Unfortunately, you're assuming that Blizzard is telling the truth about wishing that they could help the hobbyists, but having their arms twisted by piracy concerns. The real reason Blizzard doesn't use this obvious and logical solution is because they want everyone to go through Battle.net, and thus see (and possibly click on, but not likely) the ads that Blizzard is being paid to put on Battle.net. There's no way that Blizzard is going to put up with a little bit of extra bandwidth for the purpose of letting people use Battle.net without the ads and without going through their servers. If they did that, they'd be putting a lot of work into shooting themselves in the foot.
It's in the "Your Rights Online" section, but has never appeared on the frong page. This is, sadly, the fate of many quality submissions, including Ask Slashdot.
First off, emulators are legal. I don't see how linking to emulators is showing any facilitation of piracy. Serving ROMs off their server would be different, but linking to other sites that create emulators for Nintendo products is not illegal, nor are the emulators themselves.
And second, just because it doesn't limit itself to a single legal thing doesn't mean that it should be banned by customs and made illegal in the US. Sure, the product you mentioned does nothing but develop games for the GBA. The Flash Linker does that AND lets people make legal copies of their games, which means that it actually has even more legal uses than the product you mentioned. The fact that it can pirate games alongside this does not necessarily make it a product devoted to piracy, and the surprisingly large independant software developer community that has sprung up on the web, mostly around the Flash Linker, indicates that at least a very large portion of its use is for legal purposes.
You're with Nintendo on this one because you don't know what you're talking about. Emulators are not illegal, and the presence of one illegal thing that the product can do does not mean that the product is solely devoted to piracy. Haven't you ever heard of guns, knives, VCRs, and computers? They can do many illegal things, but the presence of legal uses of the product (in this case developing independant software and making legal backups of games) means that it should not be banned, potentially even under the DMCA.
Oh, and one more thing: Not only are emulators not illegal, but they are also not solely about piracy. Myself and hundreds of others around the world have used emulators to play games that we've bought which have broken or make use of gaming systems that we've bought which have broken. I own a Super Nintendo and the game Super Metroid, but I recently chose to play a Super Metroid ROM in an emulator instead of putting the cartridge into my SNES and booting it up. Why? Because my Super Nintendo is a wreck, its plug is practically a fire hazard, and the contents of my Super Metroid cartridge make loud rattling noises when I pick it up. They're basically worthless hunks of plastic and silicon right now, but I still have the legal right to play them because I've bought both the system and the game. Thus, I am legally allowed to download ROMs off the web and play them in an emulator. This is not an uncommon practice.
Before anything is even considered, I need a letter sent via certified mail with the following:
1) The specific items in my store that violate the DMCA 2) Excerpts from the DMCA which provide support for your claim 3) Past judgements in your favor supporting your claim 4) Legal representation's name 5) The individuals to whom #4 is representing 6) The contact info of 4 and 5 7) The signatures of 4 and 5 8) Your recourse should I choose to ignore this request
Until then, no action will be taken or even considered on my part. Once
that info is provided, I'll have my legal representation contact you about
possible litigation.
-Sam Michaels
He also mentions in the post that he has been told by the manufacturer of the Linkers and a guy from Lik Sang to basically "tell them to kiss your ass and ignore it".
Travel a bit, spend some time getting to know people, and ask quiet questions to yourself. You'll be surprised how nice your first world country seems with its "corruption for money" and "people going broke from Enron". In many places, people can't *go* broke - sustinence is the daily effort... and "corruption" involves dead bodies in doorways or dumped in a garbage heap.
Just because other countries have worse crimes doesn't mean that what many American/Western corporations are doing isn't wrong. Murder is a higher crime than theft, but that does not make theft right, nor does it make it excusable. We should not excuse criminal or unfortunately legal, but highly immoral actions by corporations just because corporations in China and Russia are worse. Should we excuse murderers in America because there are guerrilla soldiers in the Congo and the Middle East that have twenty or thirty civilian kills on their belt? Of course we shouldn't. Stealing from several thousand people and bribing the US government into changing copyright and labor laws may not compare in magnitude to crimes like bribing police into beating people to death, but they're still wrong, and the culprits should still be held accountable.
