You do realize that Apple reduced the price of the upgrade by 75% while moving to App Store distribution, right? I'm not crazy about distributing a new OS over the App Store, but keep in mind Apple could have *EASILY* charged $129 for Lion and people would have paid for it.
Also, pressing one DVD may cost pennies, but the screen printing costs several times that. Add in mastering costs, packaging, manufacturing, distribution, retail, suddenly you have half a dozen vertical chains to organize. That doesn't cost pennies.
The display capabilities, strain, and technology for consumer-grade LCDs still provides for a vastly inferior reading experience than ordinary quality print media. I can read paper faster, annotate faster, and save my eyes strain and effort, and save myself time by simply printing documents out. I read thousands of pages of documents for a grad school, and I will print out anything around 10,000 words, and anything I need for personal research because I'll be reading it 3-5x. I can't imagine why you'd think current LCD technology solves these issues.
The statute language is inclusive of any "communication," so you do not need to re-package as an image. Your post is sufficient under the text of the law.
He needs to describe with sufficient detail how one of ordinary skill in the art can practice godly powers.
But what is "one of ordinary skill", and what "art" is this? Is it the art of being godly? One must be practiced in the art to say that it is not enabled.
Personally I would have gone with non-patentable subject matter under Chakrabarty, since "godly powers" are by definition not "made by man."
His "impressive" intelligence is more than negated by his actions.
The drivel he spews on Fox News makes him a party-line hack, nothing more. The smartest guy in the room needs to lead by reason and logic, not repeat tired, inflammatory lies. When I saw a clip of him discussing the Citizens United case, I thought, "ok, your legal analysis is crap. I can excuse that because you are not a lawyer (despite being a legislator), but please stop repeating tired lies."
Anyrate, as smart as Newt may be, you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate that he's more intelligent than Obama. Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter. What matters is how good of a politician you are. George W, Regan, both idiots who were extremely successful at playing the political game.
Team Newt is driving hard to brand Newt as the "intellectual" candidate. I heard a GOP analyst discussing candidates on the radio when an obvious shill called in, repeating the analysts talking points on Newt verbatim. It was shameless...
The GOPs recent and continuing anti-science, anti-education stance is beyond appalling. Coming from the Party of Ignorance, he needs to tend to his own garden before he gets cred for recommending Feynman on Amazon.
Judge Ware is actually a well respected judge of the N.Dist. CA for good reasons. I don't know if he just "doesn't get the tech", but having also resided over San Jose, his docket has been filled with technology-related cases for years. I really dislike this ruling, and I'd like to research into the subject more (can't right now due to finals), but my experience based on direct knowledge is that Ware is a good judge. Nothing will happen to him due to judicial immunity, and his track record being better than most.
My gut feeling is that the remedy became framed in a way that made possible settlements really limited, or possibly plaintiff's counsel threw the class under the bus.
It's about both. Class action as a mechanism is designed for mass tort cases where the individual award would be too small to make individual litigation practicable. There are plenty of examples of class action making individuals whole, particularly in state courts where additional rules often apply in terms of acceptable remedies. Sometimes class action settlements do come out horribly shit. However, your ignorance and cynicism doesn't change reality, or the policy lying behind class action.
Here's a better analogy, actually a straight-up example. DRAM manufacturers collude to raise the price of DIMMs for several years, resulting in raised consumer prices. This violates antitrust and unfair business practices in the U.S. Lawyers get together and file a class action suit on behalf of all individuals who purchased DRAM during the time of the price-fixing. The settlement is a check for some nominal fee, $7-15. This amount, on average, compensates individuals for what they paid at retail over what RAM prices likely would have been without the price fixing.
But the degree of toxicity of water, with for example, cyanide, are entirely different matters. With water, it's your body's failure to maintain ionic balance in the presence of too much water, causing ionic functions within the body to fail. And, yes, that gets circular, but I feel like there is a distinction that is rather significant. Consider, by comparison cyanide, which interferes with the functioning of hemoglobin in cells, to prevent oxygenation of cells. Cyanide does it's thing under all cases. A little bit of cyanide will inhibit a little bit of cells, kills a little bit of tissue. A lot of cyanide inhibits a lot of cells, kills a lot of tissue. There's no natural bodily function that uses cyanide. It's always toxic.
