That being said, it is not worth employing a lawyer for a $1600 dispute. Even if you win, it would probably cost you about that in legal fees. So true. A few years back a land lord tried to sue me for eviction and 9 months rent when I moved out of my apartment (with 2 months notice and 2 months remaining on the lease). We paid a Lawyer about $1800 in all to get out of the $6300 fee they were claiming. But the case with him before that I did not get a lawyer for the $2500 rent abatement hearing.
I hate to break it to you, but the judge was probably just being polite. That could be. As I said, a lawyer would have likely argued it much better than myself. As for my ramblings, I offered 3 statutes, with the proper identification so that both he and the State could review those laws prior to the case. All three of the laws were specificly related to either debt in marrages, medicare recoupment, and WI tax codes. Even if my presentation was entirely bumbling, it would only take a moment for him to read those laws and say "I have considered your arguement and I do not find it compelling" as opposed to "I don't know these laws".
$1600 isn't worth a lawyer unless you have a lawschool friend looking for practice;)
Yeah, it was an interesting time in my house. My wife was recovering from knee surgery when I got the bill. So I couldn't quite fathom how in the build up to her surgery she had found the time, motivation, and drive to attempt to sue me...
Turns out that the State initiated the lawsuit on her behalf, and because of how the case was being handled, she had no legal authority to decline their offer to sue me. The money they were suing me for was to go to the State Children's slush fund, where it/should/ have been sent on to the Medicare program. If it ever made it there, I have no idea.
The really entertaining part, is that even though the same State law that they sued us under specificly states that the mother of the child can not be held liable for the medicare expenses, the State was perfectly happy cashing the check from her for the full amount (I had just blown my checking account paying for her knee surgery). The State wanted it's money back, and the Judge was looking at either ignoring the laws and having an easy day, or considering the laws and creating ramifications for the State's child services agencies and Medicare recoupment.
Yeah, I should have qualified that better. It is not legal advice, it is an idle suggestion for action based on the heavily scewed experiences of a bitter and disallusioned young man.
Real legal advice would be more like: Research your State's family, child services, and medicare laws and determine if it is in your best interest to wed prior to your child's birth. Make sure you ask about recoupment, the fathers role, and all parties liability after the fact.
In the State of Wisconsin though, you're pretty much screwed. Hell, for a 1 time assistance fee that I paid back, I am now on the State's list of un-wed fathers, and due to State and Federal laws, my name can not come off that list until my son is 18. So yeah, I'm just a touch annoyed.
The point is Judges will rule on what they know, regardless of the facts and laws at hand.
For example, earlier this year I had to go to court over a child support issue. My wife and I were not married when our son was born. Rest assured I was a dutiful father and paid for our housing, food, and as much of the related medical expenses as I could, but we were dirt poor. So we took advantage of a State aide plan to help single mothers afford proper child birthing care. My wife's insurance covered most of her costs, but 0% of the child's. So, three years later, we're married and happily raising our son, when I get a bill out of the blue for $2000. Apparently, my wife was suing me for child support and the State was nice enough to step in and help her with the lawsuit.
So after the usual pre-trial rituals, and a lot of research, I presented the Judge with a series of marriage and Tax laws that showed that regardless of our marital state at the time of childbirth, in our current situation, the State was limited in it's ability to collect.
The judge said, and I quote, "I am not familiar with those laws, so I am going to rule on the one I know." And summarily ordered me to pay $1600 to the State. Maybe a lawyer could have argued it better, but when they Judge just flat out told me that nothing I could present him with would be considered in his decision, I kinda lost hope and just paid the damn bill.
So in closing, 2 points: 1) Most Judges will take the easiest path available to make it through the 9-5. Even if it means ignoring the obvious. 2) If you are about to have a child out of wedlock in Wisconsin and you are receiving state benefits, get married. Regardless of whether you intend to stay married or not. Get the license, have the kid and flip the State the bird as they foot the bill and get to ask for a dime back. (note: this is not legal advice!)
Uh, no... it wouldn't. I would advise you to pay head to your own signature. Irony is an incongruity between what is expected and what actually occurs.
So, one would expect that if you were to advertise a competition in Germany, to Germans, in which, the Germans contestants were using modern technology to crack a cipher, and that their competition was a couple of Brits using almost 70 year old technology, the expectation would be that the Germans, using modern technology would win.
It was a contest held in Germany, advertised to Germans, and the unencrypted text was written in German. There is nothing ironic about a German person cracking the code.
