Govt troops have better arms and armour (i.e., citizens are not allowed bazookas, tanks and missiles);
Well, first of all, that's not an argument against letting citizens have small weapons, it's an argument FOR letting them have big ones.
A common repsonse to that point is along the lines of "but the framers of the Constitution didn't anticipate all these new weapons". Those who say that forget that there were more weapons in those days than just muskets. They had grenades back then. They had cannons. They had fully-armed warships. And ALL of those things were held by private citizens. The framers were fully cognizant of the concept of people having access to the same kind of firepower that the government did, and they were not only okay with it, they insisted upon it. So yes, citizens should be allowed to have rockets and tanks and such. If that makes you think we'd be seeing epidemics of guys driving around in tanks blowing up everything they see like a GTA game, it's because you're erroneously assuming that having a weapon equals using that weapon at every possible opportunity. People in the colonial days owned cannons but didn't go off shelling their neighbors all the time.
Furthermore, the quoted argument fails to take into account the complexity of the nature of armed conflict. Victory doesn't automatically go to the side with the biggest gun; just look at Vietnam for proof of that. There are matters of terrain, morale, initiative, local support, etc. Also, you can't bring every weapon your side has to bear in every conflict; cruise missiles aren't going to help you flush out a cell of insurgents hiding amongst the locals. Additionally, the government would have to worry about ruining its own infrastructure if it tried to brute-force its way through an insurgency with pure firepower, so it would have to choose between fighting with one hand behind its back or crippling its own ability to prosecute the very war it's fighting. Either of those narrows the gap for an insurgency. Not to the point where victory is assured, of course, but dismissing it on that basis is a classic nirvana fallacy.
Finally, the mere possibility of an armed revolt - even a hopelessly outmatched one - acts as a restraining influence upon the government. Putting down rebellions is risky and expensive, particularly for a first-world nation that is heavily invested in trade. An armed populace is unlikely to have serious need of its arms precisely because it has them. It's easy to forget this because you can take it for granted, and also because the fact that it's imperfect (Patriot Act, NDAA, etc) can fool you into thinking it's not happening at all.
In normal life we do NOT want people shooting back at the police, for example.
In instances where the police are the bad guys, we should want exactly that. People have a right to defend themselves from criminals who attack them, and that right doesn't disappear if the criminal in question happens to wear a badge. As for cases where the cops get shot at even when they're the good guys (and I will freely state that this is by far the more common case), this is going to happen regardless because criminals don't care about gun laws.
I think that by the time you get to defending yourself against government-backed thugs, things have already gone too far, the democratic checks and balances have failed
Well, that's like saying that by the time you get to using a fire extinguisher, things have gone too far and adherence to fire-safety protocol has failed - it's correct, but it misses the point. The case when checks and balances have failed are exactly what that defense is for.
and the cost of widespread gun ownership is too high to justify keeping guns for that small eventuality
The question you should ask yourself is why gun ownership appears to have s
Forgot to mention: Some PS3 games do require a firmware update (that is included on the disc in case you're not connected) or else they refuse to play. That IS pretty shitty, and one of the reasons I don't buy PS3 games new anymore. With the 360, you might get asked to download a patch for the game, but I have yet to encounter one that won't play without it. Declining the update does disconnect you from the network, but as I mentioned that doesn't disable achievements.
No, you still get achievements/tropies even if the console is disconnected from the Internet. They just don't sync to your Live/PSN account until you reconnect it.
I had a mate staying at my house with an Xbox. I used this to play COD 4 and decided to buy my own xbox and COD 4 game.
But with this new system, your mate will still be able to bring along his own Xbox and let you play his own copy of COD 4 on it. You will still have to buy your own Xbox to play the game if your mate's not there.
Great. So in order to loan a game to a friend, I have to loan him my console as well, even though he has the same console in his house. Gosh, that's not retarded at all.
Yes, you will have to buy a copy of the game instead of borrowing his, but so what? If it's that great you'd want to have your own copy anyway.
Says who? I've borrowed great games from friends without wanting to buy them myself, and in turn loaned great games of my own to friends who didn't want to buy them. That's not some edge case either, it's a common and perfectly reasonable thing to do. Furthermore, what if we simply want to give each other games? Or buy used games? Or rent games?
You really don't see how this is clearly worse than the way things are now?