Now, consider water. It's in every cell of your body. It's used in many metabolic processes, carries ions and materials around, it's used to excrete waste. It's tied to nearly every bodily function (every one I can think of). We're designed to drink it, and we're designed to tolerate a certain balance of water at all times. Too much water will kill you, but too little water is also fatal. I know that hyponatremia is called "water intoxication" and all, but referring to water as toxic does more to destroy the meaning of "toxic" than it does to shed light on the nature of "water."
It's like saying kissing someone on the cheek too vigorously will crush their skull, therefore kissing is toxic. I'm not a medical professional, and this is just how I feel about it./emo rant
That's because you don't understand public education, and you're not familiar with the history of legislation in this area. Evolution and generally accepted science is already on the curriculum, meaning teachers can present those ideas without the chance of reprisal, and contrary positions are not allowed.
The existing response is to "not get" to any sections that are deemed in violation of the Bible. Oh, we spent 3 weeks building a sundial, therefore we'll have to skip evolution this year - again.
Now, they can present any idea they want, regardless of the position it takes, without fear of reprisal.
If you were familiar with the establishment clause jurisprudence surrounding religious education in schools, you would recognize the targeted language of the bill as a deliberate attempt to skirt the existing legal restrictions from teaching creationism in schools. You just don't know what you're looking at because you're not a constitutional law scholar.
You are confusing copyright "fair use" with trademark "fair use", and trademark "fair use" with trademark rights! You are kind of all over the place. As for CR vs. TM fair use, same name, different standards. Both are a complete doctrinal minefield in terms of the case law associated with them.
Any party can "easily make an argument" for fair use, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, knows if they will prevail on that claim. The law is just too erratic and fractured in this area.
Trademark fair use requires, as Monkeedude1212 says, commentary, criticism, news reporting, and it must specifically NOT be commercial use. Slapping a logo on something and selling it, that's commercial use.
Keep in mind Trademark rights carry an affirmative duty to police the mark. If you allow permissive, unrestricted commercial use of your marks by others, courts can later use that against you when you try and bring a legitimate trademark suit against a party that is really infringing, like making knockoff "iPud" music players or something.
So, what is the test to determine what a company needs to vigorously police against, versus what is non-infringing use? No one really knows. This is why companies go after anyone/everyone like they do. The court may end up saying, "There's not TM issue here, everyone go home." but you can't know that before you litigate. So, it is actually perfectly rational for them to sue. Even if their claims have no merit, they have satisfied their requirement to police the mark by challenging others' uses. When the real infringement occurs, they will be able to assert their rights and win.
There are copyright claims for the use of the Apple logo pedestal, and the tiny iPhone sculpture. Apple owns these designs and can assert rights over their use and importation. They may not prevail if the makers can show some fair use defense, but that analysis is complex and all over the place. The amount of copying done, and commercial use of the images stacks against them.
Trademark is weird. The threshold matters are whether the use would be likely to cause 'consumer confusion', and if they brought a dilution cause of action, whether there was a "blurring or tarnishing" of the brand. The fact that Apple doesn't make figurines is relevant to the likelihood of confusion, but blurring and tarnishment require no proof of that.
There is also the matter of "secondary meaning." Although Steve retains his own right of publicity, which is a separate claim he can bring, a trademark claim can be brought for the use of his likeness because his image is so entwined with the business of Apple, and has achieved a "secondary meaning" that it identifies the source of a product.
Steve could also bring a Right of Publicity suit for the commercial use of his likeness, but I'm not really sure how/why apple would bring that claim. They could certainly file suit as joint parties against the statue makers.
Also -side note- I just saw the figurine. Shit, that is one amazing SJobs statue!!! Now I want one...
Keep in mind that the balance between right of publicity and 1st amendment rights is still very fuzzy. Some courts apply a "transformative" (Saderup, Cardtoons) test borrowed from copyright, under which parodical uses can be allowed. Some courts use a trademark-like "invokes the idea of the person in the minds of the consumers" (Midler, White) under which even radically altered images would still infringe the right.
