Just heard that New Hampshire has one of the lowest crime rates per capita of any State in the Union. Nevada, another state similar in population to New Hampshire, has one of the highest. I betcha gun ownership there is much lower than here!:-)
Libertarianism is another form of extremism, just like religious extremism [is a form of extremism].
The comparison between libertarianism and religious extremism in that sentence is not equivalence, it's similarity (specifically that they both share the common trait of being forms of extremism).
Certainly there are extremists in any point of view, had you stated, "some libertarians behave like religious extremists in their ignoring inconvenient facts and going into denial to preserve their belief." No one would have accused you of leaping to conclusions,
If it was merely common among libertarians to be extremist, I would have said "some." But the thing is, the definition of libertarian in common usage requires that a person be what I would call extremist. Because once you accept more than a couple regulations as justified, you're no longer considered a libertarian. And there's more than a few regulations that are very thoroughly justified.
instead a wikipedia link to cognitive dissonance would have been appropriate.
Thank you for the suggestion. I actually have linked to cognitive dissonance before, but the phrase did not come to mind this time.
Now, to the mod who wasted point on calling my previous post a troll, really? Remember kids troll mod != something you disagree with.
Generally a reply that responds to someone as if they said something they didn't say and that ignores most of what they actually did say is a strawman and will be modded down.
But contract enforcement is coercive. Aren't libertarians against coercion?
I could start ranting that contract law is unnecessary, and people will be honorable out of their own self-interest, to preserve their reputation and livelihood. I could then continue on about how the non-enforcible contracts will have greater value due to people learning personal responsibility from the deregulation of contracts. Oh, and the markets will thrive under these new conditions and we'll all be wealthier.
And if you say that's nonsense and argue that contracts are justified because they're opt-in, well it's all opt-in. Nobody is forcing you to live in this country. You can leave if you don't like it.
Wow... Just wow. Were you going for an ironic +5 funny or are you being serious?
I didn't say libertarianism = ism = religious extremism. I said libertarianism is like religious extremism because the followers have the same behavior pattern of ignoring inconvenient facts and going into denial to preserve their belief.
And what'd you do? You ignored the inconvenient examples of this behavior that I provided and responded as if that information wasn't there. Did your brain block it out? It's ironic because now you've made yourself into an example of exactly what I was talking about.
Government's other role would be to enforce contractual arrangements. You signed your name on the dotted line? You live up to that contract. You breach? You pay the penalty.
But that contradicts the individual freedom you're advocating. Why should I be required to do something, just because I wrote my name on a piece of paper with some formal text saying I'd do it? Why should the government have the power to penalize me?
Be careful when you answer. If you say that it's justified because contracts are a beneficial social institution... Well that argument is a whole Pandora's box of problems for libertarians.
You hit the nail right on the head there. Libertarianism is another form of extremism, just like religious extremism. The followers actively try to suppress information that contradicts their ideology, and they're frequently in denial, rearranging the facts in their head to make them acceptable.
Even issues much smaller than this, like the Wiimote lawsuit, elicit denial. This got modded flamebait and troll because I pointed out that whether the wriststraps were defective and were breaking was relevant to the lawsuit. But no, it's a lawsuit, so it must be invalid no matter what. And whatever has to be true to make the lawsuit invalid must be true.
There were people arguing that the wriststrap was not intended as a safety device, therefore Nintendo can't be liable for damage caused by its failure. OK, never mind that that's an unsourced claim stating the opposite of what's apparent from just looking at the wriststrap and being familiar with the Wiimote's intended function. Can we just assume that it is and discuss a what-if based on the straps being a safety device? No, because in that scenario, a lawsuit might have some credibility! Even a hypothetical, they refuse to process.
One person pulled a scenario out of nowhere where the strap was frayed from a child chewing on the strap, and the parent was too irresponsible to replace it. It wasn't in the original story, so I searched for that on Google. I could not find a single instance of that happening. He just made it up on the spot to blame the people suing for the problem they were suing over.
Another person responded that car manufacturers shouldn't be liable for defective seatbelts. The reason, apparently, is because he can blame the driver for the crash instead. Libertarianism is frequently about blaming victims in order to justify inaction. It's crazy.
Animal rights activists and environmentalists are two different things. For one, an environmentalist would be far more concerned with the pollution from the rocket than they would worry about a single injured bat being killed.
