keeping track of photographic image files. That being said, I'm not really sure if it's the best solution for something like that. My first thought would be to develop a Content Management Database of some sort that would keep track of the image information, as well as link all the associated images into the same record.
e.g. You'd probably want to keep the PSD "negative", JPG distributions, and PNG thumbnails all in a single unit, with the information about the image applying to all of them. A CMS could conceivably be designed to do this, but I don't do professional photography, so I don't know of any CMSes like this offhand.
15,000 feet may seem like a lot, but it often helps to put things into perspective. For example, O'Hare International Airport has 6 paved runways with the following stats:
So this runway is only about 428 feet longer than the longest runway at JFK International. (13R/31L - 14,572ft) Given that 14,000+ feet is already a huge amount of space, we can conclude that the KSC runway would be more interesting to new space ventures because of its location and lack of commercial traffic rather than its outright length.
But this would all be settled if he got refunded his latest subscription payment.
*shakes head* No it wouldn't. Blizzard could offer him his latest subscription payment to settle the issue, but he still has a grievence against them for terminating his contract in bad faith.
It's usually considered silly to drag disputes over $14.99 to court.
According to him, he's paid hundreds of dollars to the service. Through that service, he has gained considerable virtual property; all of which has been taken away through a breach of contract. I'd say he's in a pretty good position to sue for ALL the money he's put into the game, plus court fees.
Why is it that everyone seems to want to sue Blizzard?
Honestly, I don't see that he has that many other options. He could just walk away and hope that he gets enough people to follow, but the truth is that such a boycott won't work against such a large company. You need to sting them where they'll notice. A lawsuit accomplishes that.
And THAT should be the first step: stop giving them money.
They already have his money. Some of it we can assume they didn't earn, as he was booted off the service. It's no skin off their nose if he leaves. After all, they kicked him out!
Tell me again, why do we have to sue them?
To make the point clear. Blizzard won't even respond to his communications at this point. When they did respond, they basically ignored him with form letters. At no point in this process has he been allowed a voice. So what does that leave him?
The answer is to sue. As I said in another post, suing for a full refund of services, plus court costs, and perhaps a reactivation of his account would be a great way to get their attention, as well as generate some press. And once one person successfully sues Blizzard in small claims, Blizzard will be forced to act fast to head off the avalanche of small-claims and class-action suits.
I usually see legal recourses as a last resort. (Primarily because that's what they are.) In this case, however, he's down to his last resort. So I hope he sues, and makes Blizzard admit their mistakes. Especially since these reports are becoming more and more common.
Tortoise will tell your users everything they need to know about the files status right through Windows Explorer. Teaching them how to do checkins and tree updates is also quite easy, thanks to the customized right-click menu. Advanced options like diffing, merging, and branching are still available through the submenus, but your users should be able to get their work done without resorting to those. (At least, not until they're ready.)
Of course, the fact that these are graphics designers may complicate issues somewhat. If they're using a Mac, they won't be able to use Tortoise. In which case, my next recommendation falls on SmartCVS:
SmartCVS is great for Macintoshes, although it does take slightly more training than Tortoise. The only problem you may run into, however, is that SmartCVS chokes on massive directories of files. I don't know if this problem has been fixed or not, but it was a serious problem for one of the source trees I worked on. (Think gigabytes of data spread across thousands of files.)
CVS/SVN are by no means perfect solutions, but I can't think of anything better off the top of my head. Hope this helps!
And you base this opinion on... what? How you think the world works, or how the world actually works? Because I can tell you that a judge who awards him his remaining fees would be likely to also award him court costs. At a minimum.
It's nice to think that it's all about a balance sheet of who owes who what, but the law doesn't work that way. If it did, stuff like this wouldn't be possible.
And how are you claiming he didn't violate the TOS when even he agrees that the TOS was violated (though he was in compliance with "official" posts that indicated that the activity was ok).
He's not agreeing. He's saying that even though they've redefined the matter after the fact, he's willing to agree to their new terms to help resolve the issue. That's always a good step, and will be seen as a willingness to negotiate in Good Faith should the matter ever go to court.
Macros are now and always were fine. It wasn't that he used a macro, it is that he wrote a macro to be a bot. Bots are banned.
