First off "Given that eBay is ipso facto declaring virtual goods to be the property of the game makers and not the players who 'earn' them, what does this mean for the future of virtual rights in general?" Regardless of what ebay "declare", this is and always has been the case.
Everything in a MMO belongs the publisher not the player. They can and will if you give them reason, take it all away without warning and there is nothing you can do about it.
So folks remember that important fact next time you hand over $$$$ for that fancy virtual sword
"I spoke today with a media representative for the company, who confirmed that eBay is now delisting all auctions for 'virtual artifacts' from the site." They did it before with Everquest, did not work to well then either. Everquest stuff still appeared on ebay just it pretended to be something else. Only thing it really did is encourge other people to set up (unsafer) auction sites for virtual stuff.
Only ones who will really "suffer" from this is the real casual virtual goods seller (aka selling off an account because quiting so forth) as they just won't bother with the extra hassle and virtual goods buyers because without the previously mentioned type the bigger sellers will be able to charge a bit more due to basic supply and demand.
The clear winners will be the "corporate" sellers like IGE
"Sounds reasonable to me. Fyodor was out of line. And, it's not up to GoDaddy to filter through the 100,000's of Fyodor's pages, he's alrady shown the domain to be a security threat. If he wants GoDaddy to reverse its actions, he needs to clean up his act himself. That's not GoDaddy's job." Very true, except nor is it their job to act as judge, jury and executioner just because some other company demands something to be done.
Sure, the information was a security threat to myspace, but it was not illegal in it's self (even though methods used to obtain and some uses it could be used for it might have been, but same could be said for LOTS of things)
Lets turn this around, someone posts iproof that not only is product X by company Y,unsafe due to it's tendancy to explode but also that the company knows about it and continued selling it
What does the company do?
Ask that the site owner pull the content? Nope Go to the courts to get an injuction? Nope Go to the courts to get the host to pull the site? Nope Sue the publisher in the courts? Nope Get the registrar to pull the entire site? Bingo
Do you really want registrars to have that kind of power with those lack of controls?
"When asked if GoDaddy would remove the registration for a news site like CNET News.com, if a reader posted illegal information in a discussion forum and editors could not be immediately reached over a holiday, Jones replied: 'I don't know... It's a case-by-case basis.'" In translation, if a big fish asks us to shut down a little fish we will, for anything else who gives a damn
"When you say, "I think other players should be allowed to work with iTunes," I take you literally and strongly disagree." Agreed, itunes should be able to control who they deal with but that is not what Norway seems to be saying rather it's:
"People should be able to play the music they paid for on whatever mp3 device they want"
which is even more reasonable than itunes controling who they deal with, especially when you realise that the restrictions being placed on the consumer are 100% artificial.
Hell it's not even a restriction placed there by the music rights holders trying to "protect their rights" but rather apple trying maintain and increase their market share by locking users to their hardware unless they are willing discard their music investment or potencially break the law by circumventing the DRM.
"As a European, you've probably grown up under an oppressive nanny-type government and have very little (if any) notion of how free (in the real sense) US citizens were a mere 50 years ago, and still are," Yes 50 years ago America really was the "Land of the Free and opportunity" but these days it is rapidly moveing up the list of oppressive western democracies. Not only due the actions of the government but also due to it's legal system, especially the civil litigation section.
Few years ago read a futuristic fiction story where people were trying to sneak across the mexican and canadian borders, not to get into the US but rather to get out of the US so they could be free and have a opportunity at a good life. Looking at how fast things have detiriorated in the US over the last 50 years if things continue in same direction and at same speed in about 50 more years fiction could very well become reality
"As based on Broadband deployment? Instead of basing it on say, the intelligence of the community." Would make no difference, by your criteria there would still be no US city on the list
"2. MySpace has been operating for quite a while knowing full well that child predators are active on their site." So have malls, cinemas, street corners or pretty much anywhere else you can think of...with the most common place being the family home or a relations home. So your point is? Only way anything could operate and guarantee child predators could not operate is.....actually there is no way except to kill all children in the world
"3. MySpace could certainly have done more to validate identity (registration through snail mail?), but that would have eaten into profits" No it would have shut the site down, period. And guess what would happen then? Another site would just start up run by someone else
"MySpace has made a pile of money by being user-friendly to child predators. Why shouldn't they get sued again?" No myspace has made a ton of money being user-friendly, thats it.
