I actually like the idea of the rental model Apple is pushing - rent a show for a buck or two, a movie for $4-5, watch it once, don't have to watch commercials, and don't have to bother with stopping to rent / purchase a DVD. There are VERY few movies and tv-shows that I watch that I would ever be interested in watching more than once.
If they offered a la carte programming like this, and the performance of the service itself was good, I'd probably cancel my cable subscription and never look back. I DVR most of the shows I want to watch as it is, so I'm essentially paying a cable bill for a shitload of content I never watch, and will never watch. Let me pick and choose, I'd probably spend 30-50 a month on shows & movies I actually want to watch, not have to waste time watching (or trying to fast-forward through) commercials, and save money on my cable bill.
Of course I fully expect the studios and the cable providers will do everything they can to crush this model out of existence, because... why would they want to actually go to the trouble of producing GOOD shows that would make people want to watch?
a) It was not retroactive to existing forum posts, it would have only been on the new forum system.
b) You don't HAVE to post on the forums, so the system is still opt-in. It may suck that you can't post on the forums while keeping your name private, and I think Blizz was throwing the baby out with the bathwater in going that far, but it absolutely is an opt-in system.
You'll see very quickly that forum trolling on the official Blizz forums is a huge annoyance there. Blizzard is basically spending a lot of extra money maintaining forums which actively scare people away because if you post anything, there's probably a 50+% chance you will be flamed or insulted by a douche posting from a level-1 alt who also happens to be from another realm.
The plan Blizz put forth WOULD have eliminated a lot of this, but it would have also killed the usefulness of the forums, because a lot of the people who post useful information would have stopped posting as well. If they has modified their plan to make it so you can only post on some designated main, or so that you could see all the characters on the account of anybody posting, or made everybody choose a non-changeable forum nickname, it would eliminate the "anonymous trolling" issue to a large degree without violating privacy and security.
There 10 or so women in my guild, and most of us are on a first-name basis on Vent... that doesn't mean they want to be on a first-name basis with the entire WoW community. I've heard too many horror stories from them about the skeevy things people say to blame them, too.
A lot of people quit during the "RealID" debacle and didn't return.
Any actual numbers on this? I saw a lot of people saying they would cancel their subscription in the feedback on the forums, but, judging from my own realm's forums and population, very few - if any - people actually cancelled their accounts once Blizz backed away from the change.
Sure, and Rand's goal with Atlas Shrugged was to portray 'romantically ideal' heroes and heroines... and I thought it was an all right story, though I could have done without being bludgeoned over the head with her philosophy quite so much - subtle she wasn't. You know you're supposed to hate Jim Taggart, Wesley Mouch, Orren Boyle, et. al. from the moment you meet them in the book, and you know you're supposed to see John Galt, Dagny, and Hank Rearden as heroic from the moment they're introduced. Francisco is slightly more nuanced, but she spends so much time talking about his insane degree of talent & capability that you can't help but see he's also one of the "good guys," and spends most of his time mocking (unsubtly) the people we are told (but do not believe) he spends most of his time around.
I don't think anybody reading Atlas Shrugged would say that the characters in it are particularly amenable to being identified with, though - they are (by design, but still...) outlandishly one-dimensional, almost to the point of monomania. Rand suggests that we SHOULD aspire to be like her heroic characters, but I think it's difficult to say that most of us would see much in them to identify with.
Since when is it "narcissism" to "see" bits of ourselves in characters we read about, or see in film?
Audience identification with characters in artistic works is as old as the media those artistic works have been presented in. Those works with the most timeless, universal themes are generally considered to be some of the best, most durable & long-lasting works - in other words, the ones which MANY people can "see" bits of themselves in.
Empathetic characters are nothing to be scared of or ashamed of. Do you really want films & books about nothing but outsized caricatures of humanity as characters, or filled with people who we are so utterly incapable of identifying with that they might as well be aliens from a civilization antithetical to our own? Because those types of stories might be fun one-trick ponies, but the thought of them doesn't hold much appeal for me.