He didn't make a bot. He made a macro. A macro is not a bot, nor can it ever be. If macros are allowed, and he's able to make a macro that "wins" a given situation 90% of the time by hitting a single button, then he's in the clear. That's poor coding on Blizzard's part, not a device that's able to intelligently defeat the situation.
Even he said he violated the TOS (though unknowingly, since he used a tool that was explicitly approved, just in a manner in violation of the TOS).
And here we get back to the heart of the issue. He didn't know he was doing anything wrong, and he offered to negotiate a settlement. Blizzard instead terminated him without a prior warning; as per their policy. They were WRONG. Plain and simple.
If they have a different story to tell, I'd love to hear it. Unfortunately, they don't seem to actually have a story to tell. Just a bunch of form letters that fail to address the situation.
Blizzard's TOS agreement give them some god clauses that supercede all others. The standard "it's at our discretion to determine if you're in violation, and we can choose to terminate this agreement at our discretion".
1. Blizzard would be correct if they simply said, "we don't want your business anymore." The problem is that they pointed to another section of the contract and stated that it had been violated. Thus the "god clause" as you call it, doesn't come into effect.
2. Clauses like this are not necessarily binding. If a judge finds that Blizzard failed to act in Good Faith, they may be liable for failing to uphold the terms of the contract.
Heheheh, the examples you use to discredit his arguments were all generated in the system we have now.
Try again. There was an explicit agreement between the major powers after WWI that prevented them from building up large militaries. Germany ignored that agreement in order to gain an advantage in their early attacks.
Saddam attacked the mostly defenseless country of Kuwait with the excuse that they had been "slant-drilling" into Iraqi territory. Saddam had expected a quick victory (which he got), but didn't expect strong retaliation from Kuwait's allies.
The Conquisitors came to conquer and gain slaves, not to make peace with the local inhabitants.
The First Crusade was about redirecting the efforts of the restless european warriors to efforts that seemed useful.
There are plenty of such examples of the stronger preying on the weak. That's why it's so important to maintain a military defense against such preying.
Maybe it's a fun game, but it's just a game, a service provided by Blizzard for a fee.
(Emphasis mine.)
There's the part you seem to be missing. He has paid money to be provided with a service. As of right now, he's been singled out for violations to the agreement that he didn't commit, and has been unfairly kicked out of the service he paid for. (Presumably without a refund.) Because of this, he has suffered the loss of virtual property (his characters/accounts) that he has a paid significant amount of time and money to obtain. This just isn't okay, neither in a moral sense, nor in a legal sense.
You have got to be kidding. "This company refuses to take my money anymore! I'm suing.!" I marvel at the mindset that spurred you to even imagine writing that paragraph.
I'm dead serious. The legal system is there as a recourse for resolving disputes between parties. He has pursued every avenue available to him in resolving this issue. He has been ignored and treated poorly by the other party at every step of the way. As a result, he has an honest grevience to bring against Blizzard.
While I'm not one to suggest that he sue for $10,000,000 for "emotional damages" (that's just not right), suing for restoration of his account(s), legal fees to be paid by Blizzard, and a full refund of the amount he has paid to date (to cover the harrassment he has received) is a perfectly acceptable solution. Of course, it's a lot easier to get a lawyer to handle a class action suit for him, so in that case Blizzard would be facing the equivalent of hundreds of these suits at once.
Even if he didn't take the class-action path, a judge may note several reasonable complaints occurring around the same period and decide to combine them into a single suit himself.
Firstly, we're of course hearing one side of the story.
That's about the only insightful thing you've said. Unfortunately, Blizzard refuses to talk about the issue. If they won't even talk to the customer they have a disagreement with, then that customer may have to force them to tell their side in court. Alternatively, he could start a grass-roots mailing campaign or boycott against Blizzard. These are the options he has available.
Secondly, how about some perspective: This is a game.
My perspective is just fine. A game or not, Blizzard is offering a service in exchange for money. If Blizzard then decides to turn around and unjustly harrass its customers in violation of the contract entered into, it can expect that its customers will seek to reverse the business transaction and/or force Blizzard to uphold its contractual obligations. Not only does this resolve the matter, but it sends a message to the business that the customers do not appreciate being stepped on. Otherwise, what is to prevent the company from further abusing its other customers?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." --Thomas Jefferson
I hate to break it to you, but there will always be those who seek to prey on the defenseless. You could get the entire world to lay down their arms and disband their militaries, but all you'd accomplish is to encourage the next Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin to raise an army and conquer all those foolish enough to be defenseless. The worst part of it is that their soldiers would consist of idealists who would think that they're bettering the world by spreading Communism, Facism, Eugenics, or other political idea of the day.