Please read the court document. He did NOT have a Molotov Cocktail. They assumed, at first, that what they found in the house were two incomplete Molotov Cocktails. However, after testing the bottles, they found that they weren't Molotov Cocktails at all, because the liquid in them was not petroleum-based, and was not explosive. However, the prosecution still contended that they found "Molotov Cocktails", even though in the same paragraphs he explained that the kid didn't have anything of the sort.
Would I want these games banned? No. The ratings system that is in place is what I use. Before my kids get a game, I evaluate it. Only the responsible ones get through.
Do you seriously evaluate it, though, or do you just use the rating system? One thing that dawned on me recently is that the rating system is woefully inadequate. For instance, Grand Theft Auto III has large amounts of realistic urban violence, as well as things like prostitution. Therefore, it has an "M" (Mature) rating. Devil May Cry, on the other hand, is an over-the-top action game that reminded me in many ways of playing Sonic the Hedgehog when I was a kid. But because it has some small amounts of blood, even though the player NEVER fights anything remotely human, it, too, gets an "M" rating.
I guess all I'm saying is that as a parent, please evaluate the games you buy for your children more than just looking at the rating, if you don't already. Many games on the market today are mislabeled. In fact, any game with any sort of violence in it at all seems to get a Teen or Mature rating lately, despite not being very different from older games like Contra and Castlevania.
Actually, as I posted on K5, it looks like this might actually be a case of direct discrimination against Lik Sang. They may be denying it because of where it CAME FROM, instead of what it IS, which certainly worries me, because I was about to order from Lik Sang.
Hey, if you don't like it, why don't you go out, get a license to protest, make sure you aren't annoying anyone, make sure you're not on private property, make sure you don't have any kind of passive defense items on you (gas masks, bandanas), and fucking protest about it?! I'm so sick of these lazy assholes that think that America is so horrible, but will never get off their ass to invoke their right to politely ask the government if they can protest about it. As long as they don't mind, of course.
However you may feel about gun control, comparing them to a device that may have application in unauthorized copying of software is ludicrous.
This is because you COMPLETELY missed the point of what he was saying. In this context, this serial cable and a gun definitely have a lot in common. They're both part of a general trend in American (Western?) society today toward banning the tool used in a crime, instead of just banning the crime and punishing the offenders. It started with guns, a tool that most people are in favor of banning, despite the fact that it has both legitimate and illegitimate uses. Now, in a time when anti-gun laws have been getting more and more strict in the US for over a decade, the prophesies that those "psycho gun nuts" made is coming true: Once a government starts blaming tools for crimes instead of just the people that commit them, no tool is safe, because almost any tool can be used for both good and evil. Screwdrivers can screw nails in... but they can also be used to stab someone or pry open a machine that's protected by copyrights. Box cutters can cut boxes open and be used for household cutting purposes... but they can also be used to stab people. Serial cables can be used for legitimate, legal communication between two electronic devices... but they can also be used to break copyrights, as well as strangle someone. Do you see where this is going?
Guns can be used to kill an innocent baby, defend a family, shoot a convenience store clerk, hunt deer, and shoot an inanimate target ("target" as in the kind with a bull's eye on it). Personally, I don't think guns should be banned, but that's not the point of this post, nor the one you replied to. The point is whether or not we have to go as far as banning a tool, and thus banning both its legitimate and illegitimate uses, when misusing it is already a crime.
What's more, these players often have serious compatibility problems which cause headaches for users and content providers alike
"Compatibility problems"? The bootleg DVDs aren't the ones with the compatibility problems. They play 90% of the DVDs on the planet, instead of just DVDs that are marked for the same region as the player, which limits most DVD players to one sixth, if not less, of all of the DVDs on Earth. THAT'S a compatibility problem.
Yes, you get reliability, but with licensed players you also get intentional incompatibility with most DVDs on the face of the planet, and copy protection that keeps you from doing anything that they don't want you to do with the small percentage of discs that are available to you.
Actually, Immersion has had the patent since 1993, and they released force feedback vibration vests for the Genesis and Super Nintendo around that time. The Rumble Pack does not apply as prior art, but arcade machines most certainly do.