Wow, it's almost like you and a dozen other geniuses were in such a rush to point out that 60mph is too fast for a NYC street that you forgot how to do math and realize that the margin of safety I was talking about at 60mph only grows larger as a percentage of your total stopping distance.
Go ahead, do the math for yourself. See what happens. We can wait.
Oh, and P.S. - for the purposes of my calculations, I was talking about a stopping distance being "braking distance + 1.5s reaction time" - i.e., the distance from which you realize "Oh my god, need to brake," and the point at which your car comes to a complete stop.
I don't know if your figures above include that, but again, at 60mph, a 1.5s reaction time = ~130 feet you've traveled before your foot is pressing the brake - which could explain the average of 250 I was seeing - 100-140 foot braking distance, + 130 feet during your reaction time = 250-300 feet total stopping distance.
I used those numbers because a few references I found said this was "average". If the average stopping distance is less, again, that means the half a second of extra time is a larger percentage of the braking distance - more of a margin of safety, and thus less chance of an accident where you smash into someone else, or run down a pedestrian.
In other words: changing the speed does not change the fundamental result, that an extra half second looking at the road can be a significant chunk of your stopping distance, and could mean the difference between you rear-ending someone and you stopping safely.
60mph was chosen as a random speed for purposes of illustration. Change it to 10mph, or 20mph - speeds much more likely in downtown NYC - and you'll see that the extra margin of safety 0.5 seconds adds grows to ~25% as a % of stopping distance.
The problem being, of course, when your own attempts at being politically correct ends up offending others, as this thread shows.
I'd suggest that if you're *actually* offended by EA voluntarily changing a string in the data files for their game, perhaps you are the one who is too easily offended. NOTHING about your game has changed, except for the fact that the word "Taliban" has been changed to a less 'charged' euphemism. Unless you'd care to argue that "Opposition Forces" isn't also a suitable description for the Taliban?
ultimately boils down to "do not offend anyone, ever."
No, it boils down to "Don't go out of your way to be pointlessly offensive when a simple, and trivial, change will avoid giving that offense." Which doesn't say (or even imply) that being offensive is never acceptable or legitimate.
And I'd respectfully submit that if more people lived by the principle of avoiding unnecessarily offending other people when it is easily and trivially avoided... the world would be a hell of a lot nicer place.
For instance, I could say "All the people bitching about EA changing their game voluntarily are just a bunch of fucking douchebags with a sense of entitlement bigger than CENTCOM's org chart!" But I haven't done that, because I'd much rather attempt to discuss the point rationally, and because I see no call for being unnecessarily insulting and offensive.
Should I claim that people disagreeing with me are censoring my free speech because I've chosen to moderate what I say of my own free will?
Right, but we've already agreed that this is not a problem of censorship.
EA made this change voluntarily out of respect to the objections of some families of service members for whom the whole "Be Taliban and kill the infidel Americans!" was a little too raw a topic for them. EA gets some nice press as being sensitive to the concerns of military families, you get your game with a single text substitution changing the string "Taliban" to "Opposition Forces" - gameplay is completely unaffected, and the game is still available for you (and will *probably* even be available on military bases after this change is made, increasing its availability).
You agree that it's fine for people to have opinions and voice them; You agree that it's fine for EA to voluntarily choose to make a minor alteration to a string in their game files which will make some people - at least some of whom certainly buy or have bought EA games, if not this one - happier.
I don't think there's ever been any dispute that EA had the *right* to publish the game with the Taliban name intact, so it's not a free speech issue. Nor is anybody advocating government intervention to prevent EA from publishing the game, so it's not a case of "censorship by any means".
The only reason EA was going to be hurt by this was because these crybabies were going to get the game banned for sale on bases. These people who are whining were not potential customers for this game to begin with.
So it's okay for you to wrap yourself in the flag to speak for the servicemen whose "freedoms" are being trampled by Gamestop *voluntarily* deciding not to sell a game ONLY in its AAFES outlets, out of deference to the families who expressed their objections to this game? God forbid somebody have to order it from Amazon, or go to a Gamestop off base, right?