I could understand a stereotype tag, even a nationalism tag, but racism? Are the taggers implying that people from German are of different races than the rest of the world?
I RTFA and there is nothing racist in there. Just that a guy from Germany cracked the code using some software written in Ada.
Actually, there is a lot of work being done with algae farms where hydrocarbon absorbing algae has coal fire exhaust fed to it. The result is a huge drop off in emissions, and an oil rich algae that can be easily process to produce consumer grade Bio Diesel, and the remnants can be safely used as feed stock for cattle.
Coal isn't perfect, but with gasification technologies, algae farms, carbon scrubbers, and some of the other more recent advances, it can be made a hell of a lot better. The big problem is not the technology, it is forcing the existing power plants to advance. Just last week a court in Wisconsin ruled that the down town coal fed power plant would have to meet modern standards (instead of the grandfathered 1970's standards) due to the amount of modifications that had taken place. Because of the laws in place, it is almost always in the power plant's best interests to NOT upgrade their equipment significantly because, like cars, their emissions are measured against the limitations in place when the plant opened. So only new power plants being built now have to worry about paying for the latest greatest technology to reduce emissions, while that carbon belching and highly inefficient system built decades ago is free to just spew away.
I don't expect any single entity to fully replace all others. Sure, ramping up Wind generation in the Dakotas would help A LOT, upgrading/rebuilding nuclear plants to highly efficient/lower waste pebble bed reactors would help A LOT, and cleaning up coal would be a huge boon. Distributed generation, such as integrated shingle photo-voltaic cells (solar power on each house) could also dramatically cut the need to increase centralized generation and level out peek usage demand in high temperature climates. The whole space based solar power deal is a no go though, in order to pipe that kind of power down you're talking about a multiple mile wide receiver dish taking huge amounts of microwave. Anything, animals, birds, planes, etc... that gets into that huge beam is going to be cooked in an instant. And I can't imagine the passing of that kind of energy through the atmosphere would do anything good either.
To be fair though, the market value jumped because they announced a new product. If those investors were aware of the total and complete 'shittiness' of their existing products (hell, 11 freaking versions and the interface still sucks donkey balls, unpatched exploits, etc...), they may not have been so interested in the new product.
Educating investors on what exactly they are investing in, and what the new product's likelihood of success is, is a very appropriate thing to do. Who wants to invest in a software company that is trying to muscle in on a preexisting field/market with a history of mediocre software design and poor maintenance habits?
When I was in MOS school a buddy in the barracks had a Play Station and FF7. He gave me the first slot on the memory stick, so when ever I wanted to save, I just hit the OK button over and over. Well, after he moved out I was hanging out with another guy who had just moved in. He also had a PS and FF7 and he let me play on it one day. As we were sitting there chatting, with out thinking about it, I went to save my game, and yup, saved my brand new game over slot one on the stick.
Right over his level 97 toons.
whoops.
I think there may have been tears. There was definitely a lot of anger. I was not invited back.
Ahh well, I can't retrieve my initial response, so here is a summarization.
I should start by apologizing for painting with an awfully broad brush, the patents themselves (I thought they were 20 years with the option to extend for another 14) are not outrageous. But abuse of the patent system to extend those monopolies though extension requests, incremental changes, and other tactics that do nothing to advance medicine other than to pad the profits.
I agree with you though, making money developing new drugs is extremely unlikely. We're talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to go from nothing to a box on a shelf not to mention the years it takes to get there. So pharmaceutical companies avoid taking those risks when possible. They re-invent the same crap, alter the formula some what, get a new patent, and push the new drug. Just look at all the variations on existing pain relievers, regular, extra strength, maximum strength, PM, non-drowsy, gel caps, etc... It's all the same set of tried and true already tested components. It's like building new drugs out of legos. They all work under the exact same medical theory and bring nothing new to the industry. But its a real cheap investment comparatively and they'll continue to sell and turn a profit.
Heck, look at the story behind Sudafed. The industry wasted 7 years on mixing in stiffeners and thickening agents to try to make it more difficult to use the drug as a meth base, but wound up with crap. Then they finally decided to pull the mirrored drug off the table where it had been sitting since 1996. Hell, the meth problems in this country could have been headed off 10 years ago, before the internet had put the information for how to make meth at the finger tips of anyone looking for a high. But in the search for a cheaper solution, they ignored the scientists and tabled the research for years.