Force feedback controllers are the sorts of things that the patent system was created to protect, but Immersion isn't the sort of company that the patent system was created for. Immersion took an idea that had been implemented in planes, cars, and arcade machines for years, and then took the technology and went through the relatively simple process of "porting" it (in a sense) to video game consoles. Immersion didn't have a new or unique invention. They had a very old invention, and they manipulated the patent system in order to claim it as their own and make money off of it.
Have you ever considered that these two, and the rest of the government, might (a) know more about the situation than you...
I have to admit, I stop reading an article whenever I see a quote like this, and I see it all too often. Should government figures be invulnerable to criticism simply because they're part of the government, and because, at least under your reasoning, they must have not only better information, but better judgement than the rest of us? A quote like that smacks of thoughtless nationalistic bias.
Congratulations, you fit the profile for almost every negative Australian stereotype out there. Get violently drunk off your ass and you'll be the perfect poster boy for everything the world thinks is wrong with your country.
Australia's not that powerful a nation. I don't mean to badmouth Australia, but really, it isn't up there with the larger powers of the world that can fund entire South American dictatorships with their spare change, or nuke this planet and possibly the moon out of existence with only half of its nuclear arsenal. So this makes me wonder... what are countries like the United States, Britain, Russia, or the combined force of the European Union doing with THEIR resources?
With the power and money of the United States, I'm starting to wonder if this whole "Middle East" area is really just a set of Hollywood sound stages. And if they aren't, then Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are most certainly super-advanced molecular AI programs that have been created using a combination of Martian and Plutonian alien technologies.
Or if their aims are closer to the ones that the Australians chose (political gain), then these "homosexuals" and "fetuses" are most certainly a right wing fabrication that has reached a global scale through the use of flamboyantly dressed male holograms and "sonogram" machines that are actually just downloading black-and-white video images from the global satellite network code named "Holy Satellite System of Wonder, Goodness, and Jesus".
Instead of "It's a joke. Laugh.", I think I should use, "It's a joke. Calm down. Please."
Oh my God! These things attract LIGHTNING? Well, I guess that just makes them completely unusable, then. It's too bad... if only we had some sort of device that could protect (lightning) things from lightning (rod)...
I think I have a solution for your language barrier problem, Golem. You should take a hint from the most basic way that people that don't speak the same language communicate to each other: gestures. In other words, I think you should make their communication avatar-based, and let them put in commands to make the characters move. The kids may not understand the words for "yes" and "no" in each other's languages, but just about everyone will understand that a character nodding their head is "yes" and a character shaking their head is "no". You could even make it more complex by having them express anger by scowling and stamping their foot, happiness by smiling, greeting each other by waving, and staying together in the virtual world by pointing in a direction to indicate where something is or walking somewhere and making a "c'mere" gesture with their hand to get someone to follow them.
It wouldn't be absolutely perfect, because it can't express complex ideas like global politics or history, but it would make a very good communications medium for children.
As many others have stated, the cost of this is not ACTUALLY $80 per month. It is 80 Canadian Dollars per month, which is 50 US Dollars at the most. Seeing as how most of us in the US are paying $50USD per month for our cable modem services while operating under bandwidth restrictions and a full ban on servers, I don't think that $80CD for even faster service is that bad. You should also note that this isn't just a price hike. They're also offering faster service with less bandwidth at $23CDN, which is only about $15-16USD, and would make a GREAT alternative to dial-up for lighter users.
All in all, this is a brilliant pricing plan, and is still much, much cheaper than most cable modem services in the US. It's far from selling an organ to pay the bills.
Who cares if we're not evolving? For the most part, we've moved past evolution. Evolution cures diseases in a population over hundreds of years. Humanity has cured many of the diseases that it has set its sights on in less than a tenth of the time. The same goes for physical abilities. The fastest mammal on Earth isn't the cheetah, it's the human, which rides in cars at much faster speeds and rides in planes at even faster speeds than that. The same goes for the most physically powerful. Large felines may have sharp claws, but we have nuclear weaponry. An armadillo has a thick hide, but we have kevlar, ceramic, and now artificial spider silk.
Humanity has moved past evolution and into something new and unique. This is something that all of those scientists fail to realize. We've evolved to the point where we are, in many ways, the masters of our destinies.
I'm sorry, this should have been spaced:
I thought of the "eight hour work day" reply when I posted. I figured most people would realize that there's a HUGE difference between an employee working for eight hours and a gamer playing a video game for seven hours.