You assume the government spends more efficiently than individuals.
No, I'm not assuming that. For one, it would be an unsupported generalization to say that government always spends more efficiently than individuals, regardless of the task. Just like it'd be an unsupported generalization to say that individuals always spend more efficiently than government. The truth is that government works better than individuals for some things, and not as good for others.
There's plenty of evidence for this. For just one example, get data on average tax as a percentage of income by state and average income by state. Put it in a spreadsheet and sort it with highest tax percent on top. Then calculate after-tax incomes. You'll find that there's a strong correlation between tax rate and after-tax income, meaning you're better off being the average citizen of a high-tax state then you'd be as the average citizen of a low tax state.
In reality it works like this : the government doesn't produce anything.
For a very narrow definition of 'produce' not commonly used in economics, yes that's almost true, but not by necessity. The government is fully capable of hiring people to manufacture things. But it just happens to be that ours usually outsources production to other companies. Would your opinion of the government really improve if we had state-owned manufacturing plants so that it did produce stuff?
And to be reasonable, you have to count anything the government does that has economic value: USPS, education, emergency services, police, the whole criminal justice system, the military, roads and other infrastructure, etc... Those all produce in the economic sense.
All I'm advocating is that we make case-by-case judgments on whether the government should do something and pick the more rational choice.
They're not being secretive about their position on the issue. They're being very up-front and honest about it. If they called themselves a civil liberties organization, never took second amendment cases and didn't explain the reason for not taking those cases, you might have a case for hypocrisy.
But they do state their position on the second amendment. By pointing that out, your link actually shows that they're not hypocrites. They don't fit the definition.
Now, I won't accuse you personally of this without evidence, but I've talked to other people that expressed the same sentiment, that the ACLU is hypocritical for their position on the second amendment. They often claim they would support "a real civil liberties organization." But it soon becomes apparent that they favor blasphemy laws, warrentless wiretapping and other unchecked government powers, and generally all sort of things that act against civil liberties.
These people are faking a virtue they don't have so they can attack the ACLU while claiming moral high ground. That fits the dictionary definition of hypocrite perfectly.
I do know what he's talking about. The problem is it doesn't make any sense. Not everyone agrees on the meaning of the second amendment, and it doesn't automatically make someone a hypocrite if they disagree with you.
a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.
a person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, esp. one whose private life, opinions, or statements belie his or her public statements.
Unless they're secretly fighting for individual gun rights, they're not hypocrites.
If it isn't the money itself that you own, but is instead the value represented by that money, then there are some implications.
For example, if the government takes 90% of everyone's money and destroys it, each remaining dollar is suddenly worth ten times as much, so nobody has lost value and nothing has been stolen. But if you manage to avoid paying, then your wealth increases at the expense of others and you'd be stealing value from your fellow citizens.
Similarly, if the government taxes and in return provides valuable services and economic stimulus, it boosts the value of your remaining dollars. If you don't pay the amount you're supposed to, then you're stealing.
The only fair way to distribute money taken at gunpoint, ie. taxes, is to not take the money away in the first place.
The problem with the "taken at gunpoint" rhetoric is that you're treating money like it's your property. It isn't. It belongs to the Federal Reserve, and the government is authorized to collect interest on their behalf.
Are you sure about that? My memory is fuzzy on this, but when I first read up on FAT32 it was stated that the presence of short filenames was not a requirement.
That was NTFS. If you gave the proper command to chkdsk, it would remove all the short filenames and turn that "feature" off. This freed up some space and made certain things, such as searches, a lot faster.
What we have here is a stealth tax. There is absolutely no way these costs will not be born by the consumer. This is the nature of business. If your costs rise, you need more revenue to cover them.
Wrong. There is absolutely no way that these costs will be paid by consumers. Basic supply and demand can tell you that. Businesses already set prices to maximize revenue. Dropping below the ideal price won't get them enough extra revenue from the increased demand to cover the loss from the lower price, and increasing the price won't make enough extra revenue from the increased charges to cover the loss from lost customers.
So they can't pass the cost on to consumers. What they can do is cut their own excess and increase efficiency. And those actions are good for the economy.
The Postal 3 dev listed Linux as a confirmed platform for the Source Engine in 2009.
Postal 3 isn't developed by Valve. So unless there's specific confirmation that the PC version of Postal 3 will be available on Steam and only Steam, this confirms nothing about Steam for Linux. Notice that neither of the previous games were released on Steam.