The only reason EA was going to be hurt by this was because these crybabies were going to get the game banned for sale on bases. These people who are whining were not potential customers for this game to begin with.
You're an idiot. MoH is NOT the only game EA makes. These people might not be the market for MoH, but I'm sure that EA wouldn't mind selling them a copy of Madden, or Tiger Woods Golf, or any of the other dozens of popular games they sell.
This entire issue can be boiled down to this statement: "EA has decided that making people happy who certainly buy numerous titles from them makes more financial sense than pissing off a sizable group of people and attracting negative publicity with a single title, where a 30-second find & replace will make everybody happy."
As for answering your question about "Is it okay..." - apparently to the people raising the objection, it is PERFECTLY okay. They seem satisfied that EA is changing the name, EA gets to continue selling its game, and the only thing that changes is some text that's displayed on a tv screen, which means that you are blowing this WAY out of proportion - the game is *identical,* with the exception of a single string changed from "Taliban" to "Opposition Forces".
If it's such a ridiculous change to argue for EA to make, isn't it also a ridiculous change to get upset about, and wrap in the cloak of "They're stealin our freedomz! And our jerbs!"?
10 mph = ~15 feet per second. Half a second = 7 feet traveled. Reaction time of 1.5 s = 22 feet traveled. Braking distance, 10mph to 0 mph: 5 feet.
So, to brake from 10 mph to a stop, you'll travel 27 feet. If your eyes are on the road half a second earlier, you have a nearly 25% greater margin of safety.
Now let's figure that at those speeds, car accidents will be minor, but you can still really wreck a pedestrian or a bike, plus you're a lot more likely to have a pedestrian dart out in front of you on a city street than on a highway.
Overall, I'd say that saving that half a second becomes even MORE important.
If anything, capital letters are easier to read and fewer to learn (26 as opposed to 52).
Numerous scientific studies seem to contradict your wild-ass speculation.
It translates to $100 per sign, seriously?
$100 is "a lot"? For something that will be exposed to the elements, and pollution, for 10 years, without significant corrosion, and while retaining legibility in both daytime & nighttime conditions? Think the reflective paint they use is that cheap? Even if that's ONLY the price for the sign, $100 for something which will last through 10 years of corrosion and weathering isn't such a bad deal.
I would love to see what NYCs budget is for repaving the roads.
Based on my last bone-jarring vehicular excursion to lower Manhattan, I'm guessing that budget is somewhere around $50, and that cost covers a daily bottle of Night Train to the homeless guy who apparently shovels roadkill carcasses into random potholes to "fill" them.
But then, I live in the Boston area - our road maintenance budget is even lower. The philosophy here seems to be "These roads were good enough for Paul Revere, by god. Why fix it, the frost heaves will just tear it up again?"
Say the new signs get your eyes back on the road half a second quicker - that's 44 *less* feet that you've traveled without watching the cars in front of you.
Don't think a lot can happen in that 44 feet you traveled in that extra half second?
Stopping distance for a car going 60 mph (assuming 1.5s reaction time + avg braking distance of ~250 feet, multiple sources found through google report that this seems to be the average consensus, yielding ~350-400 feet as stopping distance on a flat/level/dry surface, for an auto traveling at 60mph.
So that 44 feet is about 10% of your stopping distance - a 10% larger margin of safety every time you look away from the road and read a road sign. That's not trivial, especially when you consider the hundreds of thousands of vehicles travelling around NYC. If it helps prevent 2 minor accidents a day, that's lower emergency services costs, slightly lower insurance rates, less money spent on road repairs, and less money spent on average by people repairing their vehicles. If the science behind the studies is sound, it does add up in the aggregate.
Consider it a 27 million dollar stimulus package. Keeps road workers working, keeps sign-makers employed, and we don't have to resort to drastic and foolish measures like cutting unnecessary taxes.
