When I traveled in Europe several years ago, what struck me traffic-wise was how many traffic circles they use and just how well they work. I've often thought since then that North America should replace a lot of their low-volume traffic-lights with traffic circles. Drivers get a convenience benefit in that they don't actually have to stop, but society gets a safety benefit in that the driver must slow down to navigate the circle. Also, obviously, no traffic lights means less electricity usage so you get a small environmental benefit too.
Another side benefit is that if you take a wrong turn somewhere, you just continue on to the next circle and go back the way you came, instead of having to figure out how the hell you can get turned around.
Yet it seems that North America is fiercely adverse to traffic circles, using them only very reluctantly - and when they are used, they're done badly. There's one in my city, for example, with dedicated lanes such that, if you're not sure exactly where you're going when you enter that circle, you'll easily wind up taking the wrong exit (even after they overhauled the thing a couple years ago to try and clean it up; it was an even worse mess before). That kinda defeats the point.
Actually that's not quite it. It stops at January 15, 2009. There was a final press briefing on January 16, 2009 that isn't there, the radio address of the 17th, plus a number of photos taken between the 16th and the 20th. The very last photo posted was a shot of President & Mrs. Bush on the North Portico as they were about to greet the Obamas (yes, I was watching the site that day).
Heck, I just noticed.. Bush's farewell address isn't even there, so the snapshot must have been taken in the afternoon of the 15th.
If I had to choose between a house to live in and air to breath, I'd choose the air. If I had to choose between sex and internet, I'd choose sex. If I had to choose between 100$ and a copy of GH3+controller, I'd choose Guitar Hero. If I had to choose between 200$ and two Guitar Hero packs, I might choose the money, or I might choose the GH packs in hope of a resale.
In summation, the guy chose to have no home and a video game instead of a home and money. Sex is no longer a choice at that point, it's only fantasy.
Mod parent up, please. GP is blatantly mistaken on the criminal status of drug use & prostitution in Vancouver, but I suppose the +5 really came about for the potshot at "puritanical Americans".
Now can those of us who subscribe to the RSS feed get a version without the idle stories? I really don't want them polluting the feed because there's no way to distinguish them from any other stories.
Quantum Leap suffers from this too. A key scene in the second season finale - when hologram Al dances with his first ex-wife, just before he Leaps out, pleading with her to wait for him to come home from Vietnam, knowing that she won't - was ruined by the someone's refusal to license the song "Georgia On My Mind" for the DVD release. They were forced to remix it with some bland imitation.
I'm not sure if it was the Ray Charles estate itself or some record company that holds the copyright that got greedy about it. Either way it guts the scene. I can't bring myself to purchase the DVD set because of it.
Ditto "Married With Children", for that matter. They couldn't use "Love And Marriage" beyond the first season DVD set.
I'm amazed this could get through a post-9/11 Congress. Y'know, the day that big government failed spectacularly to protect its citizens, but the passengers of flight 93 used their cell phones to find out what was going on and put a stop to it?
So from that it naturally flows to ban cell phone use on airplanes. Brilliant thinking there.
Where's the instant meta-mod option? GP posts a long, thought-out personal history of his struggle with mental illness, what he's done to live with it and minimize its effects on his life, and includes the role of religion in his life. He's respectful about it, he doesn't preach, he doesn't ask anyone to convert. He rightfully gets a +5.
Parent makes a one-line slam of GP's religious belief, offering absolutely nothing else to the conversation, and gets a +5 from the/. knee-jerk anti-religion crowd.
Wow, that's quite the allegation. If it were as cut-and-dried as you say, how many people have been charged with crimes related to the scandal - and how many have been convicted?
I believe at least two advertising executives have been convicted of fraud to date, and just a month or two ago charges were laid against one Liberal party worker. The RCMP are notoriously slow at investigating such things.
I think you have over-stated the scope and intent of the program. Yes, there was corruption but we get that from all politicians, and the current minority government is no different. Their party headquarters were raided by Elections Canada on the grounds that they were using the campaign financing laws to defraud Canadian taxpayers.
Now your partisan leanings are showing. Fraud is not what Elections Canada is claiming. All they are claiming is that the Conservatives spent more than the allowed limit during the last election (using methods that the Liberals and NDP also used), but the money was Conservative money, not taxpayer money (I'm aware that parties do get federal subsidies, but those aren't in question here). As for the raid itself, the fact that the Liberals had cameramen on the scene as it was happening casts serious concerns on EC's partisanship and motives.