And that's where the patent abuse starts up. The process of 'mirroring' a drug allows the pharmaceutical companies to re-patent the exact same drug. The mirroring often results in a more effective drug with less side effects, but it is in the financial interests of the corporation to not mirror the drug until it's initial patent on the compound is about to expire. At that point, they can re-patent and enjoy another 20 years of monopoly. This is the crap that pisses me off. They could have released Nexium years before they did, but by waiting until Prilosec's patent was about to expire granted AstraZeneca a new life on their monopoly.
It all boils down to the good and bad of capitalism and corporations. There is no magic bullet to fix the issues, save for a careful choice of legislation and solid oversight that balances the needs of the people for treatment and the needs of the researchers for funding.
aww man, I wrote a solid reply to this while I was at the office, but the page must have timed out or something because I can't seem to find the post now from home. If I dig up some motivation tomorrow, I'll re-write it.
I don not currently have such data available. I did a number of research projects on health care, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries a few years back for some of my most interesting and challenging courses in college. I remember quoting the average number of failed (non-marketed) drugs per successful drug, and the average costs to get a drug to market, but I can not recall those values, nor the cites off the top of my head (thus the reason for un-cited vague references). Normally, I would be glad to go digging for them again, but I've got some deadlines coming up that I have to knock out of the way first. If you do find something to enforce or contradict my memory though, feel free to share, I'm all for being proven wrong.
No, what I am saying is that developing a new drug from scratch is likely going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and for each 1 drug that successfully makes it to market, there are likely hundreds if not thousands of failures. That means to innovation is extremely risky. Where as, taking an existing pattented medication, and tweeking it's formula just enough to get a new patent (as well as an extension on the original) is a relatively cheap investment and can be brought to market much more quickly.
And if a corporation does invent a new wonder drug that cures AIDS or destroys infectious diseases, world interest is going to commadeer the drug such that it's existance can help save people rather than pad the wallets of the investors.
I'm not pretending to have an agenda for fixing the situation, it's a hard balancing act between invention, safety, and profitability, but in my opinion the balance has been resting too heavily on profitability lately.
His argument is not without merit though. There is no financial interest in developing new drugs when old drugs are still protected under obscenely long lasting patents. And researchers are, as researchers are. I highly doubt many of the silicon engineers are eagerly awaiting news of how Timmy used their latest creation to do his high school term paper on. Like whys, most researchers are likely more interested in continuing their research than the 5-20 year battle what ever their last findings will go through before becoming a commercial grade product.
All of that could be put aside though, save for one major factor. There is a HUGE amount of money in the pharmaceutical world. And the sad fact is, more of that money goes to crap like Viagra commercials during the Super Bowl than to the research and development of new drugs and treatments.
I'm not saying everyone in the industry is a greedy whore, heck, I've met and worked with some really great people who are in it for the cures. But the privatization of research, the excessive burden of patents, and the big-business/lobbyist friendly approach of our government over the last 2+ decades have lead to a slowing of development and a maximization of profits.
Now normally, I'm not a big fan of taxes for taxations sake, but...
Just tax the hell out of cigarettes and put the money into socialized health care projects.
You want to stop a 16 year old kid from smoking? Tell him he needs to cough up $7.50 for a pack. Not many kids are going to be paying that rate for long. Especially with the price of gas climbing. And if you've got the money to pay for $7.50 packs of smoke, you've probably got money to pay for your own health insurance, so smoke on.
If the game has already gone gold, they would be looking at a huge loss to re-package a new CD. Especially if the game is designed to call home so that the disabling could be enacted after the purchase with out any significant overhead.
Even if the game hasn't gone gold, if they still intend to ship both an AO and M rated version, having all the data on 1 image, and just flipping an enabled switch is likely cheaper for production costs.
But yeah, you would think that these guys, having a game they know is controversial would take the time to re-burn the master image with out the objectionable scenes and wait for final rating before going gold if at all possible.
I'd say just the opposite. My son once got a hold of one of my CD's when he was a little tyke. He gummed on it for a while, but this was in his pre-teething days, so it did nothing but coat my CD in a nice layer of baby spittle.
Had that been a record, I could have just lost the last 2 minutes of one of my favorite Beach Boys albums.
Slashdot Mirror
$1600 isn't worth a lawyer unless you have a lawschool friend looking for practice
-Rick
Yeah, it was an interesting time in my house. My wife was recovering from knee surgery when I got the bill. So I couldn't quite fathom how in the build up to her surgery she had found the time, motivation, and drive to attempt to sue me...
