Amanda's defense wasn't to blame. That a justice system could put two people in jail for the murder, then a month later convict a third person of the same crime (and revise the entire story of the crime to account for this third actor, which by the way had absolutely no evidence supporting the story) who was never mentioned when the first two were convicted. This turned a three person sex orgy gone wrong into a four person sex orgy murder. Not only that but the third conviction admits to being in the house during the murder and having sex with the victim and has been accused of other violent acts including rape and assault.
No, Amanda and her boyfriend were convicted because the prosecutor in the case was a lying sniveling asshole that concocted evidence and a damn near unbelievable story to get rid of a case that was generating a lot of publicity during an election cycle. This same prosecutor has been dismissed because he was proven to have done this in the past in creating evidence to get innocent people convicted in high profile cases. (do a search on his name, he tried to build a murder case against a journalist doing a story on him and his inability to solve another high profile murder case).
The third person convicted of the Kercher murder was the only murderer, he acted alone, likely broke in and tried to rape and ended up killing Kercher in the process. After he was arrested he was coached into saying Knox and her boyfriend were involved (amazingly under the exact same story as the prosecution put forward during the knox trial) under the promise of reduced sentencing, even though Knox had already been convicted and there was little reason to offer leniency other than to avoid the prosecutor getting a black eye for wrongly convicting two innocent people.
So if the prosecutor wins every seismologist in Italy (if anyone stays in the profession what with being threated with jail time) will issue reports about the maximum probable earthquake being likely (even if it's not) and overstating both the risks and damage potential. This could very well result in increased building standards that could cost every Italian serious money. Not only that but the predictions will be so dire that after a few years of all the dire predictions and no resulting quakes the public will ignore them even if they do issue a serious report (after all you can only call wolf so many times).
This shouldn't be even allowed to proceed, it's going to destroy the seismic community and the very idea that you would hold someone responsible for something they have no control over nor do they even an ability to predict events is absolutely ridiculous. The best part is that you can't even predict event sizes or locations in some cases, as an example, the Northridge quake in Los Angelos was on a fault that wasn't even mapped. IIRC most of the quakes in Italty are the result of volcanic activity, an situation where even predicting the maximum event possible isn't even certain.
Yes cause we all know just how successful it is to not only destroy peoples lives, but their future any sense of empathy. What you suggest doesn't work, and there is hundreds of years of evidence that it doesn't. The death penalty would be a highly effective measure at deterring crime if anyone gave a rats ass about deterrents. Not a single person considers the consequences of their actions before they commit crimes. Plenty of people have been severely punished for white collar crime. Ken Lay got 30 years, did that stop the bank fraud that caused the economic crash after Enron?
You're a fool if you think there is such a thing as a deterrent and it's even worse if you think destroying someone will make the world a better place. In fact based on your post you are probably stupid enough to think prison rape does anything at all other than destroy lives.
Wind gusts do not cause power surges. Modern Turbines and windmills (the ones with the hundred foot long wings) spin at very low RPM. In high winds brakes are applied to keep the speed down because rapid rotation would destroy the windmill.
I just don't understand why people like you bring up a couple weaknesses of renewable energy then walk away like the only answer is non renewable fossil fuels. The real answer is sustainable energy production that uses multiple renewable sources. Base load from geothermal and nuclear, then you handle summer peak air conditioning load with PV and solar thermal, add in some wind for ~10% of base load, maybe some wave power for a few more percent. Some renewable gas generation from waste digestion (sewage or other organic waste), throw in Hydro where it's available and you have a system that's no entirely dependent on a single source of fuel. Not only that but you don't export several hundred billion dollars a year to hostile countries buying dino by-product to burn.
Energy generation is a national defense issue. Burning coal has made fish uneatable due to mercury content. Fossil fuels will run out someday and it is in the national interest to move away from non-renewable sources of energy because in the long run they will run out.
The problem is that no one is going to transfer their copyrights to a troll. The whole point of legal trolling is to make sure the troll company is a shell with no assets in case it loses a suit. If they actually transfer the copyrights then the shell suddenly has assets, very valuable assets that could be auctioned to pay damages.