Instead of censorship full disclosure should be made law, aka who do these scientists receive their livelyhood from. Then we can tell easly who to bother paying attention to.
"Skeptics of manmade global warming are merely saying, "You can't promote manmade global warming as fact." "
Actually no, most of them are saying "manmade global warming" is fiction
The letters are essentially a demand for information. Don't give them the information? Off to jail you go
Even worse, tell anyone, even the law courts (aka a judge), in an attempt to get the letter made null and void and guess what happens? Yep straight to jail
Don't get mislead by that safe sounding word "letter", these things are a lot worse than warrents, they are basiclly "do what we say and tell no one or else", the financial institutions have zero choice but to hand the information over.
And contrary to the very misleading article at the top, they are not asking for "credit reports" rather full disclosure of all financial information direct from source, right down to the last cent you have in your bank accounts and the fact that you spent $5 via your credit card at the coffee shop at the end of your street at 2:18pm on the 5th of July 2005
"The reality is that unless the defendent can come up with a good reason why the screenshot would have been forged, it's likely to be taken by the court as evidence, and go a long way towards a "balance of probabilities" in favour of the plaintiff. So these kinds of questions aren't really that useful. Yes, technically, someone could have forged the screen shot, but there's no earthly reason why the RIAA and the content makers would actually want to frame an innocent computer user at the beginning of the case." Actually there is a very good reason, money.
And this is easily demonstrated by examining previous cases of people being accused by the RIAA (or more exactly the intermediary company's they use for this stuff) and the modus operandi of those companies
Do they notify you that they are taking you to court no matter what? Nope they say pay $$$$ or we will take you to court. Money is one of the best motivators to lie, cheat and fake evidence
Now of course someone will say "hey it's only a few grand, that's chump change to these people", easy response, add up all the people they have stung and you are in the 10's of millions if not 100's of millions
Money that an entire industry is dependant on (and not talking the music industry here but rather the RIAA and the companies it employs) money that will go away completely if the courts start ruling against them because then their tactics of "legal extortion" will be toothless and everyone will know it
Thus nothing that the RIAA (or it's experts) present as evidence should be taken at face value without verification, because their very livelyhoods depend on winning the case
"Everywhere you went, the bodies of Chinese and Middle Easterners would be strewn in the streets while white American soldiers killed from above with virtual impunity. Did anyone call this racist? NO"
"American" is not a race, it's a nation thus no crys of "racist"
..Saying no to blind people driving while saying yes to them shooting guns then you my friend need serious professional help
The rest of the world (including most likely majority of blind people) are laughing at this stupid crap for a very good reason, it's a stupid law
"and no analysis pointing out how utterly clueless the suggestion is given the Internet's nature and trans-national reach." As China is proving, it is not so impossible, sure they cannot stop stuff being put on the web from outside the US but they can stop people from within the US actually seeing it thus further promoting the sence of false security,which is all that most anti terrorist measures give anyway.
Sure the china firewall is far from perfect but give the tech another 10 years or so and it will be a 10000 times better.
And once they (US) have it in place in the US they could tell other countrys, follow our rules/standards or will we block everything from your country, thus slowly cascading the policy outwards.