/should/ have been sent on to the Medicare program. If it ever made it there, I have no idea.
Turns out that the State initiated the lawsuit on her behalf, and because of how the case was being handled, she had no legal authority to decline their offer to sue me. The money they were suing me for was to go to the State Children's slush fund, where it
The really entertaining part, is that even though the same State law that they sued us under specificly states that the mother of the child can not be held liable for the medicare expenses, the State was perfectly happy cashing the check from her for the full amount (I had just blown my checking account paying for her knee surgery). The State wanted it's money back, and the Judge was looking at either ignoring the laws and having an easy day, or considering the laws and creating ramifications for the State's child services agencies and Medicare recoupment.
-Rick
Yeah, I should have qualified that better. It is not legal advice, it is an idle suggestion for action based on the heavily scewed experiences of a bitter and disallusioned young man.
Real legal advice would be more like: Research your State's family, child services, and medicare laws and determine if it is in your best interest to wed prior to your child's birth. Make sure you ask about recoupment, the fathers role, and all parties liability after the fact.
In the State of Wisconsin though, you're pretty much screwed. Hell, for a 1 time assistance fee that I paid back, I am now on the State's list of un-wed fathers, and due to State and Federal laws, my name can not come off that list until my son is 18. So yeah, I'm just a touch annoyed.
-Rick
I think at this point we have both shown that we have a solid grasp of the meaning of the word 'iron'. It is just our application that differs.
If you remove all context from the situation and look at this as purely "Germans crack German code faster than Brits!" then yes, there is irony.
But, in context, there is no irony.
-Rick
The point is Judges will rule on what they know, regardless of the facts and laws at hand.
For example, earlier this year I had to go to court over a child support issue. My wife and I were not married when our son was born. Rest assured I was a dutiful father and paid for our housing, food, and as much of the related medical expenses as I could, but we were dirt poor. So we took advantage of a State aide plan to help single mothers afford proper child birthing care. My wife's insurance covered most of her costs, but 0% of the child's. So, three years later, we're married and happily raising our son, when I get a bill out of the blue for $2000. Apparently, my wife was suing me for child support and the State was nice enough to step in and help her with the lawsuit.
So after the usual pre-trial rituals, and a lot of research, I presented the Judge with a series of marriage and Tax laws that showed that regardless of our marital state at the time of childbirth, in our current situation, the State was limited in it's ability to collect.
The judge said, and I quote, "I am not familiar with those laws, so I am going to rule on the one I know." And summarily ordered me to pay $1600 to the State. Maybe a lawyer could have argued it better, but when they Judge just flat out told me that nothing I could present him with would be considered in his decision, I kinda lost hope and just paid the damn bill.
So in closing, 2 points:
1) Most Judges will take the easiest path available to make it through the 9-5. Even if it means ignoring the obvious.
2) If you are about to have a child out of wedlock in Wisconsin and you are receiving state benefits, get married. Regardless of whether you intend to stay married or not. Get the license, have the kid and flip the State the bird as they foot the bill and get to ask for a dime back. (note: this is not legal advice!)
-Rick
Yes, it would be ironic if this was taking place 60+ years ago.
But it's not.
The expectation should be that modern technology will kick the ass of WWII technology.
To think this is ironic is to exist in some sort of hyperbolic fantasy were current reality has no value.
-Rick
Uh, no... it wouldn't. I would advise you to pay head to your own signature. Irony is an incongruity between what is expected and what actually occurs.
So, one would expect that if you were to advertise a competition in Germany, to Germans, in which, the Germans contestants were using modern technology to crack a cipher, and that their competition was a couple of Brits using almost 70 year old technology, the expectation would be that the Germans, using modern technology would win.
It would be ironic if the BRITS won.
-Rick
It was a contest held in Germany, advertised to Germans, and the unencrypted text was written in German. There is nothing ironic about a German person cracking the code.
-Rick
Just saying that associating an amateur radio operator/programmer with the Nazi party is a bit on the delusional side.
There are some really weird misconceptions out there about Germany, both present and past.
-Rick
Actually, the encrypted text was written in German, and the local broadcasts were made IN Germany.
So it would be significantly more amazing if someone OTHER than a German cracked it.
-Rick
Not all Germans who lived from the 1930's to the 1950's were Nazis. The Nazi party was a political party, not an affiliation of inventors.