Some have already listed here the utility of probability and statistics, and I would add to that simple and compound interest.
Most people don't need to know how to "solve for x" in the Algebra I & II sense, nor do they need trigonometry, or basic newtonian mechanics and elementary calculus. But pretty much everyone needs to know how their savings account works, how insurance premiums and risk (on a basic level) are calculated, how slot machines and the lottery work, how to save for retirement, whether the maintenance plan on their car was worth it, and enough arithmetic to save money on their groceries.
I know you're thinking that your economy of scale from identical housings will bring the price of batteries down, but right now, a battery like you're describing (that drives you as far as a tank of gas), like the one in the Tesla Roadster costs $30,000. Well, that price is from last year, so let's say they're $25,000 to produce right now, and your standardization brings the cost down to $20,000. Oh, and this battery weighs 900 lbs, that's right, as much as 5-6 adult humans in weight. So, the "garage" needs to keep millions of dollars of inventory, along with some giant robot that can swap the battery, and car engineers need to build a *MODULAR* system into every car that allows for a 900 lb power source to be safely swapped out about once a week in a matter of minutes, then driven away at highway speeds. We're not screwing in lightbulbs here, we're talking about routinely removing and replacing about 1/4 of the total mass of your car. If that doesn't seem like a daunting engineering feat by itself, you're just not thinking about it hard enough.
Where are you getting this $8000 figure? Here's a paragraph from Toyota's website from about 18 months ago:
And you also should know that the battery packs are available from any Toyota dealer. The MSRP for a battery pack for a first-generation Prius is $2,299, while the MSRP for the battery pack for the second-generation cars, those from the 2004-2008 model-years, is $2,588. This reflects three price reductions for the first-generation battery since it was introduced and two price reductions for the second-generation battery. Naturally, labor charges, which are set by each dealer, as well as possible charges from ancillary parts that could be required, should be added to that figure. Finally, we assume responsibility for recycling all of our hybrid batteries.
The prices are much lower than you think, and they keep going down over time. Installation is still bitchy expensive, tho'. Battery technology keeps getting better and cheaper, and the actual cell units in these batteries have got to be some standard industrial NiMH/Li-ion part in a proprietary packaging, so they will benefit from the same economies of scale as the rest of the industry, save their proprietary packaging (i.e. not the bulk of the cost of production).
When I finished finals this semester, I cut caffeine entirely from my diet to try and get back to a normal consumption level. During finals, I was consuming ~500 mg of caffeine in the form of tea, energy drinks, and caffeinated gum, mints, and pills. I tend to follow my caffeine consumption very closely.
After finals, I also developed a sore throat, so I was drinking over a gallon of liquid a day - LOTS more than normal. About 12 hours after my finals period ended, I got splitting headaches from the caffeine withdrawal, which lasted about a week. I've also gone through this cycle about a dozen times since highschool, and every other time I've cut caffeine from my diet.
Caffeine consumption causes a vasoconstriction of the blood vessels within the brain, and reduced sensitivity to adenosine. When caffeine consumption stops abruptly, it leads to headache, lethargy, and possibly nausea as a result of increased intercranial pressure and adenosine uptake. The symptoms are easily confused with dehydration, except that drinking lots of fluids not only doesn't help, it can make things worse.
So you're willing to use Bing a) for a fraction of your internet searches, b) for something that you've already found, and prefer to find, using Google, c) only because they are dumping money on you to do so. Your click-through feeds them some fraction of a penny, while they are paying 5% or more of whatever you just purchased for the privilege of helping you find it. Assuming you bought something even modestly substantial, say $100, they're paying out 100:1 of their revenues BEFORE you consider all the resources they poured into making this search engine, making it beautiful, advertising on TV, etc. etc. etc.
I'm not saying they can't turn a profit some day, but on paper, Bing looks like a disaster, and your behavior only corroborates that.
Um, exactly how much artwork work is required in a console port of a PC franchise with 'at-the-time' outdated graphics and an existing engine require?