Only problem though for the US is that by this time it will have lost so much financial and political strength (already the US financial markets are shrinking as most companies choose to list/trade elsewhere and politically having the USA backing you is a sure way to lose an election in many countrys)that for many countrys the loss of access to the American markets will not matter THAT much. Rather they will be be a lot more worried about losing access to the china markets, which funny enough is slowly going in the opposite direction to the US, towards a freer and more open society
Our children/grandchildren will be living in a world where everything is turned on it's head in comparison to now, with people trying to escape the oppressive country called the United States of America while millions try to get to china to get rich and live the good life
If I am understanding this correctly then it is quite different from the normal case of the carrier (unmoderated host,search engine,forum,blog...) being immune from being sued but it is now also making the the poster of content (aka the person who actually put it on the site) immune as well, now only leaving the person who first created the content liable (and they can hide behind anonminity)
If this is case it is a very very bad ruling which turns the web from a place where "freedom of speech is allowed" to a place where "freedom to lie without repercussions is allowed"
Unless you call "shortage" a low supply of qualified people willing to work at appropriate rates for under-qualified people
I know tons of people who left the industry when the crash happened, not because they could not find jobs or did not want to work in the industry any longer but because they could not find jobs that gave adequate compensation for their skills and experience. Those people are still out there and if rates increase enough they will return
There is something very wrong with a sector when there can be jobs advertised that require 5/7 years plus experience in multiple tecnologies that offer rates equal to that of a fast food resturant manager (or even less)
[quote]This is a public, and final statement that nobody gets to kill.[/quote] Unless they are a US backed kangaroo court....
Does Sadam deserve death? sure he does, but is it wise to give him a death sentence? No it is totally stupid, everyone knows the trial was not fair, no trial involving him could be, thus sentencing him to death at this mockery of a trail just add's fuel to the arguments of those who will turn him into a martyr and as a saying goes, the problem with martyr's is you can only kill them once...then you are stuck with them for the rest of your life.
If the US government had any brains they would order...woops mean "appeal to" the iraq government to commute it to life without parole
And then if the US people had any brains they would put Bush in the cell next to him
There is no chance of MS doing this, would be commercial suicide in the long term and would have the shareholders gunning for the heads of the MS board on a platter
MS want something from China (probably better anti piracy laws/enforcement) and this is a a vague (and toothless) threat to try to get their way
"How close are we to being recognized by a computer anywhere we go, as portrayed in movies like Minority Report?" Now I could be wrong but I am pretty sure Minority report was portraying retinal scanning not facial recognition
If you view this as "cashing in" then yes you are one of the few who view it like that, and most likely nearly all of you have never played MMO's before.
It's MMO standard procedure to do an expansion every 1 to 2 years, used to be to so the developers could distribute major changes (aka 100's of MB's of art work/code) to the game before broadband became widespread, the method is kept these days as it is a good way to mark milestones (major updates to way game is played), good excuse to get the box's back on shelves and of course because as it's a very good revenue booster.
Now of course the procedure can and does get abused, if you looked at some "expansions" for Ultima Online over the last few years you would see there is so little new content in them they are little more than patches (average wow "patch" contains as much as average UO expansion), in cases like that saying they are cashing in would be being nice, milking their customers for everything they can would be more appropriate
What the poster says in that essay is nothing new, been said before by many people in relation to MMO's (and previously MUD's but to lesser degree)
Pretty much everything he says I could apply to my years in Ultima Online:On large guild council, more time spent per week in game than at work, total neglect of real life friends (unless they play the game) and then when you realise "what's wrong" and pull back or quit,the machine keeps grinding on as if you have never been there and most (but not all if you are lucky) of your "great friends" and "guildies for life", quietly and rapidly forget about you
Happened to me, happened to most of the guild council and many others I know from UO and WOW
Lucky I realised this before we moved to wow and for those reasons totally refused to take a leadership role in WOW and once I realised how time consuming raiding was (or honour grinding) pulled back from those too. Sadly with WOW (and most other MMO's) if you don't honour grind, don't raid hardcore you really only have only the 3 choices
*Constant rerolling *Use the game as a glorified chat room *Quit
Gone though the first 2 already and as of last week did the 3rd and I will not be back for the expansion, nor any other upcoming MMO .
The entire MMO genre is designed to give only one of two paths, either dedicate good portions of your life to it or end up feeling like you are accomplishing very little and finally after 8 years i have had enough and decided I want a real life again
As the whole floating nuclear reactor "done before " is well covered above i will raise one concern i have about this...$200 million, maybe it's me but is that not like...very cheap?