Under the laws of most states non-consensual insertion of objects into someone's vagina classifies as sexual assault. It's called different things depending on the state but without exception it's considered sexual assault. It's silly that anyone would even imply that it's not. If I held you down and shoved objects in your ass you wouldn't think you were being raped?
There are hundreds of, if not thousands of corporate entities in the US set up with employee ownership. Many are in the engineering consulting field where the employee/owners are relatively intelligent and see the value in owning part of the business they work for. These business typically have no assets or extensive capital but place their employee's as their most important asset. Maybe it's symptomatic of a business world (engineering consulting) where assets are a hindrance (they inhibit the ability to deduct expenses) and no company is more than 6 months away from going out of business if all their work dried up.
Ooo, I can't borrow against my stock, how scary. Get real.
Yea and all us Gen-X'ers and Millennials know it and there is going to be a major reckoning when the BabyBoomers see reduced voting capacity. Combined the two generations outnumber the Babyboomers and there is change a comin.
I mean come on. Who doesn't know that cops lie all the time and that you don't believe one fucking word they say without written confirmation. Not only that but the Supreme court has ruled numerous times that Cops can lie all they want as long as they don't engage in the very specific situation of entrapment.
There is not a word in that article saying there was one single problem with the hardware. The implication I take from the wording is that the computer had a software problem. As she worked as a teacher at an alternative high school (PC for HS for juvenile delinquents) and she purchased a stolen laptop which had been stolen from another school district (wonder what those asset tags are for) I'm willing to wager it's highly likely she knew the damn thing was stolen and counted on not being caught. The police believed her story so well they charged her with receiving stolen property (the charges were dropped later, probably DA didn't think she/he could win the case).
If you had actually followed the news you would be aware that HP offered to refund the price difference to anyone that bought a touchpad after a certain date (IIRC it was July 15th, a month and half before the price cut if not the very day they went on sale). You could do it through the retailer or directly through HP. It was a very fair offer IMO.
How much money did Microsoft burn trying to get the XBOX off the ground?
Total running expenditures are in excess of 5 billion dollars. On the upside they made a couple million dollars each of the last few quarters and they might just pay back that investment in 50-100 years depending on how frequently they want to spend $2+ billion to sell a new console version.
In all seriousness, the XBox has been a colossal money sink for MS and likely will never ever return the money invested. On the upside they used their big wallet to destroy much of the console competition prematurely such that when consoles do go away (and they will before 2020 in their current form at least) that no one but MS will be around to ride that roller-coaster into the toilet. But that's what happens when a monopoly uses their monopoly funding to adversely impact another market to gain a monopoly.
In Court you have to dot your t's and cross your i's or the higher court will refuse the hear the appeal. You have to show essentially negligence by the lower court for an appeal to succeed and that's what EPIC is doing. Presenting the errors in judgement and asking the lower court to overrule their own previous ruling. If the court refuses to go ahead with that (and it does happen that courts overturn their own judgments, reference the RIAA case against Jamie Thomas where the court overturned their own previous bad ruling) then they appeal that decision and the basis for courts ruling is then open to appeal due to the errors outlined in the previous ruling. People forget there are strict rules in the appeals courts about what is open for appeal. You can't appeal everything and the kitchen sink and it becomes a shell game to find the right avenue of appeal to get a judgement overturned.
I can understand suing if someone else is selling the recordings and making money off the transaction. But once he was dead the stuff should have passed into the public domain and paying to create a memorial? I don't think so. That's beyond evil.
Any wood frame home that meets any sort of modern code requirement (like 70's onward) is going to do absolutely fine in an earthquake. Wood frames are exceptional dampeners and highly flexible, though the drywall may crack and the brick veneer might fall off the basic structure will remain unmolested. The only real danger in residential housing is unreinforced masonry (not brick veneer). The biggest killer in residential homes during earthquakes is an unreinforced brick chimney tumbling into the house and killing the occupants. The most frequent damage to a residential house in an earthquake is the house bouncing off the foundation due to the lack of "hurricane straps" that became code in the 90's.