You are also conflating last gen with current gen's artwork requirements. HD gaming has raised the bar exponentially for the number of man hours required to make state of the art graphics. Sure, a small indie game does not require 70 artists, but a game that pushes the boundaries, or at least can hang with the AAA big dogs most certainly does.
On Braid, that game may have been developed by a skeleton crew, but it still required several years of development time and a budget of around $500,000. You can say that anybody can drop what they're doing and start coding a game, but how many have the tenacity and resources to devote that much, particularly when balanced against the risk of never breaking even or losing money in the end?
Financially, indie game development is a HUGE crapshoot. Alternatively, every one of the horrendously overworked R* employees went home to their failing marriages with paycheck in hand. I'm not defending R*'s labor practices, but from a practical risk/reward analysis, they are much better off than the average indie game dev, who operates with no certainty of every having a payday. It's solving the poverty problem by installing slot machines in low-rent neighborhoods. .
He's complaining about the features of a game, which are a good, or good/service combination, using legislation that specifically targets location based attractions. If he's going after Sony because of its SonyStyle stores, then any possible equitable remedy would also apply to every store that has a game kiosk, or anything interactive at all, like the easy listening CD machine at Bed Bath and Beyond.
Personally, I really, really hope that this case is dismissed. First, for inapplicability of the statute, but more importantly so that game developers are not saddled with the additional economic burden of adding disability compliance to all games. The mechanics of a video game are not like walking up a ramp, including a braille menu, or using the bathroom. They are varied, and hinge fundamentally on a wide variety of combinations of audio and visual stimuli that cannot generally be summed in a way to make them equally accessible given some sensory impairment. There is no single, predictable means of meeting such a requirement, adding more uncontrollable variable cost to game development, leading to less ambitious titles, less experimentation among developers, less development time and resources for the core functionality of the game. Having been a software developer, a game developer, and now a legal scholar, this just seems bad, bad, bad.
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Good thing that's not the standard for obviousness.
The standard is that the patent would have been obvious to try for one of ordinary skill in the art (here, the art is product design of some kind).
Even if you could prove your "one out of any 10 geeks" assertion, which you absolutely can't, it would be of no weight in determining obviousness.
You do realize that Apple reduced the price of the upgrade by 75% while moving to App Store distribution, right? I'm not crazy about distributing a new OS over the App Store, but keep in mind Apple could have *EASILY* charged $129 for Lion and people would have paid for it.
Also, pressing one DVD may cost pennies, but the screen printing costs several times that. Add in mastering costs, packaging, manufacturing, distribution, retail, suddenly you have half a dozen vertical chains to organize. That doesn't cost pennies.
The display capabilities, strain, and technology for consumer-grade LCDs still provides for a vastly inferior reading experience than ordinary quality print media. I can read paper faster, annotate faster, and save my eyes strain and effort, and save myself time by simply printing documents out. I read thousands of pages of documents for a grad school, and I will print out anything around 10,000 words, and anything I need for personal research because I'll be reading it 3-5x. I can't imagine why you'd think current LCD technology solves these issues.
The statute language is inclusive of any "communication," so you do not need to re-package as an image. Your post is sufficient under the text of the law.
He needs to describe with sufficient detail how one of ordinary skill in the art can practice godly powers.
But what is "one of ordinary skill", and what "art" is this? Is it the art of being godly? One must be practiced in the art to say that it is not enabled.
Personally I would have gone with non-patentable subject matter under Chakrabarty, since "godly powers" are by definition not "made by man."
His "impressive" intelligence is more than negated by his actions.
The drivel he spews on Fox News makes him a party-line hack, nothing more. The smartest guy in the room needs to lead by reason and logic, not repeat tired, inflammatory lies. When I saw a clip of him discussing the Citizens United case, I thought, "ok, your legal analysis is crap. I can excuse that because you are not a lawyer (despite being a legislator), but please stop repeating tired lies."
Anyrate, as smart as Newt may be, you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate that he's more intelligent than Obama. Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter. What matters is how good of a politician you are. George W, Regan, both idiots who were extremely successful at playing the political game.
Team Newt is driving hard to brand Newt as the "intellectual" candidate. I heard a GOP analyst discussing candidates on the radio when an obvious shill called in, repeating the analysts talking points on Newt verbatim. It was shameless...