A particularly ugly example of this was the conquisitors of the "New World" who sought to obtain land and slaves for Spain, all under the guise of spreading Catholic Christianity. The Crusades are another ugly example of this, though we could be here all day trying to analyze those events.
So you're convinced that every person who accidentally triggers a TOS violation should be permanently banned from a service like WoW, even when:
1. The service claims in forum posts that what he's doing is okay. 2. The user offers to correct the problem, and even accept a punishment. 3. The service has a policy that is supposed to require multiple violations to obtain a ban. 4. The user has no prior history of TOS violations. 5. The user has spent considerable money on the product.
If you think that all that combines to make a "responsible decision" on the part of Blizzard, then allow me to be the first to point out that you're a heartless tyrant, and I really do hope this happens to you. Perhaps you'll see things different from the other side.
I for one, hopes he gets a good lawyer. Given that this is far from the first time I've heard these complaints, a class action suit against Blizzard may just be what's needed to shake things up.
Sorry, that didn't come out quite as I intended it. What I was trying to say is that these weapons are generally found in vehicle mounts, and in open area combat. In close quarters combat, their size and weight makes them difficult to transport and use without creating a variety of problems for the gunner. This robot, OTOH, can roll into a tight alleyway, and immediately saturate the area with gunfire. Or so the theory goes, anyway.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Why is the parent modded as "Troll"? He offered an honest opinion about what the Bible actually says. I don't see what the problem is here.
Sounds like a cel-phone. Are we over-engineering the problem?
Nope. Take a cellphone with a power crank, and extend it to have a larger screen (so you can see what you're doing) and a full keyboard (so that you can type comfortably).
Q: What have you got?
A: More or less the same thing as the $100 laptop.
Every credible soure I have read have praised the thoughts behind his donations
Turn your head. The "thought" behind those donations were coming from somewhere close by.
What's the saying again, "Behind every great man lies an even greater woman?" =)
I think what he meant was that handing computers to poor uneducated people in third world countries is not magic pixie dust
Be careful here. While I'm still reserving judgement on how well the $100 laptop will accomplish its goals, keep in mind that a laptop like this would probably be distributed in conjunction with the educational services that organizations like Christian Children's Fund provide. Thus the laptop could be a tool to further the education they're already recieving.
That computer may one day help an adult better plan his farming techiniques using satellite images, or track the finances and stock of his small market business, help him compute fair prices for the things he farmed/fished/made, and otherwise generally help him to become economically prosperous. The more people who make that step towards economic prosperity, the more jobs that will be created for those less fortunate. In addition, the education provided could help these people change their governments, and create a better society for themselves.
It's a long-shot that a computer would help make these things possible, but it's nice to know that people are trying.
His quote is actually a Chinese Proverb. (Reference Link) The Bible talks heavily about giving to the poor. In my interpretation, this is because the poor are not always a result of their own doing, but may be born into a situation that takes a lot of time and effort to get out of. The poorer parts of Africa are a fairly good example of this. None of those children asked to be born into their situation. But given the chance for an education (which requires food and medicine so that they may stay alive) they may very well learn to "fish for themselves". :-)
I do have to say, though, I've often heard Biblical Proverbs misattributed as "old sayings" or said by famous figures like dead Presidents, but this is only the second time I've heard it the other way around. The first time was the Greek Proverb, "everything in moderation."
It seems like Gates is walking up to someone who desperately needs just basic transportation and telling them that a $1,000 junker isn't what they need. They need a high performance Dodge Viper with a personal mechanic to maintain it. Broadband connection? Why? I thought I read that these $100 laptops were going to have radio frequency repeaters so that information could be sent from laptop to laptop and act as routers for each other.
The key thing to understand about Bill Gates is that he isn't a technologist. Sure, the general populace believes that he's the smartest man in the world, but the truth is that he has absolutely no vision what-so-ever. If you read his books (e.g. The Road Ahead), he proposes mostly fanciful ideas that might have come out of a SciFi article from 30 years ago. Actual concepts about why his ideas are useful, the reasons why the implementation will work, etc. are all missing from his books.