Regardless of your intentional defamation of the builders you listed if they complied with the local building codes their homes will do fine in earthquakes and other disasters that are accounted for in the code. In fact the newer the homes the more strict the code requirements and the better they will handle disasters. You better hope your intentional defamation doesn't draw a lawsuit.
Whatever you believe about a Fetus and it's value the reality is that Abortion is a medical procedure that is between the doctor and their patient. One of the greatest avenues to government intrusion into peoples personal lives is the propensity of both parties to regulate the medical establishment.
All the nut jobs that want to put restrictions on abortions absolutely fail to consider the situation when that abortion is not only warranted, but needed to save a life. The most volatile of those is the third trimester abortion, yet in the vast majority of those cases those abortions are not only medically necessary they are required to save the life of the mother. The vast majority of the public is completely unaware of the genetic diseases, conditions and medical dangers that can present themselves during human gestation and the results that not only kill the fetus but the mother as well. Yet these same individuals are willing to exact a death sentence on an innocent woman because they feel it's their moral imperative to dictate the medical needs of others with the full force of the guns and prisons of government.
Abortion like all the other legislation that involves dictating morality to others is a personal choice that revolves around medical discussions between doctors and their patients. I personally don't believe abortion should be used as a birth control method in this day and age but I'm not stupid enough to believe that it's the role of government to dictate medical choices on the populace.
Without agreeing to the GPL they are in intentional violation of copyright. The means (under US law) max statutory damages of several hundred thousand dollars PER distribution (which if they even distributed it a dozen times could be several million dollars) and the court will probably award punitive damages of up to 9 times the statutory damages for intentional infringement. If they sold a hundred copies of the software they could conceivably be hit with a hundred million dollars in statutory damages and punitive awards.
Although you are right they could claim they didn't agree to the GPL, but by doing so they would make the damages much much worse. This is the reason in nearly every single case where legal proceedings are started companies comply with the GPL, because not agreeing to the contract contained in the GPL is a far worse fate then complying with the terms. People forget that this is by design, Stallman deliberately used copyright law (and it's massive damages) to create a license that creates a situation where complying with the license is the least damaging result to an infringer.
Now this is all hypothetical as the company in question is Russian and unless you are good friends with Putin nothing will happen to the people or companies involved..
Personally I believe this is the reason companies like Google and others where only the "young" work are doomed to failure in the long run. Experience means something, wisdom only comes from time and experience and as your example shows (I don't work in the same field but experience the same thing all the time) you don't have to be twice as productive if you make 1/2 the number of errors.
What's really needed to make this apparent to the idiot MBA's at the top is a test like the old typing tests that subtracted errors from your WPM. You might type 85 WPM but if you make a mistake every sentence the real score is 25WPM and the guy typing with two fingers can smoke you due to higher accuracy.
China has severe social problems that aren't being addressed and are being papered over by economic growth. If they stop economic growth the entire nation is likely to self destruct, possibly even into civil war. They buy American bonds precisely to keep the dollar elevated against the Yuan, they stop buying and the Yuan goes up and unemployment goes up and the social structure self destructs. They have claimed numerous times to stop buying bonds and have been shown to be buying through shell corporations in the UK. Actual holdings by China are nearly impossible to determine for this reason.
He plead guilty. Doesn't matter that it was a misdemeanor completely unrelated to the original crime, in the eyes of the bar and the courts he's a guilty man. He's got no recourse.
The only reason this shocks you is because you are ignorant of history. William Randolph Hearst controlled damn near every single major paper in the US. Later his empire included the early movie theaters and other forms of news disbursement (there was a movie created about him called Citizen Kane that never played in theaters because he owned them all). You didn't get stories published in the US without his say. It's because of Hearst that laws were passed prohibiting a single individual from controlling to much "media". All those rules were tossed out the window these last 20 years because people have simply forgotten the power Hearst held and the damage he did. Murdoch is the single biggest inheritor of the crown Hearst lost when the depression hit and the subsequent laws that were passed.
It astounds me that people don't realize the damage you can do to your country when you allow a single man to decide which stories get published.