Having visions of "Safety measures? Bahh those cost to much, if something goes wrong we can just sink it"
"In a chilling slap at free speech" It is no such thing, rather it is bringing the Internet in line with the real world.
If she (the defendant) had said the plaintiff "sucked" or "was not very good" aka opinions there would have been no case to answer but instead she leveled pretty serious accusations ("crook," a "con artist" and a "fraud.") against the plaintiff, accusations aired on websites selected to maximize damage to the plaintiffs business
If anyone had printed, or even said such things off the Internet they would be opening themselves legal suits, legal suits they would lose if they had no evidence to back up their claims
I especially love the last bit in the article "I don't feel like I can express my opinions," Bock says. "Only one side of the story was told in court. Nobody heard my side." Well duh, ok she could not afford a lawyer but nothing was stopping her from representing herself, she choose not to exercise that right so trial went on without her, did she expect otherwise? (*imagines a world where murderers, rapist and such walk free because they refuse to defend themselves*)
Only thing out of wack with this case was the amount awarded, but as the defendant had no money jury probably felt what the heck might as well award a OTT amount because either was the plaintiff is getting getting nothing
Let me get this, The US goverment knows who all these known terrorists are, where they are , who they are talking to but have not had the CIA kidnap them and dump them in a secret prison yet? Suuure
It is a pointless law really as it can be easily circumvented if someone really wishes to gamble, just insert a non US based 3rd party in the middle of any transaction (off shore bank or paypal like service)
What should be of great concern to everyone though, those for and against gambling is the way this law was passed, attaching two totally unrelated bills like this should be so illegal it should be part of the constitution because no matter how you look at it is a bad situation
Gov either get a law passed that would not on it's own make it past the finishing line by attaching it to a critical bit of legislation or possibly even worse, a piece of critical legislation does not make it into law because of the unrelated riders attached to it
Slashdot Mirror
First off
"Given that eBay is ipso facto declaring virtual goods to be the property of the game makers and not the players who 'earn' them, what does this mean for the future of virtual rights in general?"
Regardless of what ebay "declare", this is and always has been the case.
Everything in a MMO belongs the publisher not the player. They can and will if you give them reason, take it all away without warning and there is nothing you can do about it.
So folks remember that important fact next time you hand over $$$$ for that fancy virtual sword
"I spoke today with a media representative for the company, who confirmed that eBay is now delisting all auctions for 'virtual artifacts' from the site."
They did it before with Everquest, did not work to well then either. Everquest stuff still appeared on ebay just it pretended to be something else. Only thing it really did is encourge other people to set up (unsafer) auction sites for virtual stuff.
Only ones who will really "suffer" from this is the real casual virtual goods seller (aka selling off an account because quiting so forth) as they just won't bother with the extra hassle and virtual goods buyers because without the previously mentioned type the bigger sellers will be able to charge a bit more due to basic supply and demand.
The clear winners will be the "corporate" sellers like IGE
"Sounds reasonable to me. Fyodor was out of line. And, it's not up to GoDaddy to filter through the 100,000's of Fyodor's pages, he's alrady shown the domain to be a security threat. If he wants GoDaddy to reverse its actions, he needs to clean up his act himself. That's not GoDaddy's job."
Very true, except nor is it their job to act as judge, jury and executioner just because some other company demands something to be done.
Sure, the information was a security threat to myspace, but it was not illegal in it's self (even though methods used to obtain and some uses it could be used for it might have been, but same could be said for LOTS of things)
Lets turn this around, someone posts iproof that not only is product X by company Y,unsafe due to it's tendancy to explode but also that the company knows about it and continued selling it
What does the company do?
Ask that the site owner pull the content? Nope
Go to the courts to get an injuction? Nope
Go to the courts to get the host to pull the site? Nope
Sue the publisher in the courts? Nope
Get the registrar to pull the entire site? Bingo
Do you really want registrars to have that kind of power with those lack of controls?