That doesn't confirm much. It doesn't even say how many keyboards, out of the 62 replaced, were missing W keys. It could be just a few. But I'm guessing zero. Who has claimed to have personally seen the supposed vandalism? I find it odd nobody ever took pictures of it. The GAO interviewed 100 people, which is enough to get several people to report rumors they had heard as truth. I wouldn't be surprised if there were even a few people who had developed false memories of the events after the rumor had gone around a while.
I just don't think its fair to pretend this is any less serious than it actually is.
The problem is, there's no evidence that this significantly affects hard drive life. It's all just anecdotes and speculation so far.
Yeah, the manufacturers give a maximum load cycle count, but I believe this number is similar to MTBF. That is, even with a hypothetical hard drive that can't be worn out any faster due to excessive load cycling, you'd still have a maximum load cycles figure, which is simply the average number of load cycles reached when the drives died for some other reason during testing. But reaching this maximum count faster wouldn't wear out the drive any faster.
The worst part here is that I think you're sincere, rather than trolling.
Well, I have to say I am rather disturbed by you and the groupthink exhibited in this discussion.
The parachute analogy is bad. A parachute is an essential part of skydiving. Without parachutes, or if parachutes couldn't be made reliable, nobody would skydive, because chance of injury approaches 100%.
I never said you were skydiving, I just said you jumped out of a plane. Maybe the engine failed. A parachute can be a safety device, too. But it didn't have to be a good analogy (to the Wiimote incident) anyway, because I said it to demonstrate the fallacy being invoked. It was intended more as an analogy to that fallacy.
The seat belt analogy is pretty good. Seat belts, like wiimote straps, are not essential. You don't expect to use them; they're there "just in case." Without seat belts, people would still drive.
I may not expect to use seatbelts, but I expect them to function.
With seat belts, people still die in car collisions. They're a good idea, but not something you expect to use.
Kind of like a lock. With locks, people still get burglarized, but I'd still be angry at the lock company if I came home, twisted the door knob, and found that my locked door opened without my key. What would you do? "Oh well, if I was burglarized, it'd be the burglar's fault, so no big deal..."
If I got into a car crash and we were all wearing seat belts that malfunctioned, and I was horribly crippled for life and everyone I love died, it wouldn't occur to me to sue anyone over the seat belts. I got in a crash.
I don't believe that, and you can't know that.
That's an extreme exception, and it's not the seat belt manufacturer's fault I crashed.
It's not the paramedics' fault you crashed either. Is it OK if they do nothing, too?
Seat belts are not "used" (yes, they're worn, but they don't do anything) in the normal operation of a car. That belt exists as a favor to me, to improve an exceptional case (a case that has never happened with me, in nearly 25 years of driving (though I still wear a seat belt)), not because it's something I need.
But it looks like you would actually blame the seat belt maker,
I'm not blaming, I'm holding responsible. But I'll get to that.
and I don't really think that's a terribly uncommon attitude. And I think that's really sad. I wish all you people would move out of my country so we could have a responsible society, instead of a "blame someone else" society.
A "blame someone else" society? It's so ironic you said that. You're the one talking about blame. You're the one so concerned about who gets blamed. You keep saying who is and isn't at fault. When somebody crashes a car, you make sure to blame them. You are blaming someone else.
What happens when you are responsible for engineering a seatbelt? How good of a job are you going to do if you believe that if it breaks in a crash, it's someone else's fault for crashing their car? Are you going to blame someone else to avoid responsibility? I can think of nothing more anti-responsibility than an ideology that won't hold a car company responsible if their seatbelts break in a crash.
I'm not trying to "blame someone else" at all. I'm just trying to fix the damn problem. So I want them to be held responsible, financially. Because when they're figuring their profit maximization formula, their liability for injury or damages will go into the equation. The courts have a regulatory effect on the free market that makes it actually care about product quality and safety.
And as a person opposed to this regulation, you play a role in the damage, injury, and death caused by unsafe products. What do you do when this is pointed out? You blame someone else.
Throwing motions and throwing are separated by the release as you pointed out. If people are actually releasing the WiiMote when throwing, then they're misusing the product.