The GOPs recent and continuing anti-science, anti-education stance is beyond appalling. Coming from the Party of Ignorance, he needs to tend to his own garden before he gets cred for recommending Feynman on Amazon.
It looks like this is the Declaration the court considered in evaluating the original machines and the proposed replacements:
https://sites.google.com/site/tedfrank/files/nvidia.358.2.BagherzadehDeclaration.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1
Judge Ware is actually a well respected judge of the N.Dist. CA for good reasons. I don't know if he just "doesn't get the tech", but having also resided over San Jose, his docket has been filled with technology-related cases for years. I really dislike this ruling, and I'd like to research into the subject more (can't right now due to finals), but my experience based on direct knowledge is that Ware is a good judge. Nothing will happen to him due to judicial immunity, and his track record being better than most.
My gut feeling is that the remedy became framed in a way that made possible settlements really limited, or possibly plaintiff's counsel threw the class under the bus.
It's about both. Class action as a mechanism is designed for mass tort cases where the individual award would be too small to make individual litigation practicable. There are plenty of examples of class action making individuals whole, particularly in state courts where additional rules often apply in terms of acceptable remedies. Sometimes class action settlements do come out horribly shit. However, your ignorance and cynicism doesn't change reality, or the policy lying behind class action.
Here's a better analogy, actually a straight-up example. DRAM manufacturers collude to raise the price of DIMMs for several years, resulting in raised consumer prices. This violates antitrust and unfair business practices in the U.S. Lawyers get together and file a class action suit on behalf of all individuals who purchased DRAM during the time of the price-fixing. The settlement is a check for some nominal fee, $7-15. This amount, on average, compensates individuals for what they paid at retail over what RAM prices likely would have been without the price fixing.
But the degree of toxicity of water, with for example, cyanide, are entirely different matters. With water, it's your body's failure to maintain ionic balance in the presence of too much water, causing ionic functions within the body to fail. And, yes, that gets circular, but I feel like there is a distinction that is rather significant. Consider, by comparison cyanide, which interferes with the functioning of hemoglobin in cells, to prevent oxygenation of cells. Cyanide does it's thing under all cases. A little bit of cyanide will inhibit a little bit of cells, kills a little bit of tissue. A lot of cyanide inhibits a lot of cells, kills a lot of tissue. There's no natural bodily function that uses cyanide. It's always toxic.
Now, consider water. It's in every cell of your body. It's used in many metabolic processes, carries ions and materials around, it's used to excrete waste. It's tied to nearly every bodily function (every one I can think of). We're designed to drink it, and we're designed to tolerate a certain balance of water at all times. Too much water will kill you, but too little water is also fatal. I know that hyponatremia is called "water intoxication" and all, but referring to water as toxic does more to destroy the meaning of "toxic" than it does to shed light on the nature of "water."
It's like saying kissing someone on the cheek too vigorously will crush their skull, therefore kissing is toxic. I'm not a medical professional, and this is just how I feel about it. /emo rant
That's because you don't understand public education, and you're not familiar with the history of legislation in this area. Evolution and generally accepted science is already on the curriculum, meaning teachers can present those ideas without the chance of reprisal, and contrary positions are not allowed.
The existing response is to "not get" to any sections that are deemed in violation of the Bible. Oh, we spent 3 weeks building a sundial, therefore we'll have to skip evolution this year - again.
Now, they can present any idea they want, regardless of the position it takes, without fear of reprisal.
If you were familiar with the establishment clause jurisprudence surrounding religious education in schools, you would recognize the targeted language of the bill as a deliberate attempt to skirt the existing legal restrictions from teaching creationism in schools. You just don't know what you're looking at because you're not a constitutional law scholar.
You are confusing copyright "fair use" with trademark "fair use", and trademark "fair use" with trademark rights! You are kind of all over the place. As for CR vs. TM fair use, same name, different standards. Both are a complete doctrinal minefield in terms of the case law associated with them.
Any party can "easily make an argument" for fair use, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, knows if they will prevail on that claim. The law is just too erratic and fractured in this area.