You act as if the IT staff was absolutely incompetent and didn't make backups. That's highly unlikely. They should have backup tapes going back close to a year.
Your right about Origins and they most certainly will break it. They think the future is smartphone games, they've done a dozen paid press stories about how that's the future of gaming. They are going to bet the whole company on it. Definitely a category with some potential for money but in the long run it's not going to replace PC gaming (which EA abandoned 3 years ago) but might kill consoles (doubtful), that's yet to be seen. Personally I don't think people are going to stop playing games on big screens and I'm willing to bet this little Origins venture is a complete and total failure.
EA doesn't know how to take care of a customer. And software is one of those areas where taking care of the customer is very very important. There are millions of american's that will never buy another EA game. Buying popcap isn't going to make that better.
EA will as always fail. They will put this quarters revenue above the customer. They will likely engage is borderline illegal behavior (probably electronic surveillance of their customers, including maybe even keyloggers). They will terminate any service that isn't making money, even after promising at sale that it will remain as long as customers want. They will deliberately shut down games when new versions come out to force purchases. And if successful they will probably charge a monthly fee after promising the service will remain free. They will charge for reinstall. They will limit the service in every way possible to increase revenue. They will soak the customer at every opportunity, including I can see them charging extra for things like steam community.
EA is run by MBA's who are only in the game for this quarters profit and bonus. Valve is a company run by game players and developers for the same.
Personally I will no longer buy EA or UbiSoft titles. The BS (Safedisc5 with limited reinstalls) they have been pulling lately along with all their anti-consumer policies has completely evaporated any desire I have to play a single one of their games, regardless or title or quality. I've been burned one too many times by these terrible companies and I will not EVER give them another dollar again. I'd prefer if they abandon the PC entirely instead of fostering half ass console ports on the PC world. Let them leave the PC space to Valve and other companies that can competently produce PC games. I have several hundred games on Steam, I'm in their ideal target age range and have a disposable income that allows me to buy games that hit my fancy and they will never ever see another dime from me.
Slashdot Mirror
Amanda's defense wasn't to blame. That a justice system could put two people in jail for the murder, then a month later convict a third person of the same crime (and revise the entire story of the crime to account for this third actor, which by the way had absolutely no evidence supporting the story) who was never mentioned when the first two were convicted. This turned a three person sex orgy gone wrong into a four person sex orgy murder. Not only that but the third conviction admits to being in the house during the murder and having sex with the victim and has been accused of other violent acts including rape and assault.
No, Amanda and her boyfriend were convicted because the prosecutor in the case was a lying sniveling asshole that concocted evidence and a damn near unbelievable story to get rid of a case that was generating a lot of publicity during an election cycle. This same prosecutor has been dismissed because he was proven to have done this in the past in creating evidence to get innocent people convicted in high profile cases. (do a search on his name, he tried to build a murder case against a journalist doing a story on him and his inability to solve another high profile murder case).
The third person convicted of the Kercher murder was the only murderer, he acted alone, likely broke in and tried to rape and ended up killing Kercher in the process. After he was arrested he was coached into saying Knox and her boyfriend were involved (amazingly under the exact same story as the prosecution put forward during the knox trial) under the promise of reduced sentencing, even though Knox had already been convicted and there was little reason to offer leniency other than to avoid the prosecutor getting a black eye for wrongly convicting two innocent people.
So if the prosecutor wins every seismologist in Italy (if anyone stays in the profession what with being threated with jail time) will issue reports about the maximum probable earthquake being likely (even if it's not) and overstating both the risks and damage potential. This could very well result in increased building standards that could cost every Italian serious money. Not only that but the predictions will be so dire that after a few years of all the dire predictions and no resulting quakes the public will ignore them even if they do issue a serious report (after all you can only call wolf so many times).
This shouldn't be even allowed to proceed, it's going to destroy the seismic community and the very idea that you would hold someone responsible for something they have no control over nor do they even an ability to predict events is absolutely ridiculous. The best part is that you can't even predict event sizes or locations in some cases, as an example, the Northridge quake in Los Angelos was on a fault that wasn't even mapped. IIRC most of the quakes in Italty are the result of volcanic activity, an situation where even predicting the maximum event possible isn't even certain.