Or they're bowling in Wii Sports. Have you played it? As I pointed out in another comment, you're intended to make a whole bowling motion toward the TV. It starts when you begin holding down the trigger (B) button on the back, then you do a backward and forward swing, treating the controller like the bowling ball. At the point you would release a real ball, you have to release the B button, taking one of the four fingers gripping it completely off. You're likely to at least loosen your grip with the remaining three fingers at that point. And let me point out that this is the exact moment you would release a bowling ball to make it go flying forward.
Oh, and they're trying to get a broader market with this thing. Younger kids and older adults. On top of that, people who don't otherwise play video games and won't have as much coordination. See a problem yet?
I'm not trying to ruin anyone's fun. I'm not saying the Wii shouldn't exist, or it shouldn't have bowling, or anything close to that. To the contrary, I love the Wii. I bought the system as soon as I could find it in stock. I have four controllers, a dozen retail games, and a bunch of WiiWare on top of that. And I have an NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, GBA, and DS. I'm not trying to ruin anything. All I'm saying is that the strap shouldn't break. That's all.
Of course that hasn't stopped other similar frivolous lawsuits from coming forth, like putting your RV on cruise control and going to make a sandwich.
That never happened. It was an urban legend created when the reflexive anti-lawsuit point of view couldn't be supported with true stories. 12
I'm guessing the WiiMote wasn't designed to be thrown.
The controller actually was designed for throwing motions. You're just not supposed to let go (obviously). That's why the strap is there.
If there's games that require throwing, you should look at who the developer was and go after the developers for requiring a WiiMote action that was not within the lines of the specs.
The number one game for controller throwing, Wii Sports, is published by Nintendo itself and packaged with the console. And even for third parties, Nintendo has a QA role. Nothing gets published for the system without their approval. For example, they make sure no one developing for the Balance Board has users jumping on the thing because that would damage it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just heard that New Hampshire has one of the lowest crime rates per capita of any State in the Union. Nevada, another state similar in population to New Hampshire, has one of the highest. I betcha gun ownership there is much lower than here! :-)
Gun Ownership by State:
30% of households in New Hampshire have guns. 33.8% of households in Nevada have guns.
See is != is like.
Read more carefully:
Libertarianism is another form of extremism, just like religious extremism [is a form of extremism].
The comparison between libertarianism and religious extremism in that sentence is not equivalence, it's similarity (specifically that they both share the common trait of being forms of extremism).
Certainly there are extremists in any point of view, had you stated, "some libertarians behave like religious extremists in their ignoring inconvenient facts and going into denial to preserve their belief." No one would have accused you of leaping to conclusions,
If it was merely common among libertarians to be extremist, I would have said "some." But the thing is, the definition of libertarian in common usage requires that a person be what I would call extremist. Because once you accept more than a couple regulations as justified, you're no longer considered a libertarian. And there's more than a few regulations that are very thoroughly justified.
instead a wikipedia link to cognitive dissonance would have been appropriate.
Thank you for the suggestion. I actually have linked to cognitive dissonance before, but the phrase did not come to mind this time.
Now, to the mod who wasted point on calling my previous post a troll, really? Remember kids troll mod != something you disagree with.
Generally a reply that responds to someone as if they said something they didn't say and that ignores most of what they actually did say is a strawman and will be modded down.
But contract enforcement is coercive. Aren't libertarians against coercion?
I could start ranting that contract law is unnecessary, and people will be honorable out of their own self-interest, to preserve their reputation and livelihood. I could then continue on about how the non-enforcible contracts will have greater value due to people learning personal responsibility from the deregulation of contracts. Oh, and the markets will thrive under these new conditions and we'll all be wealthier.
And if you say that's nonsense and argue that contracts are justified because they're opt-in, well it's all opt-in. Nobody is forcing you to live in this country. You can leave if you don't like it.
Wow... Just wow. Were you going for an ironic +5 funny or are you being serious?
I didn't say libertarianism = ism = religious extremism. I said libertarianism is like religious extremism because the followers have the same behavior pattern of ignoring inconvenient facts and going into denial to preserve their belief.
And what'd you do? You ignored the inconvenient examples of this behavior that I provided and responded as if that information wasn't there. Did your brain block it out? It's ironic because now you've made yourself into an example of exactly what I was talking about.
Are you going to ignore yourself now?
Government's other role would be to enforce contractual arrangements. You signed your name on the dotted line? You live up to that contract. You breach? You pay the penalty.