I notice you avoided the tougher & more pointed question in my post:
Would you tell the people protesting publication of that game ("Hate Crime!") to shut up because they're whining pussies who can't tell reality from a game?
The point is not that the existence of the game will encourage people to go become skinhead white supremacists. The point is that the existence of the game will deeply offend groups of people, who will vocally criticize my game.
So, will you go to bat for me, and go on record telling all of those minorities offended by my game to not buy it, and just shut the fuck up and stop trying to censor me?
So if these people don't like the game they don't have to buy or play it.
And they likely won't. And they also likely will avoid all future EA titles that they may have been inclined to purchase, too. And that hurts EA's bottom line much more than the 2 or 3 outraged nerds on slashdot who won't buy the game because they did this: s/Taliban/Opposition Forces/g, without having any real impact on the game play.
Actually I'm not the one who cares about the irrelevant text.
It's funny you should say that, because there are examples littered all throughout this thread where you're waxing poetic in fairly inflamed tones about how this is "a bunch of whiners whitewashing a name." Like this, from your post above:
I think you mean a bad example of a corporation being a pussy in face of a bunch of whiners? The fact of the matter is that you are still playing as the Taliban and all the models are exactly the same. All this is is a white-washing of the name.
Sounds like you're a lot more upset about a name change than you'd like to admit. Or perhaps you'd like to retract the purple prose, and restate your position in a more reasonable tone?
The real minority complaining about this kind of shit are some puritans who probably only saw a weapon on TV, and who are all about protecting someone _else's_ sensibilities. You know, the "it's not about me, but OMG it might offend that other guy over there" kind. Even if that guy over there doesn't actually feel any need to be protected by such a knight in shiny armour.
The minority complaining to EA is doing exactly what you suggest. They are families of servicemen and women who have lost family members in this conflict. EA has specifically said that that feedback, and the wish to be sensitive to those people, is why they're changing the name.
It's not inventing a minority, it's pointing out that if you're claiming that this is some "freedom" issue, and that your freedoms are being trampled by this group of "whiners," the same thing could be said about any minority who we take pains not to offend or mock.
All the other video games that were offensive to minorities went unremarked (most notably the entire GTA III series with the exception of their attempt at showing pixellated sex, which is apparently unforgivable.)
Really? I seem to recall those receiving quite a bit of negative publicity when they were released, as well. And that also conveniently overlooks the fact that you weren't playing a game named "Gambino Crime Family: Kill the NYPD!"
Slashdot Mirror
I actually like the idea of the rental model Apple is pushing - rent a show for a buck or two, a movie for $4-5, watch it once, don't have to watch commercials, and don't have to bother with stopping to rent / purchase a DVD. There are VERY few movies and tv-shows that I watch that I would ever be interested in watching more than once.
If they offered a la carte programming like this, and the performance of the service itself was good, I'd probably cancel my cable subscription and never look back. I DVR most of the shows I want to watch as it is, so I'm essentially paying a cable bill for a shitload of content I never watch, and will never watch. Let me pick and choose, I'd probably spend 30-50 a month on shows & movies I actually want to watch, not have to waste time watching (or trying to fast-forward through) commercials, and save money on my cable bill.
Of course I fully expect the studios and the cable providers will do everything they can to crush this model out of existence, because... why would they want to actually go to the trouble of producing GOOD shows that would make people want to watch?
a) It was not retroactive to existing forum posts, it would have only been on the new forum system.
b) You don't HAVE to post on the forums, so the system is still opt-in. It may suck that you can't post on the forums while keeping your name private, and I think Blizz was throwing the baby out with the bathwater in going that far, but it absolutely is an opt-in system.
Go to your realm's forums. Read.
Go to your class forums. Read.
Go to the role forums. Read.
You'll see very quickly that forum trolling on the official Blizz forums is a huge annoyance there. Blizzard is basically spending a lot of extra money maintaining forums which actively scare people away because if you post anything, there's probably a 50+% chance you will be flamed or insulted by a douche posting from a level-1 alt who also happens to be from another realm.