Yes cause we all know just how successful it is to not only destroy peoples lives, but their future any sense of empathy. What you suggest doesn't work, and there is hundreds of years of evidence that it doesn't. The death penalty would be a highly effective measure at deterring crime if anyone gave a rats ass about deterrents. Not a single person considers the consequences of their actions before they commit crimes. Plenty of people have been severely punished for white collar crime. Ken Lay got 30 years, did that stop the bank fraud that caused the economic crash after Enron?
You're a fool if you think there is such a thing as a deterrent and it's even worse if you think destroying someone will make the world a better place. In fact based on your post you are probably stupid enough to think prison rape does anything at all other than destroy lives.
Wind gusts do not cause power surges. Modern Turbines and windmills (the ones with the hundred foot long wings) spin at very low RPM. In high winds brakes are applied to keep the speed down because rapid rotation would destroy the windmill.
I just don't understand why people like you bring up a couple weaknesses of renewable energy then walk away like the only answer is non renewable fossil fuels. The real answer is sustainable energy production that uses multiple renewable sources. Base load from geothermal and nuclear, then you handle summer peak air conditioning load with PV and solar thermal, add in some wind for ~10% of base load, maybe some wave power for a few more percent. Some renewable gas generation from waste digestion (sewage or other organic waste), throw in Hydro where it's available and you have a system that's no entirely dependent on a single source of fuel. Not only that but you don't export several hundred billion dollars a year to hostile countries buying dino by-product to burn.
Energy generation is a national defense issue. Burning coal has made fish uneatable due to mercury content. Fossil fuels will run out someday and it is in the national interest to move away from non-renewable sources of energy because in the long run they will run out.
The problem is that no one is going to transfer their copyrights to a troll. The whole point of legal trolling is to make sure the troll company is a shell with no assets in case it loses a suit. If they actually transfer the copyrights then the shell suddenly has assets, very valuable assets that could be auctioned to pay damages.
Under the laws of most states non-consensual insertion of objects into someone's vagina classifies as sexual assault. It's called different things depending on the state but without exception it's considered sexual assault. It's silly that anyone would even imply that it's not. If I held you down and shoved objects in your ass you wouldn't think you were being raped?
There are hundreds of, if not thousands of corporate entities in the US set up with employee ownership. Many are in the engineering consulting field where the employee/owners are relatively intelligent and see the value in owning part of the business they work for. These business typically have no assets or extensive capital but place their employee's as their most important asset. Maybe it's symptomatic of a business world (engineering consulting) where assets are a hindrance (they inhibit the ability to deduct expenses) and no company is more than 6 months away from going out of business if all their work dried up.
Ooo, I can't borrow against my stock, how scary. Get real.
Yea and all us Gen-X'ers and Millennials know it and there is going to be a major reckoning when the BabyBoomers see reduced voting capacity. Combined the two generations outnumber the Babyboomers and there is change a comin.
Cops Lie. News at 11.
I mean come on. Who doesn't know that cops lie all the time and that you don't believe one fucking word they say without written confirmation. Not only that but the Supreme court has ruled numerous times that Cops can lie all they want as long as they don't engage in the very specific situation of entrapment.
There is not a word in that article saying there was one single problem with the hardware. The implication I take from the wording is that the computer had a software problem. As she worked as a teacher at an alternative high school (PC for HS for juvenile delinquents) and she purchased a stolen laptop which had been stolen from another school district (wonder what those asset tags are for) I'm willing to wager it's highly likely she knew the damn thing was stolen and counted on not being caught. The police believed her story so well they charged her with receiving stolen property (the charges were dropped later, probably DA didn't think she/he could win the case).
If you had actually followed the news you would be aware that HP offered to refund the price difference to anyone that bought a touchpad after a certain date (IIRC it was July 15th, a month and half before the price cut if not the very day they went on sale). You could do it through the retailer or directly through HP. It was a very fair offer IMO.