For one thing, there's the amount of work being put into those hours. An employee tries to, on average, minimize the amount of work that they're doing, take as many bathroom breaks as possible, etc. An employee also usually gets a half hour to an hour to break for lunch, as well as two days off every week. Now let's look at the gamer, using what we know about gamers and what we know about this kid. Gamers don't intentionally dawdle and "slack off" while gaming. They'll sit there at the game for the entire seven hours playing almost nonstop, with the only breaks being quick two minute bathroom breaks before running back to the game. They also usually don't break for lunch, either. And most importantly, this kid didn't seem to be taking days off, like the two days off that most employees get. He was playing "seven hours a day", and probably every day.
Working eight hours per day is much less stressful to the physical appendage (in this case, the fingers, hand, and wrists) being used during the work than gaming for seven hours is. Gaming has less breaks, more determination put into it, and in this kid's case, a lack of the two days off per week that an employee usually has at their job.
I thought of the "eight hour work day" reply when I posted. I figured most people would realize that there's a HUGE difference between an employee working for eight hours and a gamer playing a video game for seven hours.
For one thing, there's the amount of work being put into those hours. An employee tries to, on average, minimize the amount of work that they're doing, take as many bathroom breaks as possible, etc. An employee also usually gets a half hour to an hour to break for lunch, as well as two days off every week.
Now let's look at the gamer, using what we know about gamers and what we know about this kid. Gamers don't intentionally dawdle and "slack off" while gaming. They'll sit there at the game for the entire seven hours playing almost nonstop, with the only breaks being quick two minute bathroom breaks before running back to the game. They also usually don't break for lunch, either. And most importantly, this kid didn't seem to be taking days off, like the two days off that most employees get. He was playing "seven hours a day", and probably every day.
Working eight hours per day is much less stressful to the physical appendage (in this case, the fingers, hand, and wrists) being used during the work than gaming for seven hours is. Gaming has less breaks, more determination put into it, and in this kid's case, a lack of the two days off per week that an employee usually has at their job.
Playing a video game for seven hours or more in a single day is something every Final Fantasy fan has experienced the day after the game comes out. It isn't really a problem in most cases, as it's usual something that gamers only do once every one or two months. The real problem here was that the kid was doing it EVERY DAY, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK, which is unfathomable even for gaming "addicts".
Isn't doing ANYTHING for seven hours straight every single day hazardous to your health? This is more of a fact of life than a problem with video game systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, you're assuming that Blizzard is telling the truth about wishing that they could help the hobbyists, but having their arms twisted by piracy concerns. The real reason Blizzard doesn't use this obvious and logical solution is because they want everyone to go through Battle.net, and thus see (and possibly click on, but not likely) the ads that Blizzard is being paid to put on Battle.net. There's no way that Blizzard is going to put up with a little bit of extra bandwidth for the purpose of letting people use Battle.net without the ads and without going through their servers. If they did that, they'd be putting a lot of work into shooting themselves in the foot.
It's in the "Your Rights Online" section, but has never appeared on the frong page. This is, sadly, the fate of many quality submissions, including Ask Slashdot.
A couple of things:
First off, emulators are legal. I don't see how linking to emulators is showing any facilitation of piracy. Serving ROMs off their server would be different, but linking to other sites that create emulators for Nintendo products is not illegal, nor are the emulators themselves.
And second, just because it doesn't limit itself to a single legal thing doesn't mean that it should be banned by customs and made illegal in the US. Sure, the product you mentioned does nothing but develop games for the GBA. The Flash Linker does that AND lets people make legal copies of their games, which means that it actually has even more legal uses than the product you mentioned. The fact that it can pirate games alongside this does not necessarily make it a product devoted to piracy, and the surprisingly large independant software developer community that has sprung up on the web, mostly around the Flash Linker, indicates that at least a very large portion of its use is for legal purposes.
You're with Nintendo on this one because you don't know what you're talking about. Emulators are not illegal, and the presence of one illegal thing that the product can do does not mean that the product is solely devoted to piracy. Haven't you ever heard of guns, knives, VCRs, and computers? They can do many illegal things, but the presence of legal uses of the product (in this case developing independant software and making legal backups of games) means that it should not be banned, potentially even under the DMCA.