The plan Blizz put forth WOULD have eliminated a lot of this, but it would have also killed the usefulness of the forums, because a lot of the people who post useful information would have stopped posting as well. If they has modified their plan to make it so you can only post on some designated main, or so that you could see all the characters on the account of anybody posting, or made everybody choose a non-changeable forum nickname, it would eliminate the "anonymous trolling" issue to a large degree without violating privacy and security.
There 10 or so women in my guild, and most of us are on a first-name basis on Vent... that doesn't mean they want to be on a first-name basis with the entire WoW community. I've heard too many horror stories from them about the skeevy things people say to blame them, too.
Any actual numbers on this? I saw a lot of people saying they would cancel their subscription in the feedback on the forums, but, judging from my own realm's forums and population, very few - if any - people actually cancelled their accounts once Blizz backed away from the change.
Sure, and Rand's goal with Atlas Shrugged was to portray 'romantically ideal' heroes and heroines... and I thought it was an all right story, though I could have done without being bludgeoned over the head with her philosophy quite so much - subtle she wasn't. You know you're supposed to hate Jim Taggart, Wesley Mouch, Orren Boyle, et. al. from the moment you meet them in the book, and you know you're supposed to see John Galt, Dagny, and Hank Rearden as heroic from the moment they're introduced. Francisco is slightly more nuanced, but she spends so much time talking about his insane degree of talent & capability that you can't help but see he's also one of the "good guys," and spends most of his time mocking (unsubtly) the people we are told (but do not believe) he spends most of his time around.
I don't think anybody reading Atlas Shrugged would say that the characters in it are particularly amenable to being identified with, though - they are (by design, but still...) outlandishly one-dimensional, almost to the point of monomania. Rand suggests that we SHOULD aspire to be like her heroic characters, but I think it's difficult to say that most of us would see much in them to identify with.
And what's the general consensus on the quality of Atlas Shrugged around here again? :)
Since when is it "narcissism" to "see" bits of ourselves in characters we read about, or see in film?
Audience identification with characters in artistic works is as old as the media those artistic works have been presented in. Those works with the most timeless, universal themes are generally considered to be some of the best, most durable & long-lasting works - in other words, the ones which MANY people can "see" bits of themselves in.
Empathetic characters are nothing to be scared of or ashamed of. Do you really want films & books about nothing but outsized caricatures of humanity as characters, or filled with people who we are so utterly incapable of identifying with that they might as well be aliens from a civilization antithetical to our own? Because those types of stories might be fun one-trick ponies, but the thought of them doesn't hold much appeal for me.
Wow, it's almost like you and a dozen other geniuses were in such a rush to point out that 60mph is too fast for a NYC street that you forgot how to do math and realize that the margin of safety I was talking about at 60mph only grows larger as a percentage of your total stopping distance.
Go ahead, do the math for yourself. See what happens. We can wait.
Oh, and P.S. - for the purposes of my calculations, I was talking about a stopping distance being "braking distance + 1.5s reaction time" - i.e., the distance from which you realize "Oh my god, need to brake," and the point at which your car comes to a complete stop.
I don't know if your figures above include that, but again, at 60mph, a 1.5s reaction time = ~130 feet you've traveled before your foot is pressing the brake - which could explain the average of 250 I was seeing - 100-140 foot braking distance, + 130 feet during your reaction time = 250-300 feet total stopping distance.
I used those numbers because a few references I found said this was "average". If the average stopping distance is less, again, that means the half a second of extra time is a larger percentage of the braking distance - more of a margin of safety, and thus less chance of an accident where you smash into someone else, or run down a pedestrian.
In other words: changing the speed does not change the fundamental result, that an extra half second looking at the road can be a significant chunk of your stopping distance, and could mean the difference between you rear-ending someone and you stopping safely.
It does not change the fundamental curve.
60mph was chosen as a random speed for purposes of illustration. Change it to 10mph, or 20mph - speeds much more likely in downtown NYC - and you'll see that the extra margin of safety 0.5 seconds adds grows to ~25% as a % of stopping distance.