But that contradicts the individual freedom you're advocating. Why should I be required to do something, just because I wrote my name on a piece of paper with some formal text saying I'd do it? Why should the government have the power to penalize me?
Be careful when you answer. If you say that it's justified because contracts are a beneficial social institution... Well that argument is a whole Pandora's box of problems for libertarians.
You hit the nail right on the head there. Libertarianism is another form of extremism, just like religious extremism. The followers actively try to suppress information that contradicts their ideology, and they're frequently in denial, rearranging the facts in their head to make them acceptable.
Even issues much smaller than this, like the Wiimote lawsuit, elicit denial. This got modded flamebait and troll because I pointed out that whether the wriststraps were defective and were breaking was relevant to the lawsuit. But no, it's a lawsuit, so it must be invalid no matter what. And whatever has to be true to make the lawsuit invalid must be true.
There were people arguing that the wriststrap was not intended as a safety device, therefore Nintendo can't be liable for damage caused by its failure. OK, never mind that that's an unsourced claim stating the opposite of what's apparent from just looking at the wriststrap and being familiar with the Wiimote's intended function. Can we just assume that it is and discuss a what-if based on the straps being a safety device? No, because in that scenario, a lawsuit might have some credibility! Even a hypothetical, they refuse to process.
One person pulled a scenario out of nowhere where the strap was frayed from a child chewing on the strap, and the parent was too irresponsible to replace it. It wasn't in the original story, so I searched for that on Google. I could not find a single instance of that happening. He just made it up on the spot to blame the people suing for the problem they were suing over.
Another person responded that car manufacturers shouldn't be liable for defective seatbelts. The reason, apparently, is because he can blame the driver for the crash instead. Libertarianism is frequently about blaming victims in order to justify inaction. It's crazy.
Or you could implement atomic renames in software, instead of doing it in hardware...
$ date -d '2009-03-18 11:36 AM PDT' +%s
1237401360
Animal rights activists and environmentalists are two different things. For one, an environmentalist would be far more concerned with the pollution from the rocket than they would worry about a single injured bat being killed.
If you read the interview, you'll see that the IWF does not have clearance to view child pornography.
I've always wondered... How are child pornography cases prosecuted? Don't they have to show the evidence to the jury, and wouldn't that be illegal?
You assume the government spends more efficiently than individuals.
No, I'm not assuming that. For one, it would be an unsupported generalization to say that government always spends more efficiently than individuals, regardless of the task. Just like it'd be an unsupported generalization to say that individuals always spend more efficiently than government. The truth is that government works better than individuals for some things, and not as good for others.
There's plenty of evidence for this. For just one example, get data on average tax as a percentage of income by state and average income by state. Put it in a spreadsheet and sort it with highest tax percent on top. Then calculate after-tax incomes. You'll find that there's a strong correlation between tax rate and after-tax income, meaning you're better off being the average citizen of a high-tax state then you'd be as the average citizen of a low tax state.
In reality it works like this : the government doesn't produce anything.
For a very narrow definition of 'produce' not commonly used in economics, yes that's almost true, but not by necessity. The government is fully capable of hiring people to manufacture things. But it just happens to be that ours usually outsources production to other companies. Would your opinion of the government really improve if we had state-owned manufacturing plants so that it did produce stuff?
And to be reasonable, you have to count anything the government does that has economic value: USPS, education, emergency services, police, the whole criminal justice system, the military, roads and other infrastructure, etc... Those all produce in the economic sense.
All I'm advocating is that we make case-by-case judgments on whether the government should do something and pick the more rational choice.
They're not being secretive about their position on the issue. They're being very up-front and honest about it. If they called themselves a civil liberties organization, never took second amendment cases and didn't explain the reason for not taking those cases, you might have a case for hypocrisy.
But they do state their position on the second amendment. By pointing that out, your link actually shows that they're not hypocrites. They don't fit the definition.
Now, I won't accuse you personally of this without evidence, but I've talked to other people that expressed the same sentiment, that the ACLU is hypocritical for their position on the second amendment. They often claim they would support "a real civil liberties organization." But it soon becomes apparent that they favor blasphemy laws, warrentless wiretapping and other unchecked government powers, and generally all sort of things that act against civil liberties.
These people are faking a virtue they don't have so they can attack the ACLU while claiming moral high ground. That fits the dictionary definition of hypocrite perfectly.