Trademark fair use requires, as Monkeedude1212 says, commentary, criticism, news reporting, and it must specifically NOT be commercial use. Slapping a logo on something and selling it, that's commercial use.
Keep in mind Trademark rights carry an affirmative duty to police the mark. If you allow permissive, unrestricted commercial use of your marks by others, courts can later use that against you when you try and bring a legitimate trademark suit against a party that is really infringing, like making knockoff "iPud" music players or something.
So, what is the test to determine what a company needs to vigorously police against, versus what is non-infringing use? No one really knows. This is why companies go after anyone/everyone like they do. The court may end up saying, "There's not TM issue here, everyone go home." but you can't know that before you litigate. So, it is actually perfectly rational for them to sue. Even if their claims have no merit, they have satisfied their requirement to police the mark by challenging others' uses. When the real infringement occurs, they will be able to assert their rights and win.
There are copyright claims for the use of the Apple logo pedestal, and the tiny iPhone sculpture. Apple owns these designs and can assert rights over their use and importation. They may not prevail if the makers can show some fair use defense, but that analysis is complex and all over the place. The amount of copying done, and commercial use of the images stacks against them.
Trademark is weird. The threshold matters are whether the use would be likely to cause 'consumer confusion', and if they brought a dilution cause of action, whether there was a "blurring or tarnishing" of the brand. The fact that Apple doesn't make figurines is relevant to the likelihood of confusion, but blurring and tarnishment require no proof of that.
There is also the matter of "secondary meaning." Although Steve retains his own right of publicity, which is a separate claim he can bring, a trademark claim can be brought for the use of his likeness because his image is so entwined with the business of Apple, and has achieved a "secondary meaning" that it identifies the source of a product.
Steve could also bring a Right of Publicity suit for the commercial use of his likeness, but I'm not really sure how/why apple would bring that claim. They could certainly file suit as joint parties against the statue makers.
Also -side note- I just saw the figurine. Shit, that is one amazing SJobs statue!!! Now I want one...
Keep in mind that the balance between right of publicity and 1st amendment rights is still very fuzzy. Some courts apply a "transformative" (Saderup, Cardtoons) test borrowed from copyright, under which parodical uses can be allowed. Some courts use a trademark-like "invokes the idea of the person in the minds of the consumers" (Midler, White) under which even radically altered images would still infringe the right.
But they also haven't learned the math they need!
Some have already listed here the utility of probability and statistics, and I would add to that simple and compound interest.
Most people don't need to know how to "solve for x" in the Algebra I & II sense, nor do they need trigonometry, or basic newtonian mechanics and elementary calculus. But pretty much everyone needs to know how their savings account works, how insurance premiums and risk (on a basic level) are calculated, how slot machines and the lottery work, how to save for retirement, whether the maintenance plan on their car was worth it, and enough arithmetic to save money on their groceries.
I know you're thinking that your economy of scale from identical housings will bring the price of batteries down, but right now, a battery like you're describing (that drives you as far as a tank of gas), like the one in the Tesla Roadster costs $30,000. Well, that price is from last year, so let's say they're $25,000 to produce right now, and your standardization brings the cost down to $20,000. Oh, and this battery weighs 900 lbs, that's right, as much as 5-6 adult humans in weight. So, the "garage" needs to keep millions of dollars of inventory, along with some giant robot that can swap the battery, and car engineers need to build a *MODULAR* system into every car that allows for a 900 lb power source to be safely swapped out about once a week in a matter of minutes, then driven away at highway speeds. We're not screwing in lightbulbs here, we're talking about routinely removing and replacing about 1/4 of the total mass of your car. If that doesn't seem like a daunting engineering feat by itself, you're just not thinking about it hard enough.
Where are you getting this $8000 figure? Here's a paragraph from Toyota's website from about 18 months ago:
And you also should know that the battery packs are available from any Toyota dealer. The MSRP for a battery pack for a first-generation Prius is $2,299, while the MSRP for the battery pack for the second-generation cars, those from the 2004-2008 model-years, is $2,588. This reflects three price reductions for the first-generation battery since it was introduced and two price reductions for the second-generation battery. Naturally, labor charges, which are set by each dealer, as well as possible charges from ancillary parts that could be required, should be added to that figure. Finally, we assume responsibility for recycling all of our hybrid batteries.