I'd suggest that if you're *actually* offended by EA voluntarily changing a string in the data files for their game, perhaps you are the one who is too easily offended. NOTHING about your game has changed, except for the fact that the word "Taliban" has been changed to a less 'charged' euphemism. Unless you'd care to argue that "Opposition Forces" isn't also a suitable description for the Taliban?
No, it boils down to "Don't go out of your way to be pointlessly offensive when a simple, and trivial, change will avoid giving that offense." Which doesn't say (or even imply) that being offensive is never acceptable or legitimate.
And I'd respectfully submit that if more people lived by the principle of avoiding unnecessarily offending other people when it is easily and trivially avoided... the world would be a hell of a lot nicer place.
For instance, I could say "All the people bitching about EA changing their game voluntarily are just a bunch of fucking douchebags with a sense of entitlement bigger than CENTCOM's org chart!" But I haven't done that, because I'd much rather attempt to discuss the point rationally, and because I see no call for being unnecessarily insulting and offensive.
Should I claim that people disagreeing with me are censoring my free speech because I've chosen to moderate what I say of my own free will?
See my response to the first responder. above, with figures for 10mph.
The margin as a % of stopping distance only goes up as the speed of travel goes down.
Right, but we've already agreed that this is not a problem of censorship.
EA made this change voluntarily out of respect to the objections of some families of service members for whom the whole "Be Taliban and kill the infidel Americans!" was a little too raw a topic for them. EA gets some nice press as being sensitive to the concerns of military families, you get your game with a single text substitution changing the string "Taliban" to "Opposition Forces" - gameplay is completely unaffected, and the game is still available for you (and will *probably* even be available on military bases after this change is made, increasing its availability).
You agree that it's fine for people to have opinions and voice them; You agree that it's fine for EA to voluntarily choose to make a minor alteration to a string in their game files which will make some people - at least some of whom certainly buy or have bought EA games, if not this one - happier.
I don't think there's ever been any dispute that EA had the *right* to publish the game with the Taliban name intact, so it's not a free speech issue. Nor is anybody advocating government intervention to prevent EA from publishing the game, so it's not a case of "censorship by any means".
So... what exactly is your problem, then?
So it's okay for you to wrap yourself in the flag to speak for the servicemen whose "freedoms" are being trampled by Gamestop *voluntarily* deciding not to sell a game ONLY in its AAFES outlets, out of deference to the families who expressed their objections to this game? God forbid somebody have to order it from Amazon, or go to a Gamestop off base, right?
You're an idiot. MoH is NOT the only game EA makes. These people might not be the market for MoH, but I'm sure that EA wouldn't mind selling them a copy of Madden, or Tiger Woods Golf, or any of the other dozens of popular games they sell.
This entire issue can be boiled down to this statement: "EA has decided that making people happy who certainly buy numerous titles from them makes more financial sense than pissing off a sizable group of people and attracting negative publicity with a single title, where a 30-second find & replace will make everybody happy."
As for answering your question about "Is it okay..." - apparently to the people raising the objection, it is PERFECTLY okay. They seem satisfied that EA is changing the name, EA gets to continue selling its game, and the only thing that changes is some text that's displayed on a tv screen, which means that you are blowing this WAY out of proportion - the game is *identical,* with the exception of a single string changed from "Taliban" to "Opposition Forces".
If it's such a ridiculous change to argue for EA to make, isn't it also a ridiculous change to get upset about, and wrap in the cloak of "They're stealin our freedomz! And our jerbs!"?
Fair enough:
10 mph = ~15 feet per second.
Half a second = 7 feet traveled.
Reaction time of 1.5 s = 22 feet traveled.
Braking distance, 10mph to 0 mph: 5 feet.
So, to brake from 10 mph to a stop, you'll travel 27 feet. If your eyes are on the road half a second earlier, you have a nearly 25% greater margin of safety.