I think your political leanings are pretty obvious given that partisan explanation. I wish you had omitted some of the more gratuitous hyperbole though. Apart from the bias, you have described the situation reasonably well.
I calls em as I sees em. The Liberals aren't fit to govern. I'm not convinced they're even fit to serve as opposition. Why they continue to poll anywhere above the 10-15% they truly deserve eludes me. I may strongly disagree with the NDP, but I can respect that they are (most of the time) a principled political party who articulate alternate policies. Today's Liberals fail on both counts.
To add to the above, I'll try to explain the current problems of the Liberal party, our official opposition that has been abstaining from votes that would defeat the government and trigger an election.
The Liberals were in power under Jean Chretien from 1993 to 2003, when Paul Martin replaced him. Two things happened around this time. First, Chretien passed a campaign-finance reform bill that banned contributions from corporations and unions. Second, a major scandal broke that was dubbed the sponsorship scandal, as it was revealed Liberal-friendly advertising agencies in the province of Quebec had been awarded numerous government advertising contracts for doing effectively no work, and passing sums of money back to the Liberals as donations. One such case was, literally, an envelope full of cash passed to a Liberal party member in an Italian restaurant.
The Liberals had relied heavily on corporate donors during their time in power and did not have much in place for "grassroots" fundraising, so the campaign finance reform crippled their fundraising abilities. This remains true today; the Liberals are consistently out-fundraised by a huge margin by the Conservatives, who have very solid grassroots fundraising. I think in the last quarter, even the NDP raised more cash than the Liberals. The Liberals have still not managed to fully pay off their debts from their 2006 leadership convention. Bottom line: the Conservatives are flush with cash, the Liberals are broke. The Liberals simply can't afford an election.
The fallout from the sponsorship scandal crushed Liberal fortunes in Quebec and allowed the Conservatives to make significant inroads in the 2006 election. Selecting Dion as leader, who is not popular in nationalist parts of Quebec from his time as constitutional affairs minister under Chretien, has compounded the Liberal problem. Outside of Montreal, the Liberals are polling very badly in Quebec, behind both the Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois, with the NDP nipping at their heels. Even in Montreal, recent polls are suggesting once-Liberal strongholds may be up for grabs. The Liberals have historically been weak in western Canada, and need to win large numbers of seats in both Quebec and Ontario to form government. As of today, the Liberals simply can't win in Quebec.
The final problem the Liberals have is they have transitioned very poorly from government to opposition. Often dubbed Canada's "natural governing party", the Liberals seem to have forgotten how to formulate policy when they are not governing. Much of their performance in opposition has been taken up with blustering about alleged Conservative scandals, rather than articulating an alternate vision of how to run the country.
So in a nutshell, our official opposition is a party that can't afford to trigger an election it can't win on policies it doesn't have. And the Liberals know it. Hence they huff and puff about opposing the Conservatives, but won't pull the trigger.
What is the answer? I guess that if you are holding yourselves up as being the defender of the free world and calling 'evil' to account you have to make sure that you don't commit evil yourselves. I guess I should've noted that I'm Canadian, not American, so the "you" is misplaced.
I'd also like to know if there is any country, anywhere, that holds up to this "you must do no evil before you can criticize others" standard, because it seems to me on the one hand impossibly high, and on the other a disingenuous way to brush aside any relevant criticism. The United States may have its faults, but I'll still opt for it to lead the free world over any other country out there, and in most respects there's not even a close second.
Does anyone else think that one of these days, it would be nice to read an article and discussion about some other country's issue without having to read a gratuitous slam about some aspect of the United States which gets modded up to +5 mostly because it is a gratuitous slam about the United States?
So read claim 1 and enlighten us. Where's the brilliant innovation in this legalese that demands a 17-year monopoly on implementing it?
"1. A system for reducing customer dissatisfaction for waiting, said system comprising:a queue monitoring subsystem that detects an entry of a customer into a waiting queue;a reward computing subsystem that calculates a reward for the customer for being in the waiting queue; anda communication subsystem to communicate the reward to the customer,wherein at least one of said queue monitoring subsystem, said reward computing subsystem, and said communication subsystem is automated."
I ordered a meal at Wendy's not too long ago. I waited a long time for some reason. When the guy brought me my meal, he also brought me a coupon for a free meal as compensation for waiting. In behind the counter at this particular Wendy's, I could see an order board, showing the orders and how long it has been since they were taken. Aka: an automated queue monitoring system.