-Rick
I could understand a stereotype tag, even a nationalism tag, but racism? Are the taggers implying that people from German are of different races than the rest of the world?
I RTFA and there is nothing racist in there. Just that a guy from Germany cracked the code using some software written in Ada.
-Rick
Actually, there is a lot of work being done with algae farms where hydrocarbon absorbing algae has coal fire exhaust fed to it. The result is a huge drop off in emissions, and an oil rich algae that can be easily process to produce consumer grade Bio Diesel, and the remnants can be safely used as feed stock for cattle.
Coal isn't perfect, but with gasification technologies, algae farms, carbon scrubbers, and some of the other more recent advances, it can be made a hell of a lot better. The big problem is not the technology, it is forcing the existing power plants to advance. Just last week a court in Wisconsin ruled that the down town coal fed power plant would have to meet modern standards (instead of the grandfathered 1970's standards) due to the amount of modifications that had taken place. Because of the laws in place, it is almost always in the power plant's best interests to NOT upgrade their equipment significantly because, like cars, their emissions are measured against the limitations in place when the plant opened. So only new power plants being built now have to worry about paying for the latest greatest technology to reduce emissions, while that carbon belching and highly inefficient system built decades ago is free to just spew away.
I don't expect any single entity to fully replace all others. Sure, ramping up Wind generation in the Dakotas would help A LOT, upgrading/rebuilding nuclear plants to highly efficient/lower waste pebble bed reactors would help A LOT, and cleaning up coal would be a huge boon. Distributed generation, such as integrated shingle photo-voltaic cells (solar power on each house) could also dramatically cut the need to increase centralized generation and level out peek usage demand in high temperature climates. The whole space based solar power deal is a no go though, in order to pipe that kind of power down you're talking about a multiple mile wide receiver dish taking huge amounts of microwave. Anything, animals, birds, planes, etc... that gets into that huge beam is going to be cooked in an instant. And I can't imagine the passing of that kind of energy through the atmosphere would do anything good either.
-Rick
To be fair though, the market value jumped because they announced a new product. If those investors were aware of the total and complete 'shittiness' of their existing products (hell, 11 freaking versions and the interface still sucks donkey balls, unpatched exploits, etc...), they may not have been so interested in the new product.
Educating investors on what exactly they are investing in, and what the new product's likelihood of success is, is a very appropriate thing to do. Who wants to invest in a software company that is trying to muscle in on a preexisting field/market with a history of mediocre software design and poor maintenance habits?
-Rick
It's kinda like the old philosophical 'tree falling in a forest' question...
If Dvorak posts in a news group, does anyone really care?
-Rick
When I was in MOS school a buddy in the barracks had a Play Station and FF7. He gave me the first slot on the memory stick, so when ever I wanted to save, I just hit the OK button over and over. Well, after he moved out I was hanging out with another guy who had just moved in. He also had a PS and FF7 and he let me play on it one day. As we were sitting there chatting, with out thinking about it, I went to save my game, and yup, saved my brand new game over slot one on the stick.
Right over his level 97 toons.
whoops.
I think there may have been tears. There was definitely a lot of anger. I was not invited back.
-Rick
Ahh well, I can't retrieve my initial response, so here is a summarization.
I should start by apologizing for painting with an awfully broad brush, the patents themselves (I thought they were 20 years with the option to extend for another 14) are not outrageous. But abuse of the patent system to extend those monopolies though extension requests, incremental changes, and other tactics that do nothing to advance medicine other than to pad the profits.
I agree with you though, making money developing new drugs is extremely unlikely. We're talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to go from nothing to a box on a shelf not to mention the years it takes to get there. So pharmaceutical companies avoid taking those risks when possible. They re-invent the same crap, alter the formula some what, get a new patent, and push the new drug. Just look at all the variations on existing pain relievers, regular, extra strength, maximum strength, PM, non-drowsy, gel caps, etc... It's all the same set of tried and true already tested components. It's like building new drugs out of legos. They all work under the exact same medical theory and bring nothing new to the industry. But its a real cheap investment comparatively and they'll continue to sell and turn a profit.
Heck, look at the story behind Sudafed. The industry wasted 7 years on mixing in stiffeners and thickening agents to try to make it more difficult to use the drug as a meth base, but wound up with crap. Then they finally decided to pull the mirrored drug off the table where it had been sitting since 1996. Hell, the meth problems in this country could have been headed off 10 years ago, before the internet had put the information for how to make meth at the finger tips of anyone looking for a high. But in the search for a cheaper solution, they ignored the scientists and tabled the research for years.