Oh, and one more thing: Not only are emulators not illegal, but they are also not solely about piracy. Myself and hundreds of others around the world have used emulators to play games that we've bought which have broken or make use of gaming systems that we've bought which have broken. I own a Super Nintendo and the game Super Metroid, but I recently chose to play a Super Metroid ROM in an emulator instead of putting the cartridge into my SNES and booting it up. Why? Because my Super Nintendo is a wreck, its plug is practically a fire hazard, and the contents of my Super Metroid cartridge make loud rattling noises when I pick it up. They're basically worthless hunks of plastic and silicon right now, but I still have the legal right to play them because I've bought both the system and the game. Thus, I am legally allowed to download ROMs off the web and play them in an emulator. This is not an uncommon practice.
The following is the letter that Sam Michaels is sending to Nintendo, copied from this message board post by Sam Michaels:
He also mentions in the post that he has been told by the manufacturer of the Linkers and a guy from Lik Sang to basically "tell them to kiss your ass and ignore it".
Just because other countries have worse crimes doesn't mean that what many American/Western corporations are doing isn't wrong. Murder is a higher crime than theft, but that does not make theft right, nor does it make it excusable. We should not excuse criminal or unfortunately legal, but highly immoral actions by corporations just because corporations in China and Russia are worse. Should we excuse murderers in America because there are guerrilla soldiers in the Congo and the Middle East that have twenty or thirty civilian kills on their belt? Of course we shouldn't. Stealing from several thousand people and bribing the US government into changing copyright and labor laws may not compare in magnitude to crimes like bribing police into beating people to death, but they're still wrong, and the culprits should still be held accountable.
Please read the court document. He did NOT have a Molotov Cocktail. They assumed, at first, that what they found in the house were two incomplete Molotov Cocktails. However, after testing the bottles, they found that they weren't Molotov Cocktails at all, because the liquid in them was not petroleum-based, and was not explosive. However, the prosecution still contended that they found "Molotov Cocktails", even though in the same paragraphs he explained that the kid didn't have anything of the sort.
Do you seriously evaluate it, though, or do you just use the rating system? One thing that dawned on me recently is that the rating system is woefully inadequate. For instance, Grand Theft Auto III has large amounts of realistic urban violence, as well as things like prostitution. Therefore, it has an "M" (Mature) rating. Devil May Cry, on the other hand, is an over-the-top action game that reminded me in many ways of playing Sonic the Hedgehog when I was a kid. But because it has some small amounts of blood, even though the player NEVER fights anything remotely human, it, too, gets an "M" rating.
I guess all I'm saying is that as a parent, please evaluate the games you buy for your children more than just looking at the rating, if you don't already. Many games on the market today are mislabeled. In fact, any game with any sort of violence in it at all seems to get a Teen or Mature rating lately, despite not being very different from older games like Contra and Castlevania.
Actually, as I posted on K5, it looks like this might actually be a case of direct discrimination against Lik Sang. They may be denying it because of where it CAME FROM, instead of what it IS, which certainly worries me, because I was about to order from Lik Sang.
Hey, if you don't like it, why don't you go out, get a license to protest, make sure you aren't annoying anyone, make sure you're not on private property, make sure you don't have any kind of passive defense items on you (gas masks, bandanas), and fucking protest about it?! I'm so sick of these lazy assholes that think that America is so horrible, but will never get off their ass to invoke their right to politely ask the government if they can protest about it. As long as they don't mind, of course.
::snicker::
This is because you COMPLETELY missed the point of what he was saying. In this context, this serial cable and a gun definitely have a lot in common. They're both part of a general trend in American (Western?) society today toward banning the tool used in a crime, instead of just banning the crime and punishing the offenders. It started with guns, a tool that most people are in favor of banning, despite the fact that it has both legitimate and illegitimate uses. Now, in a time when anti-gun laws have been getting more and more strict in the US for over a decade, the prophesies that those "psycho gun nuts" made is coming true: Once a government starts blaming tools for crimes instead of just the people that commit them, no tool is safe, because almost any tool can be used for both good and evil. Screwdrivers can screw nails in... but they can also be used to stab someone or pry open a machine that's protected by copyrights. Box cutters can cut boxes open and be used for household cutting purposes... but they can also be used to stab people. Serial cables can be used for legitimate, legal communication between two electronic devices... but they can also be used to break copyrights, as well as strangle someone. Do you see where this is going? Guns can be used to kill an innocent baby, defend a family, shoot a convenience store clerk, hunt deer, and shoot an inanimate target ("target" as in the kind with a bull's eye on it). Personally, I don't think guns should be banned, but that's not the point of this post, nor the one you replied to. The point is whether or not we have to go as far as banning a tool, and thus banning both its legitimate and illegitimate uses, when misusing it is already a crime.