Prior art. Plain and simple. Which is what this garbage patent application is: plain and simple. It is not novel, it is not innovative, and granting it would in no way promote the progress of science.
DJB has an awful problem of confusing "I don't know how it can be done" with "it can't be done"
That's not what I took from his writeup. If I had to sum it up, I'd say his take on it would be akin to, "This could've been done the easy way (make ipv6 backwards-compatible with ipv4) or the hard way (don't) - so why on earth did the designers of ipv6 choose the hard way?"
Spider-Man has actually just become an example of how American comic books can't even do a "start over" right. Marvel just performed a magical reset of Spider-Man continuity. He made a deal with the devil to erase his marriage to Mary Jane Watson from everyone's memory so that his Aunt May would survive a gunshot wound.
No, I'm not kidding. Marvel made JMS write that story over his objections (he actually wanted his name pulled from the issue at one point), published it, and just expect Spider-Man fans to swallow it. 20 years of the Spider-marriage, wiped out, in an instant. In the way that only American comic books would even think of.
OK, I really don't know squat about how patents are done. But I did take a look at the two highest-numbered patents there. What did I see?
The abstract: word-for-word identical.
The description: word-for-word identical.
The claims: claim #1 is the same, but there's a lot more verbiage in the second patent. Patent #1 then goes on to claim method #1 over a whole slew of different communication channels, each as their own claim - this patten repeats itself throughout patent #1. Claim #8 in patent #1 is the same claim as #1, just with the wording tweaked. Claim #6 in patent #2 has all the same wording again.
Shall I go on?
Seriously: WTF? Did the examiner even read these things? 5,995,705 looks like nothing more than a time-extension of 5,164,839, which is itself an extension of 5,057,932. Is this not a classic patent troll? Keep dressing up the same patent over & over again to get more time under the patent to litigate against the true innovators?
If this is typical for real patents, then patent law is even more screwed up than I already thought it was.
Most average users aren't going to need one-one-hundredth of what is in Photoshop, whereas Gimp may allow them to easily clean up their personal photos and send them out at Christmastime.
That's kind of self-contradictory, isn't it? If Photoshop is too bloated for most users, and Gimp bills itself as the OSS Photoshop, shouldn't Gimp be too bloated for most users?
Picasa or Paint.NET are better choices than Gimp for such users, IMO.
Wealth isn't created in the board room or on wall street. Wealth is created in the factory, behind the fry cook's stove, in the programmer's cube, on the construction site. The wealthy don't create wealth, they aggregate it.
That a statement like that runs up to +5 without an appropriate rebuttal is a crying shame. So the restaurant owner who built the restaurant, bought the deep-fryer and other kitchen equipment, and pays the cook, isn't creating wealth by his actions? The factory owner who invests tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in specialized equipment, the land the factory sits on, the building it's housed in, paying his workers and his contractors, isn't creating wealth by his actions? You think it would be better if those owners didn't do those things? Where are the workers then?
I'll tell you: sitting on welfare whining they don't have jobs.
Since this started with a Churchill quote (well, an apocryphal one anyway), I'll paraphrase one to finish: Capitalism is the worst form of economy, except for all the others that have been tried.
Sounds good in theory, except for the fact that the 1918 pandemic killed mostly the young & healthy, those with strong enough immune systems that they produced fatal cytokine storms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#History). H5N1, the avian flu that everyone's worried about, is capable of doing the same thing to humans.
If all you do is read the wikipedia article on H5N1 and still don't feel just a little scared, you've got a stronger constitution than I've got.
Grandparent post gets a +5 without a single supporting link or fact to his statements about Petraeus lying to Congress or running the war poorly, and feigning ignorance about why an ad accusing a 4-star general of treason could possibly be offensive. Parent post deserves to be +5 to properly rebut it, or GP modded down.
Prime example of why those in the political center or right say Slashdot is left-wing.
If Bioware stays as its own studio, and EA just acts as their backer, that may not be such a bad thing. This could then just mean that Bioware ends up getting more reliable funding, and ends up churning out games in a more regular fashion. In addition, Bioware is not exactly known for extravagant salaries, so this may end up getting a bunch of them better pay.