Now let's figure that at those speeds, car accidents will be minor, but you can still really wreck a pedestrian or a bike, plus you're a lot more likely to have a pedestrian dart out in front of you on a city street than on a highway.
Overall, I'd say that saving that half a second becomes even MORE important.
Numerous scientific studies seem to contradict your wild-ass speculation.
$100 is "a lot"? For something that will be exposed to the elements, and pollution, for 10 years, without significant corrosion, and while retaining legibility in both daytime & nighttime conditions? Think the reflective paint they use is that cheap? Even if that's ONLY the price for the sign, $100 for something which will last through 10 years of corrosion and weathering isn't such a bad deal.
Based on my last bone-jarring vehicular excursion to lower Manhattan, I'm guessing that budget is somewhere around $50, and that cost covers a daily bottle of Night Train to the homeless guy who apparently shovels roadkill carcasses into random potholes to "fill" them.
But then, I live in the Boston area - our road maintenance budget is even lower. The philosophy here seems to be "These roads were good enough for Paul Revere, by god. Why fix it, the frost heaves will just tear it up again?"
60 mph = 88 feet per second.
Say the new signs get your eyes back on the road half a second quicker - that's 44 *less* feet that you've traveled without watching the cars in front of you.
Don't think a lot can happen in that 44 feet you traveled in that extra half second?
Stopping distance for a car going 60 mph (assuming 1.5s reaction time + avg braking distance of ~250 feet, multiple sources found through google report that this seems to be the average consensus, yielding ~350-400 feet as stopping distance on a flat/level/dry surface, for an auto traveling at 60mph.
So that 44 feet is about 10% of your stopping distance - a 10% larger margin of safety every time you look away from the road and read a road sign. That's not trivial, especially when you consider the hundreds of thousands of vehicles travelling around NYC. If it helps prevent 2 minor accidents a day, that's lower emergency services costs, slightly lower insurance rates, less money spent on road repairs, and less money spent on average by people repairing their vehicles. If the science behind the studies is sound, it does add up in the aggregate.
Is that because it's more expensive, or has Bloomberg banned Mt. Dew as well now?
Consider it a 27 million dollar stimulus package. Keeps road workers working, keeps sign-makers employed, and we don't have to resort to drastic and foolish measures like cutting unnecessary taxes.
I notice you avoided the tougher & more pointed question in my post:
Would you tell the people protesting publication of that game ("Hate Crime!") to shut up because they're whining pussies who can't tell reality from a game?
The point is not that the existence of the game will encourage people to go become skinhead white supremacists. The point is that the existence of the game will deeply offend groups of people, who will vocally criticize my game.
So, will you go to bat for me, and go on record telling all of those minorities offended by my game to not buy it, and just shut the fuck up and stop trying to censor me?
And they likely won't. And they also likely will avoid all future EA titles that they may have been inclined to purchase, too. And that hurts EA's bottom line much more than the 2 or 3 outraged nerds on slashdot who won't buy the game because they did this: s/Taliban/Opposition Forces/g, without having any real impact on the game play.
It's funny you should say that, because there are examples littered all throughout this thread where you're waxing poetic in fairly inflamed tones about how this is "a bunch of whiners whitewashing a name." Like this, from your post above:
Sounds like you're a lot more upset about a name change than you'd like to admit. Or perhaps you'd like to retract the purple prose, and restate your position in a more reasonable tone?
The minority complaining to EA is doing exactly what you suggest. They are families of servicemen and women who have lost family members in this conflict. EA has specifically said that that feedback, and the wish to be sensitive to those people, is why they're changing the name.
It's not inventing a minority, it's pointing out that if you're claiming that this is some "freedom" issue, and that your freedoms are being trampled by this group of "whiners," the same thing could be said about any minority who we take pains not to offend or mock.
Really? I seem to recall those receiving quite a bit of negative publicity when they were released, as well. And that also conveniently overlooks the fact that you weren't playing a game named "Gambino Crime Family: Kill the NYPD!"