"When asked if GoDaddy would remove the registration for a news site like CNET News.com, if a reader posted illegal information in a discussion forum and editors could not be immediately reached over a holiday, Jones replied: 'I don't know... It's a case-by-case basis.'"
In translation, if a big fish asks us to shut down a little fish we will, for anything else who gives a damn
"When you say, "I think other players should be allowed to work with iTunes," I take you literally and strongly disagree."
Agreed, itunes should be able to control who they deal with but that is not what Norway seems to be saying rather it's:
"People should be able to play the music they paid for on whatever mp3 device they want"
which is even more reasonable than itunes controling who they deal with, especially when you realise that the restrictions being placed on the consumer are 100% artificial.
Hell it's not even a restriction placed there by the music rights holders trying to "protect their rights" but rather apple trying maintain and increase their market share by locking users to their hardware unless they are willing discard their music investment or potencially break the law by circumventing the DRM.
"As a European, you've probably grown up under an oppressive nanny-type government and have very little (if any) notion of how free (in the real sense) US citizens were a mere 50 years ago, and still are,"
Yes 50 years ago America really was the "Land of the Free and opportunity" but these days it is rapidly moveing up the list of oppressive western democracies. Not only due the actions of the government but also due to it's legal system, especially the civil litigation section.
Few years ago read a futuristic fiction story where people were trying to sneak across the mexican and canadian borders, not to get into the US but rather to get out of the US so they could be free and have a opportunity at a good life. Looking at how fast things have detiriorated in the US over the last 50 years if things continue in same direction and at same speed in about 50 more years fiction could very well become reality
"As based on Broadband deployment?
Instead of basing it on say, the intelligence of the community."
Would make no difference, by your criteria there would still be no US city on the list
"2. MySpace has been operating for quite a while knowing full well that child predators are active on their site."
So have malls, cinemas, street corners or pretty much anywhere else you can think of...with the most common place being the family home or a relations home. So your point is? Only way anything could operate and guarantee child predators could not operate is.....actually there is no way except to kill all children in the world
"3. MySpace could certainly have done more to validate identity (registration through snail mail?), but that would have eaten into profits"
No it would have shut the site down, period. And guess what would happen then? Another site would just start up run by someone else
"MySpace has made a pile of money by being user-friendly to child predators. Why shouldn't they get sued again?"
No myspace has made a ton of money being user-friendly, thats it.
Instead of censorship full disclosure should be made law, aka who do these scientists receive their livelyhood from. Then we can tell easly who to bother paying attention to.
"Skeptics of manmade global warming are merely saying, "You can't promote manmade global warming as fact." " Actually no, most of them are saying "manmade global warming" is fiction
The letters are essentially a demand for information.
Don't give them the information? Off to jail you go
Even worse, tell anyone, even the law courts (aka a judge), in an attempt to get the letter made null and void and guess what happens? Yep straight to jail
Don't get mislead by that safe sounding word "letter", these things are a lot worse than warrents, they are basiclly "do what we say and tell no one or else", the financial institutions have zero choice but to hand the information over.
And contrary to the very misleading article at the top, they are not asking for "credit reports" rather full disclosure of all financial information direct from source, right down to the last cent you have in your bank accounts and the fact that you spent $5 via your credit card at the coffee shop at the end of your street at 2:18pm on the 5th of July 2005
Actually it is past time the EU does start doing this to all US citizens entering the EU, exactly the same as Brazil.
"The reality is that unless the defendent can come up with a good reason why the screenshot would have been forged, it's likely to be taken by the court as evidence, and go a long way towards a "balance of probabilities" in favour of the plaintiff. So these kinds of questions aren't really that useful. Yes, technically, someone could have forged the screen shot, but there's no earthly reason why the RIAA and the content makers would actually want to frame an innocent computer user at the beginning of the case."
Actually there is a very good reason, money.