Total running expenditures are in excess of 5 billion dollars. On the upside they made a couple million dollars each of the last few quarters and they might just pay back that investment in 50-100 years depending on how frequently they want to spend $2+ billion to sell a new console version.
In all seriousness, the XBox has been a colossal money sink for MS and likely will never ever return the money invested. On the upside they used their big wallet to destroy much of the console competition prematurely such that when consoles do go away (and they will before 2020 in their current form at least) that no one but MS will be around to ride that roller-coaster into the toilet. But that's what happens when a monopoly uses their monopoly funding to adversely impact another market to gain a monopoly.
In Court you have to dot your t's and cross your i's or the higher court will refuse the hear the appeal. You have to show essentially negligence by the lower court for an appeal to succeed and that's what EPIC is doing. Presenting the errors in judgement and asking the lower court to overrule their own previous ruling. If the court refuses to go ahead with that (and it does happen that courts overturn their own judgments, reference the RIAA case against Jamie Thomas where the court overturned their own previous bad ruling) then they appeal that decision and the basis for courts ruling is then open to appeal due to the errors outlined in the previous ruling. People forget there are strict rules in the appeals courts about what is open for appeal. You can't appeal everything and the kitchen sink and it becomes a shell game to find the right avenue of appeal to get a judgement overturned.
I can understand suing if someone else is selling the recordings and making money off the transaction. But once he was dead the stuff should have passed into the public domain and paying to create a memorial? I don't think so. That's beyond evil.
Any wood frame home that meets any sort of modern code requirement (like 70's onward) is going to do absolutely fine in an earthquake. Wood frames are exceptional dampeners and highly flexible, though the drywall may crack and the brick veneer might fall off the basic structure will remain unmolested. The only real danger in residential housing is unreinforced masonry (not brick veneer). The biggest killer in residential homes during earthquakes is an unreinforced brick chimney tumbling into the house and killing the occupants. The most frequent damage to a residential house in an earthquake is the house bouncing off the foundation due to the lack of "hurricane straps" that became code in the 90's.
Regardless of your intentional defamation of the builders you listed if they complied with the local building codes their homes will do fine in earthquakes and other disasters that are accounted for in the code. In fact the newer the homes the more strict the code requirements and the better they will handle disasters. You better hope your intentional defamation doesn't draw a lawsuit.
Whatever you believe about a Fetus and it's value the reality is that Abortion is a medical procedure that is between the doctor and their patient. One of the greatest avenues to government intrusion into peoples personal lives is the propensity of both parties to regulate the medical establishment.
All the nut jobs that want to put restrictions on abortions absolutely fail to consider the situation when that abortion is not only warranted, but needed to save a life. The most volatile of those is the third trimester abortion, yet in the vast majority of those cases those abortions are not only medically necessary they are required to save the life of the mother. The vast majority of the public is completely unaware of the genetic diseases, conditions and medical dangers that can present themselves during human gestation and the results that not only kill the fetus but the mother as well. Yet these same individuals are willing to exact a death sentence on an innocent woman because they feel it's their moral imperative to dictate the medical needs of others with the full force of the guns and prisons of government.
Abortion like all the other legislation that involves dictating morality to others is a personal choice that revolves around medical discussions between doctors and their patients. I personally don't believe abortion should be used as a birth control method in this day and age but I'm not stupid enough to believe that it's the role of government to dictate medical choices on the populace.
Without agreeing to the GPL they are in intentional violation of copyright. The means (under US law) max statutory damages of several hundred thousand dollars PER distribution (which if they even distributed it a dozen times could be several million dollars) and the court will probably award punitive damages of up to 9 times the statutory damages for intentional infringement. If they sold a hundred copies of the software they could conceivably be hit with a hundred million dollars in statutory damages and punitive awards.
Although you are right they could claim they didn't agree to the GPL, but by doing so they would make the damages much much worse. This is the reason in nearly every single case where legal proceedings are started companies comply with the GPL, because not agreeing to the contract contained in the GPL is a far worse fate then complying with the terms. People forget that this is by design, Stallman deliberately used copyright law (and it's massive damages) to create a license that creates a situation where complying with the license is the least damaging result to an infringer.