The prices are much lower than you think, and they keep going down over time. Installation is still bitchy expensive, tho'. Battery technology keeps getting better and cheaper, and the actual cell units in these batteries have got to be some standard industrial NiMH/Li-ion part in a proprietary packaging, so they will benefit from the same economies of scale as the rest of the industry, save their proprietary packaging (i.e. not the bulk of the cost of production).
I'm going to buy me an electric car!
When I finished finals this semester, I cut caffeine entirely from my diet to try and get back to a normal consumption level. During finals, I was consuming ~500 mg of caffeine in the form of tea, energy drinks, and caffeinated gum, mints, and pills. I tend to follow my caffeine consumption very closely.
After finals, I also developed a sore throat, so I was drinking over a gallon of liquid a day - LOTS more than normal. About 12 hours after my finals period ended, I got splitting headaches from the caffeine withdrawal, which lasted about a week. I've also gone through this cycle about a dozen times since highschool, and every other time I've cut caffeine from my diet.
Caffeine consumption causes a vasoconstriction of the blood vessels within the brain, and reduced sensitivity to adenosine. When caffeine consumption stops abruptly, it leads to headache, lethargy, and possibly nausea as a result of increased intercranial pressure and adenosine uptake. The symptoms are easily confused with dehydration, except that drinking lots of fluids not only doesn't help, it can make things worse.
So you're willing to use Bing a) for a fraction of your internet searches, b) for something that you've already found, and prefer to find, using Google, c) only because they are dumping money on you to do so. Your click-through feeds them some fraction of a penny, while they are paying 5% or more of whatever you just purchased for the privilege of helping you find it. Assuming you bought something even modestly substantial, say $100, they're paying out 100:1 of their revenues BEFORE you consider all the resources they poured into making this search engine, making it beautiful, advertising on TV, etc. etc. etc.
I'm not saying they can't turn a profit some day, but on paper, Bing looks like a disaster, and your behavior only corroborates that.
Of course, don't expect that to last long considering how multi-core things are getting.
Um, exactly how much artwork work is required in a console port of a PC franchise with 'at-the-time' outdated graphics and an existing engine require?
You are also conflating last gen with current gen's artwork requirements. HD gaming has raised the bar exponentially for the number of man hours required to make state of the art graphics. Sure, a small indie game does not require 70 artists, but a game that pushes the boundaries, or at least can hang with the AAA big dogs most certainly does.
On Braid, that game may have been developed by a skeleton crew, but it still required several years of development time and a budget of around $500,000. You can say that anybody can drop what they're doing and start coding a game, but how many have the tenacity and resources to devote that much, particularly when balanced against the risk of never breaking even or losing money in the end?
Financially, indie game development is a HUGE crapshoot. Alternatively, every one of the horrendously overworked R* employees went home to their failing marriages with paycheck in hand. I'm not defending R*'s labor practices, but from a practical risk/reward analysis, they are much better off than the average indie game dev, who operates with no certainty of every having a payday. It's solving the poverty problem by installing slot machines in low-rent neighborhoods. .
He's complaining about the features of a game, which are a good, or good/service combination, using legislation that specifically targets location based attractions. If he's going after Sony because of its SonyStyle stores, then any possible equitable remedy would also apply to every store that has a game kiosk, or anything interactive at all, like the easy listening CD machine at Bed Bath and Beyond.
Personally, I really, really hope that this case is dismissed. First, for inapplicability of the statute, but more importantly so that game developers are not saddled with the additional economic burden of adding disability compliance to all games. The mechanics of a video game are not like walking up a ramp, including a braille menu, or using the bathroom. They are varied, and hinge fundamentally on a wide variety of combinations of audio and visual stimuli that cannot generally be summed in a way to make them equally accessible given some sensory impairment. There is no single, predictable means of meeting such a requirement, adding more uncontrollable variable cost to game development, leading to less ambitious titles, less experimentation among developers, less development time and resources for the core functionality of the game. Having been a software developer, a game developer, and now a legal scholar, this just seems bad, bad, bad.