Let's time-warp back to 1992 and play word-substitution:
If Origin stays as its own studio, and EA just acts as their backer, that may not be such a bad thing. This could then just mean that Origin ends up getting more reliable funding, and ends up churning out games in a more regular fashion. In addition, Origin is not exactly known for extravagant salaries, so this may end up getting a bunch of them better pay.
If you haven't seen evidence that the defendant transferred these files, then how can you say the files are worth a total of $23.76?
The fact that the plaintiffs distribute the tracks in question at a market value of $0.99/each on iTunes, obviously.
If the defendant didn't transfer any files, then they're certainly not worth $23.76. Likewise, if the defendant actually transfered the 24 files a grand total of a million times, then the "worth" of the files is certainly much, much, higher, as in a few dollars short of a million if we take iTunes pricing as a market guide.
Do the frigging math before spouting off something like that: a million times? To distribute 24 files of, say, 3 megabytes each? That's a total of 72 terabytes of transfers! And you accuse the parent of making a deceptive argument?
Slashdot Mirror
When I traveled in Europe several years ago, what struck me traffic-wise was how many traffic circles they use and just how well they work. I've often thought since then that North America should replace a lot of their low-volume traffic-lights with traffic circles. Drivers get a convenience benefit in that they don't actually have to stop, but society gets a safety benefit in that the driver must slow down to navigate the circle. Also, obviously, no traffic lights means less electricity usage so you get a small environmental benefit too.
Another side benefit is that if you take a wrong turn somewhere, you just continue on to the next circle and go back the way you came, instead of having to figure out how the hell you can get turned around.
Yet it seems that North America is fiercely adverse to traffic circles, using them only very reluctantly - and when they are used, they're done badly. There's one in my city, for example, with dedicated lanes such that, if you're not sure exactly where you're going when you enter that circle, you'll easily wind up taking the wrong exit (even after they overhauled the thing a couple years ago to try and clean it up; it was an even worse mess before). That kinda defeats the point.
Actually that's not quite it. It stops at January 15, 2009. There was a final press briefing on January 16, 2009 that isn't there, the radio address of the 17th, plus a number of photos taken between the 16th and the 20th. The very last photo posted was a shot of President & Mrs. Bush on the North Portico as they were about to greet the Obamas (yes, I was watching the site that day).
Heck, I just noticed.. Bush's farewell address isn't even there, so the snapshot must have been taken in the afternoon of the 15th.
Typical government efficiency :P
Physics doesn't lie, and the pros are going a metric fuckload faster than high school football players do.
(USA) How much is a "metric fuckload" in english? (/USA)
I accidentally modded this "Redundant" but it should be "Insightful".
If I had to choose between a house to live in and air to breath, I'd choose the air. If I had to choose between sex and internet, I'd choose sex. If I had to choose between 100$ and a copy of GH3+controller, I'd choose Guitar Hero. If I had to choose between 200$ and two Guitar Hero packs, I might choose the money, or I might choose the GH packs in hope of a resale.
In summation, the guy chose to have no home and a video game instead of a home and money. Sex is no longer a choice at that point, it's only fantasy.
Mod parent up, please. GP is blatantly mistaken on the criminal status of drug use & prostitution in Vancouver, but I suppose the +5 really came about for the potshot at "puritanical Americans".
Now can those of us who subscribe to the RSS feed get a version without the idle stories? I really don't want them polluting the feed because there's no way to distinguish them from any other stories.
Quantum Leap suffers from this too. A key scene in the second season finale - when hologram Al dances with his first ex-wife, just before he Leaps out, pleading with her to wait for him to come home from Vietnam, knowing that she won't - was ruined by the someone's refusal to license the song "Georgia On My Mind" for the DVD release. They were forced to remix it with some bland imitation.
I'm not sure if it was the Ray Charles estate itself or some record company that holds the copyright that got greedy about it. Either way it guts the scene. I can't bring myself to purchase the DVD set because of it.
Ditto "Married With Children", for that matter. They couldn't use "Love And Marriage" beyond the first season DVD set.
I'm amazed this could get through a post-9/11 Congress. Y'know, the day that big government failed spectacularly to protect its citizens, but the passengers of flight 93 used their cell phones to find out what was going on and put a stop to it?
So from that it naturally flows to ban cell phone use on airplanes. Brilliant thinking there.
Where's the instant meta-mod option? GP posts a long, thought-out personal history of his struggle with mental illness, what he's done to live with it and minimize its effects on his life, and includes the role of religion in his life. He's respectful about it, he doesn't preach, he doesn't ask anyone to convert. He rightfully gets a +5.