And the other thing about the silly reaction is what if they are tied to the Live account? No need to lend the console, you just log on as yourself when you show your friend the game. What would be nice is to be able to download the games so you don't even need the disc. Just go to someone's house, log in, start the download watch a movie on another system, when the movie is done, play the game.
Downloading is fine, but you know what would be nice? If you could just pop in the disc and play the goddamned game. Like current consoles already do. Wanting the same basic functionality from next-gen hardware that its predecessors had isn't a "silly reaction" at all.
Quick, everyone jump on their always-on internet connections and complain about needing an always-on internet connection to play this new game! How ridiculous to expect people with a computer or console capable of running this game to also have internet access in the 21st century.
Yes. And if the Technology Fairy came down to everyone's home and gave us all magical Internet connections with literally zero latency and infinite up/down, it would STILL be ridiculous, because there's no good reason that a game needs a constant internet connection if it isn't integral to the actual gameplay.
Understand? The problem isn't that they expect us to have Internet access. The problem is that they think we should need permission to use the product we bought.
If the military can turn this suit into an important tool for war, then there will be laws that ban civilians from having it, no matter how useful it could be for civilian industries.
The only ethical response to ubisoft is not to buy their product, not to use their product, not to infringe upon their product and then tell them you are doing it and tell your friends.
Not true. There are at least two more ethical responses:
If available, buy the title on a platform where the objectionable DRM isn't used. I bought AC2 for the 360 largely for this reason (Yes, I know 360 games have some DRM, but not of the intentionally-screw-the-legit-customer variety).
Buy the title, "pirate" it anyway, and play the pirated version in order to enjoy the product you paid for without the DRM.
In either case, telling the publisher what you did and why is a good idea, though not ethically necessary.
Done in large enough numbers, both can make them realize that DRM is a drain on profits (the $X per copy sold that was spent on DRM would otherwise have been profit). Additionally, the second option acts as further evidence that "one crack downloaded =/= one sale lost".
How does one state equal the entire country? Or even three? The answer, of course, is that is doesn't, and you're simply lying.
And a blanket ban IS unconstitutional. The fact that it hasn't been overturned yet doesn't prove otherwise. To suggest that it does is to argue that any law on the books is automatically constitutional.
Posters said there were NO laws against it. I proved otherwise.
Those posters were attacking your original claim, which was this:
You have a face that's publicly viewable when you go on the street - and you don't have the right to wear a mask to hide it, What's the problem with that?
That claim is not "there are laws against it in a small number of places". It was a generalized statement of fact which, in your ignorance, you assumed applied everywhere. Your claim was that laws against masks were the rule, not the exception. You failed miserably in supporting that statement. Upon realizing this, you started trying to move the goalposts so you could redefine your position as "there's a law against it SOMEWHERE" rather than your previous position of "there's a law against it EVERYWHERE".
It's binary - either there are or there aren't. It's like being pregnant - either you are or you aren't.
But again, your claim wasn't that some place, somewhere has an anti-mask law. It was that anti-mask laws are prevalent, which as your own evidence shows is false by a binary standard.
So admit that you're wrong.
No, for the same reason I won't admit that I'm secretly the King of the Moth People.
And if you want to go by percentages, there's a country bigger than yours that has laws against it right on top of you. And there are other countries that also have similar laws.
If you want to retroactively broaden the scope of your original claim to cover the whole world, you face some problems:
It's an implicit admission that your claim fails to hold true in its original context.
It carries a much larger burden of proof than the one you were already unwilling to shoulder.
It applies to a hell of a lot more than masks. For example, you could just as easily make a blanket statement of "you don't have a right to worship as you please" based on the fact that a big chunk of the world's governments have anti-this-religion-or-that-one laws. If you want your reasoning to be consistent, you either have to commit to defending positions like that, or abandon your original one.
It doesn't fool anyone; you're just moving the goalposts again.
I've provided a way for you to demonstrate that I'm wrong. Simply go into the nearest gun store wearing a mask.
Unfortunately for you, the ways in which I can prove you wrong are not limited to what you "provide". Even "prove you wrong" is more than I need to do; I need merely point out how you have not proven yourself right. I have shown how your cited evidence fails to support your claim, and you have not defended it. You, as the one making the assertive claim, are the one under the burden of proof. So the fact that I'm not going to do what you ask doesn't say what you want to think it does. And you know it.
One of the posters claimed that there were no such laws. I proved otherwise.