And this is easily demonstrated by examining previous cases of people being accused by the RIAA (or more exactly the intermediary company's they use for this stuff) and the modus operandi of those companies
Do they notify you that they are taking you to court no matter what? Nope they say pay $$$$ or we will take you to court. Money is one of the best motivators to lie, cheat and fake evidence
Now of course someone will say "hey it's only a few grand, that's chump change to these people", easy response, add up all the people they have stung and you are in the 10's of millions if not 100's of millions
Money that an entire industry is dependant on (and not talking the music industry here but rather the RIAA and the companies it employs) money that will go away completely if the courts start ruling against them because then their tactics of "legal extortion" will be toothless and everyone will know it
Thus nothing that the RIAA (or it's experts) present as evidence should be taken at face value without verification, because their very livelyhoods depend on winning the case
"Everywhere you went, the bodies of Chinese and Middle Easterners would be strewn in the streets while white American soldiers killed from above with virtual impunity. Did anyone call this racist? NO" "American" is not a race, it's a nation thus no crys of "racist"
..Saying no to blind people driving while saying yes to them shooting guns then you my friend need serious professional help The rest of the world (including most likely majority of blind people) are laughing at this stupid crap for a very good reason, it's a stupid law
"and no analysis pointing out how utterly clueless the suggestion is given the Internet's nature and trans-national reach."
As China is proving, it is not so impossible, sure they cannot stop stuff being put on the web from outside the US but they can stop people from within the US actually seeing it thus further promoting the sence of false security,which is all that most anti terrorist measures give anyway.
Sure the china firewall is far from perfect but give the tech another 10 years or so and it will be a 10000 times better.
And once they (US) have it in place in the US they could tell other countrys, follow our rules/standards or will we block everything from your country, thus slowly cascading the policy outwards.
Only problem though for the US is that by this time it will have lost so much financial and political strength (already the US financial markets are shrinking as most companies choose to list/trade elsewhere and politically having the USA backing you is a sure way to lose an election in many countrys)that for many countrys the loss of access to the American markets will not matter THAT much. Rather they will be be a lot more worried about losing access to the china markets, which funny enough is slowly going in the opposite direction to the US, towards a freer and more open society
Our children/grandchildren will be living in a world where everything is turned on it's head in comparison to now, with people trying to escape the oppressive country called the United States of America while millions try to get to china to get rich and live the good life
If I am understanding this correctly then it is quite different from the normal case of the carrier (unmoderated host,search engine,forum,blog...) being immune from being sued but it is now also making the the poster of content (aka the person who actually put it on the site) immune as well, now only leaving the person who first created the content liable (and they can hide behind anonminity)
If this is case it is a very very bad ruling which turns the web from a place where "freedom of speech is allowed" to a place where "freedom to lie without repercussions is allowed"
Unless you call "shortage" a low supply of qualified people willing to work at appropriate rates for under-qualified people
I know tons of people who left the industry when the crash happened, not because they could not find jobs or did not want to work in the industry any longer but because they could not find jobs that gave adequate compensation for their skills and experience. Those people are still out there and if rates increase enough they will return
There is something very wrong with a sector when there can be jobs advertised that require 5/7 years plus experience in multiple tecnologies that offer rates equal to that of a fast food resturant manager (or even less)
[quote]This is a public, and final statement that nobody gets to kill.[/quote]
Unless they are a US backed kangaroo court....
Does Sadam deserve death? sure he does, but is it wise to give him a death sentence? No it is totally stupid, everyone knows the trial was not fair, no trial involving him could be, thus sentencing him to death at this mockery of a trail just add's fuel to the arguments of those who will turn him into a martyr and as a saying goes, the problem with martyr's is you can only kill them once...then you are stuck with them for the rest of your life.
If the US government had any brains they would order...woops mean "appeal to" the iraq government to commute it to life without parole
And then if the US people had any brains they would put Bush in the cell next to him
There is no chance of MS doing this, would be commercial suicide in the long term and would have the shareholders gunning for the heads of the MS board on a platter
MS want something from China (probably better anti piracy laws/enforcement) and this is a a vague (and toothless) threat to try to get their way
"How close are we to being recognized by a computer anywhere we go, as portrayed in movies like Minority Report?"