Now this is all hypothetical as the company in question is Russian and unless you are good friends with Putin nothing will happen to the people or companies involved..
Personally I believe this is the reason companies like Google and others where only the "young" work are doomed to failure in the long run. Experience means something, wisdom only comes from time and experience and as your example shows (I don't work in the same field but experience the same thing all the time) you don't have to be twice as productive if you make 1/2 the number of errors.
What's really needed to make this apparent to the idiot MBA's at the top is a test like the old typing tests that subtracted errors from your WPM. You might type 85 WPM but if you make a mistake every sentence the real score is 25WPM and the guy typing with two fingers can smoke you due to higher accuracy.
China has severe social problems that aren't being addressed and are being papered over by economic growth. If they stop economic growth the entire nation is likely to self destruct, possibly even into civil war. They buy American bonds precisely to keep the dollar elevated against the Yuan, they stop buying and the Yuan goes up and unemployment goes up and the social structure self destructs. They have claimed numerous times to stop buying bonds and have been shown to be buying through shell corporations in the UK. Actual holdings by China are nearly impossible to determine for this reason.
He plead guilty. Doesn't matter that it was a misdemeanor completely unrelated to the original crime, in the eyes of the bar and the courts he's a guilty man. He's got no recourse.
The only reason this shocks you is because you are ignorant of history. William Randolph Hearst controlled damn near every single major paper in the US. Later his empire included the early movie theaters and other forms of news disbursement (there was a movie created about him called Citizen Kane that never played in theaters because he owned them all). You didn't get stories published in the US without his say. It's because of Hearst that laws were passed prohibiting a single individual from controlling to much "media". All those rules were tossed out the window these last 20 years because people have simply forgotten the power Hearst held and the damage he did. Murdoch is the single biggest inheritor of the crown Hearst lost when the depression hit and the subsequent laws that were passed.
It astounds me that people don't realize the damage you can do to your country when you allow a single man to decide which stories get published.
You act as if the IT staff was absolutely incompetent and didn't make backups. That's highly unlikely. They should have backup tapes going back close to a year.
Your right about Origins and they most certainly will break it. They think the future is smartphone games, they've done a dozen paid press stories about how that's the future of gaming. They are going to bet the whole company on it. Definitely a category with some potential for money but in the long run it's not going to replace PC gaming (which EA abandoned 3 years ago) but might kill consoles (doubtful), that's yet to be seen. Personally I don't think people are going to stop playing games on big screens and I'm willing to bet this little Origins venture is a complete and total failure.
EA doesn't know how to take care of a customer. And software is one of those areas where taking care of the customer is very very important. There are millions of american's that will never buy another EA game. Buying popcap isn't going to make that better.
Add me to the list of mob with pitchforks and Torches searching for Zuckerberg.
Oh and I could use a google+ Invite as well. trenthansonpe at gmail.
EA will as always fail. They will put this quarters revenue above the customer. They will likely engage is borderline illegal behavior (probably electronic surveillance of their customers, including maybe even keyloggers). They will terminate any service that isn't making money, even after promising at sale that it will remain as long as customers want. They will deliberately shut down games when new versions come out to force purchases. And if successful they will probably charge a monthly fee after promising the service will remain free. They will charge for reinstall. They will limit the service in every way possible to increase revenue. They will soak the customer at every opportunity, including I can see them charging extra for things like steam community.
EA is run by MBA's who are only in the game for this quarters profit and bonus. Valve is a company run by game players and developers for the same.
Personally I will no longer buy EA or UbiSoft titles. The BS (Safedisc5 with limited reinstalls) they have been pulling lately along with all their anti-consumer policies has completely evaporated any desire I have to play a single one of their games, regardless or title or quality. I've been burned one too many times by these terrible companies and I will not EVER give them another dollar again. I'd prefer if they abandon the PC entirely instead of fostering half ass console ports on the PC world. Let them leave the PC space to Valve and other companies that can competently produce PC games. I have several hundred games on Steam, I'm in their ideal target age range and have a disposable income that allows me to buy games that hit my fancy and they will never ever see another dime from me.