You "proved" that your claim is less than 6% true, which you would have known if you had actually read your source. Remember: three states out of fifty (and zero cities, but we'll get to that later), none of whom have been shown by you to be enforcing these laws in the context you claimed or defending them in court. Since your original claim is a blanket statement covering the entire US (assuming that you only meant the US), this isn't even remotely enough to show that your claim should be accepted as generally true everywhere.
Now, if you want to show that those laws are not in effect, do so, and pics or it didn't happen.
There is on constitutional right to go around wearing a mask
Well, first of all, there doesn't need to be. Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.".
But we need not fall back on the Ninth. Wearing a mask has two primary functions: self-expression and anonymity, both of which are amply protected by the First Amendment.
Therefore, any laws against masks can only pass Constitutional muster if tailored to a very narrow scope. Those of California, DC, and Florida would probably survive since they focus on the use of masks to aid activities that are unlawful anyway.
New York's did survive a challenge, but don't get excited by the headline; read the article and you'll see that the reasoning was tied entirely to safety issues arising from the fact that the plaintiffs were seeking to hold a KKK parade in their hoods, and it was held that the hoods did not convey anything that the robes didn't. Obviously the same could not be said of, say, a protest by Anonymous, and certainly not to someone just walking down the street as in your original statement of "You have a face that's publicly viewable when you go on the street - and you don't have the right to wear a mask to hide it". Note also that the court recognized that "the law could theoretically
be applied in a manner that violates the First Amendment’s protection of expressive conduct,
also referred to as communicative conduct or symbolic speech.". Applied to a case like Anonymous where the mask is essential to the message, or to an individual, the law is far less likely to hold up (it doesn't even apply in the latter case anyway).
And if New York's law has chinks in its armor, then those of North Carolina and the Virginias, with their broad scopes, would get chewed up and spit out like Chiclets. Assuming they even get enforced in the "walking down the street" context of your original claim, that is.
...and various states, as well as municipalities, prohibit it.
Prove it, then, and furthermore prove that said prohibition - and NOT against Klan rallies and the like, but against indi
People made a blanket statement that there was no such law - I proved that there is.
No, you made the blanket statement:
"You have a face that's publicly viewable when you go on the street - and you don't have the right to wear a mask to hide it". You succeeded, at most, at "proving" this to be true in a narrow set of circumstances...in three states out of fifty. That's a success rate of less than 6%.
As for "unlikely to happen", tell that to the 8-year-old who was arrested for writing on her desk with an erasable marker, or the 5-year-old kid who was charged with sexual assault because he kissed a classmate.
Ignoring your failure to cite sources showing these incidents actually took place, let's look at the parallel you're trying to make. Laws against vandalism and sexual assault:
Exist in every state.
Are regularly enforced.
Outlaw an activity in which one person clearly violates the rights of another. An actual, honest-to-god crime, in other words.
Were, in the examples you (neglect to) cite, applied to situations drastically different from those they were meant to address.
None of this applies to your so-called "can't hide your face" law. Your comparison doesn't hold water.
Feel free to prove me wrong by going into your local bank wearing a mask. Better yet, go into your local gun shop wearing a mask. Do Darwin proud!:-)
So, having started from a position of "you don't have a right to hide your face in public", you have now backpedalled to "if you hide your face in certain specific public places people might think you're breaking a completely different law even though you're not". That's about as close to admitting you were wrong as you can get without coming out and honestly saying so.
And don't try to shift the burden of proof. You made the positive claim, you have to back it up. Thus far you have failed miserably to do so.
You obviously didn't read the link - it lists STATES that ban masks, not cities.
You obviously didn't read the link. Few states are listed as having anti-mask laws, fewer still support your general claim of "you don't have a right to wear a mask":
California - Illegal to wear a mask for the purposes of disguising yourself during the commission of a crime or evading capture by the police.
DC, Florida - Illegal to wear a mask for the purposes of intimidation/threats, depriving others of their legal rights, or avoiding identification while committing a crime.
New York - Illegal to hang around masked in a public place with a group of people similarly masked
North Carolina, Virgina, West Virginia - Congratulations, these have a broad enough scope to superficially support your claim...provided none of the listed exemptions apply. You also have to ignore the fact that these are essentially blue-laws targeted at the KKK and their like, enforcement of which against someone just going about his business while masked is laughably unlikely to happen in the first place, much less survive a Constitutional challenge.