What people need to realize is that Bill Gates is a ruthless business man who knows how to be in the right place at the right time. He made his entire fortune by embracing other people's ideas and extending them to be successful in the market. Everything from the Altair port of BASIC, to purchasing a CP/M ripoff to sell IBM as DOS, to announcing a non-existant "Windows" to compete with VisiOn, to cheating Spyglass out of a web browser to compete with Netscape. He doesn't know what will work until someone else shows him how. Then, and only then, does he make sure he nails the market before anyone else does.
Don't listen to Bill Gates. He has nothing useful or insightful to say. And I sincerely doubt that most people here really want to follow in his footsteps, even if it does mean becoming one of the richest men in the world.
I've tried out Mandrake/Mandriva a number of times in the past. (I even did a review on version 10 here.) While they gained a lot of good will for being "user friendly", I always found them to be not worth the effort. The desktop feels nice and all, but the system always had some sort of problems that could never quite be resolved. It's hard to say why Mandrake always was so difficult to work with, but if I were to take a guess, I'd point a finger at their bleeding edge software. They are infamous for always packing in the latest and greatest. That same bleeding edge mentality is what got them in trouble with version 9.2.
Bye bye, CD Drive.
Maybe they could use it for landing tests for Aurora and all kinds
:-P
of secret and non-existent airplanes.
Are you kidding? If Dan Brown says it, it must be true!
Just look here for your proof! See, see, see? Dan Brown says it's true!
I'll bet you want to take your words back now, don't you Mr. Smartypants?
That's also a very good point. However, with the current crop of commercial space vehicles, this probably doesn't matter quite as much. Once these vehicles start obtaining footprints similar to that of the Space Shuttle, then the width of the runway will probably matter a lot more.
Edwards Airforce Base has a paved runway about 15,000 feet long, but there is an additional 10 miles or so of marked dry lake bed suitable for landing a wide range of aircraft
:-)
Good point. I used to use that runway in X-Plane to take off custom spaceplanes. The extra runway was extremely helpful in getting the vehicle off the ground. Especially when I equipped the craft with ejectable JATO bottles in lieu of a proper Solid Rocket Booster.
(In case anyone is wondering: No, I never made it to orbit. As soon as I hit Mach 5, I overstress the frame and lose a wing or somesuch. If I don't hit Mach 5, I run out of fuel before I obtain orbit. Even in the simulated NASP craft that is supposed to be able to make it to orbit. Guess I better let a real pilot at the controls.)
I have been told that SVN is good at handling binary files. So TortoiseSVN can conceivably work for keeping track of photographic image files. That being said, I'm not really sure if it's the best solution for something like that. My first thought would be to develop a Content Management Database of some sort that would keep track of the image information, as well as link all the associated images into the same record.
e.g. You'd probably want to keep the PSD "negative", JPG distributions, and PNG thumbnails all in a single unit, with the information about the image applying to all of them. A CMS could conceivably be designed to do this, but I don't do professional photography, so I don't know of any CMSes like this offhand.
But this would all be settled if he got refunded his latest subscription payment.
*shakes head* No it wouldn't. Blizzard could offer him his latest subscription payment to settle the issue, but he still has a grievence against them for terminating his contract in bad faith.
It's usually considered silly to drag disputes over $14.99 to court.
According to him, he's paid hundreds of dollars to the service. Through that service, he has gained considerable virtual property; all of which has been taken away through a breach of contract. I'd say he's in a pretty good position to sue for ALL the money he's put into the game, plus court fees.
xxx
China: About 108,000,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique) United States: About 107,000,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique)
Well, there goes their boilerplate excuse about "making the web safer" for the Chinese people.
Why is it that everyone seems to want to sue Blizzard?
Honestly, I don't see that he has that many other options. He could just walk away and hope that he gets enough people to follow, but the truth is that such a boycott won't work against such a large company. You need to sting them where they'll notice. A lawsuit accomplishes that.
And THAT should be the first step: stop giving them money.
They already have his money. Some of it we can assume they didn't earn, as he was booted off the service. It's no skin off their nose if he leaves. After all, they kicked him out!
Tell me again, why do we have to sue them?