I do know what he's talking about. The problem is it doesn't make any sense. Not everyone agrees on the meaning of the second amendment, and it doesn't automatically make someone a hypocrite if they disagree with you.
They do good work and unlike the ACLU they aren't hypocrites, at least as far as I can tell.
hypocrite
Unless they're secretly fighting for individual gun rights, they're not hypocrites.
If it isn't the money itself that you own, but is instead the value represented by that money, then there are some implications.
For example, if the government takes 90% of everyone's money and destroys it, each remaining dollar is suddenly worth ten times as much, so nobody has lost value and nothing has been stolen. But if you manage to avoid paying, then your wealth increases at the expense of others and you'd be stealing value from your fellow citizens.
Similarly, if the government taxes and in return provides valuable services and economic stimulus, it boosts the value of your remaining dollars. If you don't pay the amount you're supposed to, then you're stealing.
The only fair way to distribute money taken at gunpoint, ie. taxes, is to not take the money away in the first place.
The problem with the "taken at gunpoint" rhetoric is that you're treating money like it's your property. It isn't. It belongs to the Federal Reserve, and the government is authorized to collect interest on their behalf.
That sight you list is partisan and very pro-Obama. How can they mark 'no earmarks' as a compromise?
...
Maybe the justification is the justification they gave?
Are you sure about that? My memory is fuzzy on this, but when I first read up on FAT32 it was stated that the presence of short filenames was not a requirement.
That was NTFS. If you gave the proper command to chkdsk, it would remove all the short filenames and turn that "feature" off. This freed up some space and made certain things, such as searches, a lot faster.
What we have here is a stealth tax. There is absolutely no way these costs will not be born by the consumer. This is the nature of business. If your costs rise, you need more revenue to cover them.
Wrong. There is absolutely no way that these costs will be paid by consumers. Basic supply and demand can tell you that. Businesses already set prices to maximize revenue. Dropping below the ideal price won't get them enough extra revenue from the increased demand to cover the loss from the lower price, and increasing the price won't make enough extra revenue from the increased charges to cover the loss from lost customers.
So they can't pass the cost on to consumers. What they can do is cut their own excess and increase efficiency. And those actions are good for the economy.
The Postal 3 dev listed Linux as a confirmed platform for the Source Engine in 2009.
Postal 3 isn't developed by Valve. So unless there's specific confirmation that the PC version of Postal 3 will be available on Steam and only Steam, this confirms nothing about Steam for Linux. Notice that neither of the previous games were released on Steam.
Let's start here:
White House Vandalized In Transition, G.A.O. Finds
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFDE163CF931A25755C0A9649C8B63
That doesn't confirm much. It doesn't even say how many keyboards, out of the 62 replaced, were missing W keys. It could be just a few. But I'm guessing zero. Who has claimed to have personally seen the supposed vandalism? I find it odd nobody ever took pictures of it. The GAO interviewed 100 people, which is enough to get several people to report rumors they had heard as truth. I wouldn't be surprised if there were even a few people who had developed false memories of the events after the rumor had gone around a while.
Check out the following links:
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/05/23/vandals/print.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2002/06/13/scandal/print.html
http://www.fair.org/activism/vandal-update.html
I just don't think its fair to pretend this is any less serious than it actually is.
The problem is, there's no evidence that this significantly affects hard drive life. It's all just anecdotes and speculation so far.
Yeah, the manufacturers give a maximum load cycle count, but I believe this number is similar to MTBF. That is, even with a hypothetical hard drive that can't be worn out any faster due to excessive load cycling, you'd still have a maximum load cycles figure, which is simply the average number of load cycles reached when the drives died for some other reason during testing. But reaching this maximum count faster wouldn't wear out the drive any faster.
The worst part here is that I think you're sincere, rather than trolling.
Well, I have to say I am rather disturbed by you and the groupthink exhibited in this discussion.
The parachute analogy is bad. A parachute is an essential part of skydiving. Without parachutes, or if parachutes couldn't be made reliable, nobody would skydive, because chance of injury approaches 100%.
I never said you were skydiving, I just said you jumped out of a plane. Maybe the engine failed. A parachute can be a safety device, too. But it didn't have to be a good analogy (to the Wiimote incident) anyway, because I said it to demonstrate the fallacy being invoked. It was intended more as an analogy to that fallacy.