Even that aside, all it shows is that there are three states currently violating your right to wear a mask in public, not that you don't have the right to begin with. You absolutely do have that right. It harms nobody, and other people are not entitled to see your face.
It's amazing how many people like you are missing the obvious fact that the paper is a joke. Has Slashdot instituted a "No Understanding Deadpan Humor" policy that I didn't hear about?
He wasn't being serious, O Misser Of Preposterously Obvious Jokes. You've basically called Johnathon Swift an idiot for not seeing the flaws in his plan to end Irish hunger through cannibalism.
Have you ever bought and ate a real steak. No... Not the kind you buy at Western Corral, but the NY cut or Filet mignon aged beef marinated over 24 hours cooked by a professional with the right blend of herbs spices and other fruity nonsense
The right blend of herbs and spices is "salt and pepper". And fuck marinating. Just let that fucker cuddle up to peanut oil and hot cast iron for a couple minutes per side and Bob's your uncle. That is a real steak. Anything else and you might as well just go watch Beaches and have a good cry with the rest of the girls.
I'm ok with every citizen being under surveillance - under one condition, and one condition only: those in power are subject to the same surveillance, and the surveillance is accessible by everyone, freely, with no restrictions.
No, that's not okay either. A camera in the mayor's office does not justify a camera in my living room.
CoX launched without PVP and I felt it was a betrayal to add it after the fact.
That betrayal exists solely within your mind, since you were never promised a PVP-less game in the first place. Arenas were originally going to be a launch feature; they just kept getting pushed back until Issue 4. PVP was always part of the plan. Frankly, it's silly not to have PVP in a superhero MMO (as long as it's optional), especially once you add villain play.
Sorry dude but screwing the people of this country out of their money and wrecking the economy was a bipartisan effort. Blaming it on R or D alone is rather stupid, like jellyfish stupid.
You know what's even more stupid? Inferring things that were never implied.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, first of all, that's not an argument against letting citizens have small weapons, it's an argument FOR letting them have big ones.
A common repsonse to that point is along the lines of "but the framers of the Constitution didn't anticipate all these new weapons". Those who say that forget that there were more weapons in those days than just muskets. They had grenades back then. They had cannons. They had fully-armed warships. And ALL of those things were held by private citizens. The framers were fully cognizant of the concept of people having access to the same kind of firepower that the government did, and they were not only okay with it, they insisted upon it. So yes, citizens should be allowed to have rockets and tanks and such. If that makes you think we'd be seeing epidemics of guys driving around in tanks blowing up everything they see like a GTA game, it's because you're erroneously assuming that having a weapon equals using that weapon at every possible opportunity. People in the colonial days owned cannons but didn't go off shelling their neighbors all the time.
Furthermore, the quoted argument fails to take into account the complexity of the nature of armed conflict. Victory doesn't automatically go to the side with the biggest gun; just look at Vietnam for proof of that. There are matters of terrain, morale, initiative, local support, etc. Also, you can't bring every weapon your side has to bear in every conflict; cruise missiles aren't going to help you flush out a cell of insurgents hiding amongst the locals. Additionally, the government would have to worry about ruining its own infrastructure if it tried to brute-force its way through an insurgency with pure firepower, so it would have to choose between fighting with one hand behind its back or crippling its own ability to prosecute the very war it's fighting. Either of those narrows the gap for an insurgency. Not to the point where victory is assured, of course, but dismissing it on that basis is a classic nirvana fallacy.
Finally, the mere possibility of an armed revolt - even a hopelessly outmatched one - acts as a restraining influence upon the government. Putting down rebellions is risky and expensive, particularly for a first-world nation that is heavily invested in trade. An armed populace is unlikely to have serious need of its arms precisely because it has them. It's easy to forget this because you can take it for granted, and also because the fact that it's imperfect (Patriot Act, NDAA, etc) can fool you into thinking it's not happening at all.
In instances where the police are the bad guys, we should want exactly that. People have a right to defend themselves from criminals who attack them, and that right doesn't disappear if the criminal in question happens to wear a badge. As for cases where the cops get shot at even when they're the good guys (and I will freely state that this is by far the more common case), this is going to happen regardless because criminals don't care about gun laws.
Well, that's like saying that by the time you get to using a fire extinguisher, things have gone too far and adherence to fire-safety protocol has failed - it's correct, but it misses the point. The case when checks and balances have failed are exactly what that defense is for.