Parent makes a one-line slam of GP's religious belief, offering absolutely nothing else to the conversation, and gets a +5 from the /. knee-jerk anti-religion crowd.
Shameful.
The sight of that guy in that underwear/diaper thing, that is.
Couldn't that have been marked NSFW? I just about lost my breakfast.
Wow, that's quite the allegation. If it were as cut-and-dried as you say, how many people have been charged with crimes related to the scandal - and how many have been convicted?
I believe at least two advertising executives have been convicted of fraud to date, and just a month or two ago charges were laid against one Liberal party worker. The RCMP are notoriously slow at investigating such things.
I think you have over-stated the scope and intent of the program. Yes, there was corruption but we get that from all politicians, and the current minority government is no different. Their party headquarters were raided by Elections Canada on the grounds that they were using the campaign financing laws to defraud Canadian taxpayers.
Now your partisan leanings are showing. Fraud is not what Elections Canada is claiming. All they are claiming is that the Conservatives spent more than the allowed limit during the last election (using methods that the Liberals and NDP also used), but the money was Conservative money, not taxpayer money (I'm aware that parties do get federal subsidies, but those aren't in question here). As for the raid itself, the fact that the Liberals had cameramen on the scene as it was happening casts serious concerns on EC's partisanship and motives.
I think your political leanings are pretty obvious given that partisan explanation. I wish you had omitted some of the more gratuitous hyperbole though. Apart from the bias, you have described the situation reasonably well.
I calls em as I sees em. The Liberals aren't fit to govern. I'm not convinced they're even fit to serve as opposition. Why they continue to poll anywhere above the 10-15% they truly deserve eludes me. I may strongly disagree with the NDP, but I can respect that they are (most of the time) a principled political party who articulate alternate policies. Today's Liberals fail on both counts.
The Liberals were in power under Jean Chretien from 1993 to 2003, when Paul Martin replaced him. Two things happened around this time. First, Chretien passed a campaign-finance reform bill that banned contributions from corporations and unions. Second, a major scandal broke that was dubbed the sponsorship scandal, as it was revealed Liberal-friendly advertising agencies in the province of Quebec had been awarded numerous government advertising contracts for doing effectively no work, and passing sums of money back to the Liberals as donations. One such case was, literally, an envelope full of cash passed to a Liberal party member in an Italian restaurant.
The Liberals had relied heavily on corporate donors during their time in power and did not have much in place for "grassroots" fundraising, so the campaign finance reform crippled their fundraising abilities. This remains true today; the Liberals are consistently out-fundraised by a huge margin by the Conservatives, who have very solid grassroots fundraising. I think in the last quarter, even the NDP raised more cash than the Liberals. The Liberals have still not managed to fully pay off their debts from their 2006 leadership convention. Bottom line: the Conservatives are flush with cash, the Liberals are broke. The Liberals simply can't afford an election.
The fallout from the sponsorship scandal crushed Liberal fortunes in Quebec and allowed the Conservatives to make significant inroads in the 2006 election. Selecting Dion as leader, who is not popular in nationalist parts of Quebec from his time as constitutional affairs minister under Chretien, has compounded the Liberal problem. Outside of Montreal, the Liberals are polling very badly in Quebec, behind both the Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois, with the NDP nipping at their heels. Even in Montreal, recent polls are suggesting once-Liberal strongholds may be up for grabs. The Liberals have historically been weak in western Canada, and need to win large numbers of seats in both Quebec and Ontario to form government. As of today, the Liberals simply can't win in Quebec.
The final problem the Liberals have is they have transitioned very poorly from government to opposition. Often dubbed Canada's "natural governing party", the Liberals seem to have forgotten how to formulate policy when they are not governing. Much of their performance in opposition has been taken up with blustering about alleged Conservative scandals, rather than articulating an alternate vision of how to run the country.
So in a nutshell, our official opposition is a party that can't afford to trigger an election it can't win on policies it doesn't have. And the Liberals know it. Hence they huff and puff about opposing the Conservatives, but won't pull the trigger.
Does anyone else think that one of these days, it would be nice to read an article and discussion about some other country's issue without having to read a gratuitous slam about some aspect of the United States which gets modded up to +5 mostly because it is a gratuitous slam about the United States?