What's more, these players often have serious compatibility problems which cause headaches for users and content providers alike
"Compatibility problems"? The bootleg DVDs aren't the ones with the compatibility problems. They play 90% of the DVDs on the planet, instead of just DVDs that are marked for the same region as the player, which limits most DVD players to one sixth, if not less, of all of the DVDs on Earth. THAT'S a compatibility problem.
Yes, you get reliability, but with licensed players you also get intentional incompatibility with most DVDs on the face of the planet, and copy protection that keeps you from doing anything that they don't want you to do with the small percentage of discs that are available to you.
;)
Buyer beware!
Actually, Immersion has had the patent since 1993, and they released force feedback vibration vests for the Genesis and Super Nintendo around that time. The Rumble Pack does not apply as prior art, but arcade machines most certainly do.
Force feedback controllers are the sorts of things that the patent system was created to protect, but Immersion isn't the sort of company that the patent system was created for. Immersion took an idea that had been implemented in planes, cars, and arcade machines for years, and then took the technology and went through the relatively simple process of "porting" it (in a sense) to video game consoles. Immersion didn't have a new or unique invention. They had a very old invention, and they manipulated the patent system in order to claim it as their own and make money off of it.
Have you ever considered that these two, and the rest of the government, might (a) know more about the situation than you...
I have to admit, I stop reading an article whenever I see a quote like this, and I see it all too often. Should government figures be invulnerable to criticism simply because they're part of the government, and because, at least under your reasoning, they must have not only better information, but better judgement than the rest of us? A quote like that smacks of thoughtless nationalistic bias.
Congratulations, you fit the profile for almost every negative Australian stereotype out there. Get violently drunk off your ass and you'll be the perfect poster boy for everything the world thinks is wrong with your country.
Australia's not that powerful a nation. I don't mean to badmouth Australia, but really, it isn't up there with the larger powers of the world that can fund entire South American dictatorships with their spare change, or nuke this planet and possibly the moon out of existence with only half of its nuclear arsenal. So this makes me wonder... what are countries like the United States, Britain, Russia, or the combined force of the European Union doing with THEIR resources?
With the power and money of the United States, I'm starting to wonder if this whole "Middle East" area is really just a set of Hollywood sound stages. And if they aren't, then Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are most certainly super-advanced molecular AI programs that have been created using a combination of Martian and Plutonian alien technologies.
Or if their aims are closer to the ones that the Australians chose (political gain), then these "homosexuals" and "fetuses" are most certainly a right wing fabrication that has reached a global scale through the use of flamboyantly dressed male holograms and "sonogram" machines that are actually just downloading black-and-white video images from the global satellite network code named "Holy Satellite System of Wonder, Goodness, and Jesus".
Instead of "It's a joke. Laugh.", I think I should use, "It's a joke. Calm down. Please."
Oh my God! These things attract LIGHTNING? Well, I guess that just makes them completely unusable, then. It's too bad... if only we had some sort of device that could protect (lightning) things from lightning (rod)...
That's supposed to be the idea. The terrorists called the deaths of Schwarzenegger's character's family "collateral damage", and it disgusts him.
I think I have a solution for your language barrier problem, Golem. You should take a hint from the most basic way that people that don't speak the same language communicate to each other: gestures. In other words, I think you should make their communication avatar-based, and let them put in commands to make the characters move. The kids may not understand the words for "yes" and "no" in each other's languages, but just about everyone will understand that a character nodding their head is "yes" and a character shaking their head is "no". You could even make it more complex by having them express anger by scowling and stamping their foot, happiness by smiling, greeting each other by waving, and staying together in the virtual world by pointing in a direction to indicate where something is or walking somewhere and making a "c'mere" gesture with their hand to get someone to follow them.