The question you should ask yourself is why gun ownership appears to have s
Forgot to mention: Some PS3 games do require a firmware update (that is included on the disc in case you're not connected) or else they refuse to play. That IS pretty shitty, and one of the reasons I don't buy PS3 games new anymore. With the 360, you might get asked to download a patch for the game, but I have yet to encounter one that won't play without it. Declining the update does disconnect you from the network, but as I mentioned that doesn't disable achievements.
No, you still get achievements/tropies even if the console is disconnected from the Internet. They just don't sync to your Live/PSN account until you reconnect it.
Great. So in order to loan a game to a friend, I have to loan him my console as well, even though he has the same console in his house. Gosh, that's not retarded at all.
Says who? I've borrowed great games from friends without wanting to buy them myself, and in turn loaned great games of my own to friends who didn't want to buy them. That's not some edge case either, it's a common and perfectly reasonable thing to do. Furthermore, what if we simply want to give each other games? Or buy used games? Or rent games?
You really don't see how this is clearly worse than the way things are now?
Downloading is fine, but you know what would be nice? If you could just pop in the disc and play the goddamned game. Like current consoles already do. Wanting the same basic functionality from next-gen hardware that its predecessors had isn't a "silly reaction" at all.
Yes. And if the Technology Fairy came down to everyone's home and gave us all magical Internet connections with literally zero latency and infinite up/down, it would STILL be ridiculous, because there's no good reason that a game needs a constant internet connection if it isn't integral to the actual gameplay.
Understand? The problem isn't that they expect us to have Internet access. The problem is that they think we should need permission to use the product we bought.
When it comes to puns, less is ore.
Exactly. Just like they did with:
Not true. There are at least two more ethical responses:
In either case, telling the publisher what you did and why is a good idea, though not ethically necessary.
Done in large enough numbers, both can make them realize that DRM is a drain on profits (the $X per copy sold that was spent on DRM would otherwise have been profit). Additionally, the second option acts as further evidence that "one crack downloaded =/= one sale lost".
How does one state equal the entire country? Or even three? The answer, of course, is that is doesn't, and you're simply lying.
And a blanket ban IS unconstitutional. The fact that it hasn't been overturned yet doesn't prove otherwise. To suggest that it does is to argue that any law on the books is automatically constitutional.
Those posters were attacking your original claim, which was this:
That claim is not "there are laws against it in a small number of places". It was a generalized statement of fact which, in your ignorance, you assumed applied everywhere. Your claim was that laws against masks were the rule, not the exception. You failed miserably in supporting that statement. Upon realizing this, you started trying to move the goalposts so you could redefine your position as "there's a law against it SOMEWHERE" rather than your previous position of "there's a law against it EVERYWHERE".
But again, your claim wasn't that some place, somewhere has an anti-mask law. It was that anti-mask laws are prevalent, which as your own evidence shows is false by a binary standard.
No, for the same reason I won't admit that I'm secretly the King of the Moth People.
If you want to retroactively broaden the scope of your original claim to cover the whole world, you face some problems:
Unfortunately for you, the ways in which I can prove you wrong are not limited to what you "provide". Even "prove you wrong" is more than I need to do; I need merely point out how you have not proven yourself right. I have shown how your cited evidence fails to support your claim, and you have not defended it. You, as the one making the assertive claim, are the one under the burden of proof. So the fact that I'm not going to do what you ask doesn't say what you want to think it does. And you know it.
You "proved" that your claim is less than 6% true, which you would have known if you had actually read your source. Remember: three states out of fifty (and zero cities, but we'll get to that later), none of whom have been shown by you to be enforcing these laws in the context you claimed or defending them in court. Since your original claim is a blanket statement covering the entire US (assuming that you only meant the US), this isn't even remotely enough to show that your claim should be accepted as generally true everywhere.
Again, burden of proof. You're arguing from ignorance here.
Well, first of all, there doesn't need to be. Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.".
But we need not fall back on the Ninth. Wearing a mask has two primary functions: self-expression and anonymity, both of which are amply protected by the First Amendment.
Therefore, any laws against masks can only pass Constitutional muster if tailored to a very narrow scope. Those of California, DC, and Florida would probably survive since they focus on the use of masks to aid activities that are unlawful anyway.