To make the point clear. Blizzard won't even respond to his communications at this point. When they did respond, they basically ignored him with form letters. At no point in this process has he been allowed a voice. So what does that leave him?
The answer is to sue. As I said in another post, suing for a full refund of services, plus court costs, and perhaps a reactivation of his account would be a great way to get their attention, as well as generate some press. And once one person successfully sues Blizzard in small claims, Blizzard will be forced to act fast to head off the avalanche of small-claims and class-action suits.
I usually see legal recourses as a last resort. (Primarily because that's what they are.) In this case, however, he's down to his last resort. So I hope he sues, and makes Blizzard admit their mistakes. Especially since these reports are becoming more and more common.
[Logo] did.. But that was some kinda drawing tool?
This, my friends, is exactly why Logo is useless as an introductory programming language.
Allow me to solve your problems right now:
http://tortoisecvs.sourceforge.net/ (For CVS Servers)
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ (For Subversion servers)
Tortoise will tell your users everything they need to know about the files status right through Windows Explorer. Teaching them how to do checkins and tree updates is also quite easy, thanks to the customized right-click menu. Advanced options like diffing, merging, and branching are still available through the submenus, but your users should be able to get their work done without resorting to those. (At least, not until they're ready.)
Of course, the fact that these are graphics designers may complicate issues somewhat. If they're using a Mac, they won't be able to use Tortoise. In which case, my next recommendation falls on SmartCVS:
http://www.smartcvs.com/
SmartCVS is great for Macintoshes, although it does take slightly more training than Tortoise. The only problem you may run into, however, is that SmartCVS chokes on massive directories of files. I don't know if this problem has been fixed or not, but it was a serious problem for one of the source trees I worked on. (Think gigabytes of data spread across thousands of files.)
CVS/SVN are by no means perfect solutions, but I can't think of anything better off the top of my head. Hope this helps!
And you base this opinion on... what? How you think the world works, or how the world actually works? Because I can tell you that a judge who awards him his remaining fees would be likely to also award him court costs. At a minimum.
It's nice to think that it's all about a balance sheet of who owes who what, but the law doesn't work that way. If it did, stuff like this wouldn't be possible.
And how are you claiming he didn't violate the TOS when even he agrees that the TOS was violated (though he was in compliance with "official" posts that indicated that the activity was ok).
He's not agreeing. He's saying that even though they've redefined the matter after the fact, he's willing to agree to their new terms to help resolve the issue. That's always a good step, and will be seen as a willingness to negotiate in Good Faith should the matter ever go to court.
Macros are now and always were fine. It wasn't that he used a macro, it is that he wrote a macro to be a bot. Bots are banned.
He didn't make a bot. He made a macro. A macro is not a bot, nor can it ever be. If macros are allowed, and he's able to make a macro that "wins" a given situation 90% of the time by hitting a single button, then he's in the clear. That's poor coding on Blizzard's part, not a device that's able to intelligently defeat the situation.
Even he said he violated the TOS (though unknowingly, since he used a tool that was explicitly approved, just in a manner in violation of the TOS).
And here we get back to the heart of the issue. He didn't know he was doing anything wrong, and he offered to negotiate a settlement. Blizzard instead terminated him without a prior warning; as per their policy. They were WRONG. Plain and simple.
If they have a different story to tell, I'd love to hear it. Unfortunately, they don't seem to actually have a story to tell. Just a bunch of form letters that fail to address the situation.
Blizzard's TOS agreement give them some god clauses that supercede all others. The standard "it's at our discretion to determine if you're in violation, and we can choose to terminate this agreement at our discretion".
1. Blizzard would be correct if they simply said, "we don't want your business anymore." The problem is that they pointed to another section of the contract and stated that it had been violated. Thus the "god clause" as you call it, doesn't come into effect.
2. Clauses like this are not necessarily binding. If a judge finds that Blizzard failed to act in Good Faith, they may be liable for failing to uphold the terms of the contract.
Heheheh, the examples you use to discredit his arguments were all generated in the system we have now.
Try again. There was an explicit agreement between the major powers after WWI that prevented them from building up large militaries. Germany ignored that agreement in order to gain an advantage in their early attacks.
Saddam attacked the mostly defenseless country of Kuwait with the excuse that they had been "slant-drilling" into Iraqi territory. Saddam had expected a quick victory (which he got), but didn't expect strong retaliation from Kuwait's allies.