It wouldn't be absolutely perfect, because it can't express complex ideas like global politics or history, but it would make a very good communications medium for children.
As many others have stated, the cost of this is not ACTUALLY $80 per month. It is 80 Canadian Dollars per month, which is 50 US Dollars at the most. Seeing as how most of us in the US are paying $50USD per month for our cable modem services while operating under bandwidth restrictions and a full ban on servers, I don't think that $80CD for even faster service is that bad. You should also note that this isn't just a price hike. They're also offering faster service with less bandwidth at $23CDN, which is only about $15-16USD, and would make a GREAT alternative to dial-up for lighter users.
All in all, this is a brilliant pricing plan, and is still much, much cheaper than most cable modem services in the US. It's far from selling an organ to pay the bills.
Who cares if we're not evolving? For the most part, we've moved past evolution. Evolution cures diseases in a population over hundreds of years. Humanity has cured many of the diseases that it has set its sights on in less than a tenth of the time. The same goes for physical abilities. The fastest mammal on Earth isn't the cheetah, it's the human, which rides in cars at much faster speeds and rides in planes at even faster speeds than that. The same goes for the most physically powerful. Large felines may have sharp claws, but we have nuclear weaponry. An armadillo has a thick hide, but we have kevlar, ceramic, and now artificial spider silk. Humanity has moved past evolution and into something new and unique. This is something that all of those scientists fail to realize. We've evolved to the point where we are, in many ways, the masters of our destinies.
I'm sorry, this should have been spaced: I thought of the "eight hour work day" reply when I posted. I figured most people would realize that there's a HUGE difference between an employee working for eight hours and a gamer playing a video game for seven hours. For one thing, there's the amount of work being put into those hours. An employee tries to, on average, minimize the amount of work that they're doing, take as many bathroom breaks as possible, etc. An employee also usually gets a half hour to an hour to break for lunch, as well as two days off every week. Now let's look at the gamer, using what we know about gamers and what we know about this kid. Gamers don't intentionally dawdle and "slack off" while gaming. They'll sit there at the game for the entire seven hours playing almost nonstop, with the only breaks being quick two minute bathroom breaks before running back to the game. They also usually don't break for lunch, either. And most importantly, this kid didn't seem to be taking days off, like the two days off that most employees get. He was playing "seven hours a day", and probably every day. Working eight hours per day is much less stressful to the physical appendage (in this case, the fingers, hand, and wrists) being used during the work than gaming for seven hours is. Gaming has less breaks, more determination put into it, and in this kid's case, a lack of the two days off per week that an employee usually has at their job.
I thought of the "eight hour work day" reply when I posted. I figured most people would realize that there's a HUGE difference between an employee working for eight hours and a gamer playing a video game for seven hours. For one thing, there's the amount of work being put into those hours. An employee tries to, on average, minimize the amount of work that they're doing, take as many bathroom breaks as possible, etc. An employee also usually gets a half hour to an hour to break for lunch, as well as two days off every week. Now let's look at the gamer, using what we know about gamers and what we know about this kid. Gamers don't intentionally dawdle and "slack off" while gaming. They'll sit there at the game for the entire seven hours playing almost nonstop, with the only breaks being quick two minute bathroom breaks before running back to the game. They also usually don't break for lunch, either. And most importantly, this kid didn't seem to be taking days off, like the two days off that most employees get. He was playing "seven hours a day", and probably every day. Working eight hours per day is much less stressful to the physical appendage (in this case, the fingers, hand, and wrists) being used during the work than gaming for seven hours is. Gaming has less breaks, more determination put into it, and in this kid's case, a lack of the two days off per week that an employee usually has at their job.
Playing a video game for seven hours or more in a single day is something every Final Fantasy fan has experienced the day after the game comes out. It isn't really a problem in most cases, as it's usual something that gamers only do once every one or two months. The real problem here was that the kid was doing it EVERY DAY, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK, which is unfathomable even for gaming "addicts".
Isn't doing ANYTHING for seven hours straight every single day hazardous to your health? This is more of a fact of life than a problem with video game systems.