New York's did survive a challenge, but don't get excited by the headline; read the article and you'll see that the reasoning was tied entirely to safety issues arising from the fact that the plaintiffs were seeking to hold a KKK parade in their hoods, and it was held that the hoods did not convey anything that the robes didn't. Obviously the same could not be said of, say, a protest by Anonymous, and certainly not to someone just walking down the street as in your original statement of "You have a face that's publicly viewable when you go on the street - and you don't have the right to wear a mask to hide it". Note also that the court recognized that "the law could theoretically be applied in a manner that violates the First Amendment’s protection of expressive conduct, also referred to as communicative conduct or symbolic speech.". Applied to a case like Anonymous where the mask is essential to the message, or to an individual, the law is far less likely to hold up (it doesn't even apply in the latter case anyway).
And if New York's law has chinks in its armor, then those of North Carolina and the Virginias, with their broad scopes, would get chewed up and spit out like Chiclets. Assuming they even get enforced in the "walking down the street" context of your original claim, that is.
Prove it, then, and furthermore prove that said prohibition - and NOT against Klan rallies and the like, but against indi
No, you made the blanket statement: "You have a face that's publicly viewable when you go on the street - and you don't have the right to wear a mask to hide it". You succeeded, at most, at "proving" this to be true in a narrow set of circumstances...in three states out of fifty. That's a success rate of less than 6%.
Ignoring your failure to cite sources showing these incidents actually took place, let's look at the parallel you're trying to make. Laws against vandalism and sexual assault:
None of this applies to your so-called "can't hide your face" law. Your comparison doesn't hold water.
So, having started from a position of "you don't have a right to hide your face in public", you have now backpedalled to "if you hide your face in certain specific public places people might think you're breaking a completely different law even though you're not". That's about as close to admitting you were wrong as you can get without coming out and honestly saying so.
And don't try to shift the burden of proof. You made the positive claim, you have to back it up. Thus far you have failed miserably to do so.
You obviously didn't read the link. Few states are listed as having anti-mask laws, fewer still support your general claim of "you don't have a right to wear a mask":
California - Illegal to wear a mask for the purposes of disguising yourself during the commission of a crime or evading capture by the police.
DC, Florida - Illegal to wear a mask for the purposes of intimidation/threats, depriving others of their legal rights, or avoiding identification while committing a crime.
New York - Illegal to hang around masked in a public place with a group of people similarly masked
North Carolina, Virgina, West Virginia - Congratulations, these have a broad enough scope to superficially support your claim...provided none of the listed exemptions apply. You also have to ignore the fact that these are essentially blue-laws targeted at the KKK and their like, enforcement of which against someone just going about his business while masked is laughably unlikely to happen in the first place, much less survive a Constitutional challenge.
Even that aside, all it shows is that there are three states currently violating your right to wear a mask in public, not that you don't have the right to begin with. You absolutely do have that right. It harms nobody, and other people are not entitled to see your face.
It's amazing how many people like you are missing the obvious fact that the paper is a joke. Has Slashdot instituted a "No Understanding Deadpan Humor" policy that I didn't hear about?
He wasn't being serious, O Misser Of Preposterously Obvious Jokes. You've basically called Johnathon Swift an idiot for not seeing the flaws in his plan to end Irish hunger through cannibalism.
The right blend of herbs and spices is "salt and pepper". And fuck marinating. Just let that fucker cuddle up to peanut oil and hot cast iron for a couple minutes per side and Bob's your uncle. That is a real steak. Anything else and you might as well just go watch Beaches and have a good cry with the rest of the girls.
Then let me be more clear: A camera pointed at the mayor does not justify a camera pointed at me.
No, that's not okay either. A camera in the mayor's office does not justify a camera in my living room.
Hell, I doubt many people inside Iran know the truth.
That betrayal exists solely within your mind, since you were never promised a PVP-less game in the first place. Arenas were originally going to be a launch feature; they just kept getting pushed back until Issue 4. PVP was always part of the plan. Frankly, it's silly not to have PVP in a superhero MMO (as long as it's optional), especially once you add villain play.
You know what's even more stupid? Inferring things that were never implied.
Sorry, kiddo. Bush signed OBRA 90. You don't get to play the "it's all their fault" card.
We've heard that before, though, haven't we?
Which is a childish and stupid refrain, as roleplaying doesn't magically become harder just because you use 3rd or 4th ed rules instead of 1st or 2nd.