So read claim 1 and enlighten us. Where's the brilliant innovation in this legalese that demands a 17-year monopoly on implementing it? "1. A system for reducing customer dissatisfaction for waiting, said system comprising:a queue monitoring subsystem that detects an entry of a customer into a waiting queue;a reward computing subsystem that calculates a reward for the customer for being in the waiting queue; anda communication subsystem to communicate the reward to the customer,wherein at least one of said queue monitoring subsystem, said reward computing subsystem, and said communication subsystem is automated." I ordered a meal at Wendy's not too long ago. I waited a long time for some reason. When the guy brought me my meal, he also brought me a coupon for a free meal as compensation for waiting. In behind the counter at this particular Wendy's, I could see an order board, showing the orders and how long it has been since they were taken. Aka: an automated queue monitoring system. Prior art. Plain and simple. Which is what this garbage patent application is: plain and simple. It is not novel, it is not innovative, and granting it would in no way promote the progress of science.
That's not what I took from his writeup. If I had to sum it up, I'd say his take on it would be akin to, "This could've been done the easy way (make ipv6 backwards-compatible with ipv4) or the hard way (don't) - so why on earth did the designers of ipv6 choose the hard way?"
Spider-Man has actually just become an example of how American comic books can't even do a "start over" right. Marvel just performed a magical reset of Spider-Man continuity. He made a deal with the devil to erase his marriage to Mary Jane Watson from everyone's memory so that his Aunt May would survive a gunshot wound. No, I'm not kidding. Marvel made JMS write that story over his objections (he actually wanted his name pulled from the issue at one point), published it, and just expect Spider-Man fans to swallow it. 20 years of the Spider-marriage, wiped out, in an instant. In the way that only American comic books would even think of.
OK, I really don't know squat about how patents are done. But I did take a look at the two highest-numbered patents there. What did I see?
The abstract: word-for-word identical.
The description: word-for-word identical.
The claims: claim #1 is the same, but there's a lot more verbiage in the second patent. Patent #1 then goes on to claim method #1 over a whole slew of different communication channels, each as their own claim - this patten repeats itself throughout patent #1. Claim #8 in patent #1 is the same claim as #1, just with the wording tweaked. Claim #6 in patent #2 has all the same wording again.
Shall I go on?
Seriously: WTF? Did the examiner even read these things? 5,995,705 looks like nothing more than a time-extension of 5,164,839, which is itself an extension of 5,057,932. Is this not a classic patent troll? Keep dressing up the same patent over & over again to get more time under the patent to litigate against the true innovators?
If this is typical for real patents, then patent law is even more screwed up than I already thought it was.
That's kind of self-contradictory, isn't it? If Photoshop is too bloated for most users, and Gimp bills itself as the OSS Photoshop, shouldn't Gimp be too bloated for most users?
Picasa or Paint.NET are better choices than Gimp for such users, IMO.
That a statement like that runs up to +5 without an appropriate rebuttal is a crying shame. So the restaurant owner who built the restaurant, bought the deep-fryer and other kitchen equipment, and pays the cook, isn't creating wealth by his actions? The factory owner who invests tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in specialized equipment, the land the factory sits on, the building it's housed in, paying his workers and his contractors, isn't creating wealth by his actions? You think it would be better if those owners didn't do those things? Where are the workers then?
I'll tell you: sitting on welfare whining they don't have jobs.
Since this started with a Churchill quote (well, an apocryphal one anyway), I'll paraphrase one to finish: Capitalism is the worst form of economy, except for all the others that have been tried.
If all you do is read the wikipedia article on H5N1 and still don't feel just a little scared, you've got a stronger constitution than I've got.
Prime example of why those in the political center or right say Slashdot is left-wing.
Let's time-warp back to 1992 and play word-substitution:
If Origin stays as its own studio, and EA just acts as their backer, that may not be such a bad thing. This could then just mean that Origin ends up getting more reliable funding, and ends up churning out games in a more regular fashion. In addition, Origin is not exactly known for extravagant salaries, so this may end up getting a bunch of them better pay.
We all know how that turned out, don't we?
RIP, Bioware. It was great knowing you.
The fact that the plaintiffs distribute the tracks in question at a market value of $0.99/each on iTunes, obviously.
Do the frigging math before spouting off something like that: a million times? To distribute 24 files of, say, 3 megabytes each? That's a total of 72 terabytes of transfers! And you accuse the parent of making a deceptive argument?