The seat belt analogy is pretty good. Seat belts, like wiimote straps, are not essential. You don't expect to use them; they're there "just in case." Without seat belts, people would still drive.
I may not expect to use seatbelts, but I expect them to function.
With seat belts, people still die in car collisions. They're a good idea, but not something you expect to use.
Kind of like a lock. With locks, people still get burglarized, but I'd still be angry at the lock company if I came home, twisted the door knob, and found that my locked door opened without my key. What would you do? "Oh well, if I was burglarized, it'd be the burglar's fault, so no big deal..."
If I got into a car crash and we were all wearing seat belts that malfunctioned, and I was horribly crippled for life and everyone I love died, it wouldn't occur to me to sue anyone over the seat belts. I got in a crash.
I don't believe that, and you can't know that.
That's an extreme exception, and it's not the seat belt manufacturer's fault I crashed.
It's not the paramedics' fault you crashed either. Is it OK if they do nothing, too?
Seat belts are not "used" (yes, they're worn, but they don't do anything) in the normal operation of a car. That belt exists as a favor to me, to improve an exceptional case (a case that has never happened with me, in nearly 25 years of driving (though I still wear a seat belt)), not because it's something I need.
But it looks like you would actually blame the seat belt maker,
I'm not blaming, I'm holding responsible. But I'll get to that.
and I don't really think that's a terribly uncommon attitude. And I think that's really sad. I wish all you people would move out of my country so we could have a responsible society, instead of a "blame someone else" society.
A "blame someone else" society? It's so ironic you said that. You're the one talking about blame. You're the one so concerned about who gets blamed. You keep saying who is and isn't at fault. When somebody crashes a car, you make sure to blame them. You are blaming someone else.
What happens when you are responsible for engineering a seatbelt? How good of a job are you going to do if you believe that if it breaks in a crash, it's someone else's fault for crashing their car? Are you going to blame someone else to avoid responsibility? I can think of nothing more anti-responsibility than an ideology that won't hold a car company responsible if their seatbelts break in a crash.
I'm not trying to "blame someone else" at all. I'm just trying to fix the damn problem. So I want them to be held responsible, financially. Because when they're figuring their profit maximization formula, their liability for injury or damages will go into the equation. The courts have a regulatory effect on the free market that makes it actually care about product quality and safety.
And as a person opposed to this regulation, you play a role in the damage, injury, and death caused by unsafe products. What do you do when this is pointed out? You blame someone else.
Throwing motions and throwing are separated by the release as you pointed out. If people are actually releasing the WiiMote when throwing, then they're misusing the product.
Or they're bowling in Wii Sports. Have you played it? As I pointed out in another comment, you're intended to make a whole bowling motion toward the TV. It starts when you begin holding down the trigger (B) button on the back, then you do a backward and forward swing, treating the controller like the bowling ball. At the point you would release a real ball, you have to release the B button, taking one of the four fingers gripping it completely off. You're likely to at least loosen your grip with the remaining three fingers at that point. And let me point out that this is the exact moment you would release a bowling ball to make it go flying forward.
Oh, and they're trying to get a broader market with this thing. Younger kids and older adults. On top of that, people who don't otherwise play video games and won't have as much coordination. See a problem yet?
I'm not trying to ruin anyone's fun. I'm not saying the Wii shouldn't exist, or it shouldn't have bowling, or anything close to that. To the contrary, I love the Wii. I bought the system as soon as I could find it in stock. I have four controllers, a dozen retail games, and a bunch of WiiWare on top of that. And I have an NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, GBA, and DS. I'm not trying to ruin anything. All I'm saying is that the strap shouldn't break. That's all.
Of course that hasn't stopped other similar frivolous lawsuits from coming forth, like putting your RV on cruise control and going to make a sandwich.
That never happened. It was an urban legend created when the reflexive anti-lawsuit point of view couldn't be supported with true stories. 1 2
I'm guessing the WiiMote wasn't designed to be thrown.
The controller actually was designed for throwing motions. You're just not supposed to let go (obviously). That's why the strap is there.
If there's games that require throwing, you should look at who the developer was and go after the developers for requiring a WiiMote action that was not within the lines of the specs.
The number one game for controller throwing, Wii Sports, is published by Nintendo itself and packaged with the console. And even for third parties, Nintendo has a QA role. Nothing gets published for the system without their approval. For example, they make sure no one developing for the Balance Board has users jumping on the thing because that would damage it.