And that's where the patent abuse starts up. The process of 'mirroring' a drug allows the pharmaceutical companies to re-patent the exact same drug. The mirroring often results in a more effective drug with less side effects, but it is in the financial interests of the corporation to not mirror the drug until it's initial patent on the compound is about to expire. At that point, they can re-patent and enjoy another 20 years of monopoly. This is the crap that pisses me off. They could have released Nexium years before they did, but by waiting until Prilosec's patent was about to expire granted AstraZeneca a new life on their monopoly.
It all boils down to the good and bad of capitalism and corporations. There is no magic bullet to fix the issues, save for a careful choice of legislation and solid oversight that balances the needs of the people for treatment and the needs of the researchers for funding.
-Rick
aww man, I wrote a solid reply to this while I was at the office, but the page must have timed out or something because I can't seem to find the post now from home. If I dig up some motivation tomorrow, I'll re-write it.
-Rick
I don not currently have such data available. I did a number of research projects on health care, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries a few years back for some of my most interesting and challenging courses in college. I remember quoting the average number of failed (non-marketed) drugs per successful drug, and the average costs to get a drug to market, but I can not recall those values, nor the cites off the top of my head (thus the reason for un-cited vague references). Normally, I would be glad to go digging for them again, but I've got some deadlines coming up that I have to knock out of the way first. If you do find something to enforce or contradict my memory though, feel free to share, I'm all for being proven wrong.
-Rick
No, what I am saying is that developing a new drug from scratch is likely going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and for each 1 drug that successfully makes it to market, there are likely hundreds if not thousands of failures. That means to innovation is extremely risky. Where as, taking an existing pattented medication, and tweeking it's formula just enough to get a new patent (as well as an extension on the original) is a relatively cheap investment and can be brought to market much more quickly.
And if a corporation does invent a new wonder drug that cures AIDS or destroys infectious diseases, world interest is going to commadeer the drug such that it's existance can help save people rather than pad the wallets of the investors.
I'm not pretending to have an agenda for fixing the situation, it's a hard balancing act between invention, safety, and profitability, but in my opinion the balance has been resting too heavily on profitability lately.
-Rick
His argument is not without merit though. There is no financial interest in developing new drugs when old drugs are still protected under obscenely long lasting patents. And researchers are, as researchers are. I highly doubt many of the silicon engineers are eagerly awaiting news of how Timmy used their latest creation to do his high school term paper on. Like whys, most researchers are likely more interested in continuing their research than the 5-20 year battle what ever their last findings will go through before becoming a commercial grade product.
All of that could be put aside though, save for one major factor. There is a HUGE amount of money in the pharmaceutical world. And the sad fact is, more of that money goes to crap like Viagra commercials during the Super Bowl than to the research and development of new drugs and treatments.
I'm not saying everyone in the industry is a greedy whore, heck, I've met and worked with some really great people who are in it for the cures. But the privatization of research, the excessive burden of patents, and the big-business/lobbyist friendly approach of our government over the last 2+ decades have lead to a slowing of development and a maximization of profits.
-Rick
Now normally, I'm not a big fan of taxes for taxations sake, but...
Just tax the hell out of cigarettes and put the money into socialized health care projects.
You want to stop a 16 year old kid from smoking? Tell him he needs to cough up $7.50 for a pack. Not many kids are going to be paying that rate for long. Especially with the price of gas climbing. And if you've got the money to pay for $7.50 packs of smoke, you've probably got money to pay for your own health insurance, so smoke on.
-Rick
Ehh, it could be a PITA.
If the game has already gone gold, they would be looking at a huge loss to re-package a new CD. Especially if the game is designed to call home so that the disabling could be enacted after the purchase with out any significant overhead.
Even if the game hasn't gone gold, if they still intend to ship both an AO and M rated version, having all the data on 1 image, and just flipping an enabled switch is likely cheaper for production costs.
But yeah, you would think that these guys, having a game they know is controversial would take the time to re-burn the master image with out the objectionable scenes and wait for final rating before going gold if at all possible.
-Rick
I'd say just the opposite. My son once got a hold of one of my CD's when he was a little tyke. He gummed on it for a while, but this was in his pre-teething days, so it did nothing but coat my CD in a nice layer of baby spittle.
Had that been a record, I could have just lost the last 2 minutes of one of my favorite Beach Boys albums.
-Rick