Now I could be wrong but I am pretty sure Minority report was portraying retinal scanning not facial recognition
If you view this as "cashing in" then yes you are one of the few who view it like that, and most likely nearly all of you have never played MMO's before.
It's MMO standard procedure to do an expansion every 1 to 2 years, used to be to so the developers could distribute major changes (aka 100's of MB's of art work/code) to the game before broadband became widespread, the method is kept these days as it is a good way to mark milestones (major updates to way game is played), good excuse to get the box's back on shelves and of course because as it's a very good revenue booster.
Now of course the procedure can and does get abused, if you looked at some "expansions" for Ultima Online over the last few years you would see there is so little new content in them they are little more than patches (average wow "patch" contains as much as average UO expansion), in cases like that saying they are cashing in would be being nice, milking their customers for everything they can would be more appropriate
What the poster says in that essay is nothing new, been said before by many people in relation to MMO's (and previously MUD's but to lesser degree)
Pretty much everything he says I could apply to my years in Ultima Online:On large guild council, more time spent per week in game than at work, total neglect of real life friends (unless they play the game) and then when you realise "what's wrong" and pull back or quit,the machine keeps grinding on as if you have never been there and most (but not all if you are lucky) of your "great friends" and "guildies for life", quietly and rapidly forget about you
Happened to me, happened to most of the guild council and many others I know from UO and WOW
Lucky I realised this before we moved to wow and for those reasons totally refused to take a leadership role in WOW and once I realised how time consuming raiding was (or honour grinding) pulled back from those too. Sadly with WOW (and most other MMO's) if you don't honour grind, don't raid hardcore you really only have only the 3 choices
*Constant rerolling
*Use the game as a glorified chat room
*Quit
Gone though the first 2 already and as of last week did the 3rd and I will not be back for the expansion, nor any other upcoming MMO .
The entire MMO genre is designed to give only one of two paths, either dedicate good portions of your life to it or end up feeling like you are accomplishing very little and finally after 8 years i have had enough and decided I want a real life again
As the whole floating nuclear reactor "done before " is well covered above i will raise one concern i have about this...$200 million, maybe it's me but is that not like...very cheap? Having visions of "Safety measures? Bahh those cost to much, if something goes wrong we can just sink it"
"In a chilling slap at free speech"
It is no such thing, rather it is bringing the Internet in line with the real world.
If she (the defendant) had said the plaintiff "sucked" or "was not very good" aka opinions there would have been no case to answer but instead she leveled pretty serious accusations ("crook," a "con artist" and a "fraud.") against the plaintiff, accusations aired on websites selected to maximize damage to the plaintiffs business
If anyone had printed, or even said such things off the Internet they would be opening themselves legal suits, legal suits they would lose if they had no evidence to back up their claims
I especially love the last bit in the article
"I don't feel like I can express my opinions," Bock says. "Only one side of the story was told in court. Nobody heard my side."
Well duh, ok she could not afford a lawyer but nothing was stopping her from representing herself, she choose not to exercise that right so trial went on without her, did she expect otherwise? (*imagines a world where murderers, rapist and such walk free because they refuse to defend themselves*)
Only thing out of wack with this case was the amount awarded, but as the defendant had no money jury probably felt what the heck might as well award a OTT amount because either was the plaintiff is getting getting nothing
Let me get this, The US goverment knows who all these known terrorists are, where they are , who they are talking to but have not had the CIA kidnap them and dump them in a secret prison yet? Suuure
It is a pointless law really as it can be easily circumvented if someone really wishes to gamble, just insert a non US based 3rd party in the middle of any transaction (off shore bank or paypal like service)
What should be of great concern to everyone though, those for and against gambling is the way this law was passed, attaching two totally unrelated bills like this should be so illegal it should be part of the constitution because no matter how you look at it is a bad situation
Gov either get a law passed that would not on it's own make it past the finishing line by attaching it to a critical bit of legislation or possibly even worse, a piece of critical legislation does not make it into law because of the unrelated riders attached to it