The Conquisitors came to conquer and gain slaves, not to make peace with the local inhabitants.
The First Crusade was about redirecting the efforts of the restless european warriors to efforts that seemed useful.
There are plenty of such examples of the stronger preying on the weak. That's why it's so important to maintain a military defense against such preying.
Maybe it's a fun game, but it's just a game, a service provided by Blizzard for a fee.
(Emphasis mine.)
There's the part you seem to be missing. He has paid money to be provided with a service. As of right now, he's been singled out for violations to the agreement that he didn't commit, and has been unfairly kicked out of the service he paid for. (Presumably without a refund.) Because of this, he has suffered the loss of virtual property (his characters/accounts) that he has a paid significant amount of time and money to obtain. This just isn't okay, neither in a moral sense, nor in a legal sense.
You have got to be kidding. "This company refuses to take my money anymore! I'm suing.!" I marvel at the mindset that spurred you to even imagine writing that paragraph.
I'm dead serious. The legal system is there as a recourse for resolving disputes between parties. He has pursued every avenue available to him in resolving this issue. He has been ignored and treated poorly by the other party at every step of the way. As a result, he has an honest grevience to bring against Blizzard.
While I'm not one to suggest that he sue for $10,000,000 for "emotional damages" (that's just not right), suing for restoration of his account(s), legal fees to be paid by Blizzard, and a full refund of the amount he has paid to date (to cover the harrassment he has received) is a perfectly acceptable solution. Of course, it's a lot easier to get a lawyer to handle a class action suit for him, so in that case Blizzard would be facing the equivalent of hundreds of these suits at once.
Even if he didn't take the class-action path, a judge may note several reasonable complaints occurring around the same period and decide to combine them into a single suit himself.
Firstly, we're of course hearing one side of the story.
That's about the only insightful thing you've said. Unfortunately, Blizzard refuses to talk about the issue. If they won't even talk to the customer they have a disagreement with, then that customer may have to force them to tell their side in court. Alternatively, he could start a grass-roots mailing campaign or boycott against Blizzard. These are the options he has available.
Secondly, how about some perspective: This is a game.
My perspective is just fine. A game or not, Blizzard is offering a service in exchange for money. If Blizzard then decides to turn around and unjustly harrass its customers in violation of the contract entered into, it can expect that its customers will seek to reverse the business transaction and/or force Blizzard to uphold its contractual obligations. Not only does this resolve the matter, but it sends a message to the business that the customers do not appreciate being stepped on. Otherwise, what is to prevent the company from further abusing its other customers?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." --Thomas Jefferson
I hate to break it to you, but there will always be those who seek to prey on the defenseless. You could get the entire world to lay down their arms and disband their militaries, but all you'd accomplish is to encourage the next Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin to raise an army and conquer all those foolish enough to be defenseless. The worst part of it is that their soldiers would consist of idealists who would think that they're bettering the world by spreading Communism, Facism, Eugenics, or other political idea of the day.
A particularly ugly example of this was the conquisitors of the "New World" who sought to obtain land and slaves for Spain, all under the guise of spreading Catholic Christianity. The Crusades are another ugly example of this, though we could be here all day trying to analyze those events.
So you're convinced that every person who accidentally triggers a TOS violation should be permanently banned from a service like WoW, even when:
1. The service claims in forum posts that what he's doing is okay.
2. The user offers to correct the problem, and even accept a punishment.
3. The service has a policy that is supposed to require multiple violations to obtain a ban.
4. The user has no prior history of TOS violations.
5. The user has spent considerable money on the product.
If you think that all that combines to make a "responsible decision" on the part of Blizzard, then allow me to be the first to point out that you're a heartless tyrant, and I really do hope this happens to you. Perhaps you'll see things different from the other side.
I for one, hopes he gets a good lawyer. Given that this is far from the first time I've heard these complaints, a class action suit against Blizzard may just be what's needed to shake things up.
Sorry, that didn't come out quite as I intended it. What I was trying to say is that these weapons are generally found in vehicle mounts, and in open area combat. In close quarters combat, their size and weight makes them difficult to transport and use without creating a variety of problems for the gunner. This robot, OTOH, can roll into a tight alleyway, and immediately saturate the area with gunfire. Or so the theory goes, anyway. :)