You missed the whole Battle.net outrage, huh?

So, does that mean it has a 5 minute summoning animation??

Explain this. Oh, also assume that those engaging in said vote coercion are going to sit you down and ask you to verify your vote in front of them, so they can see who you voted for exactly as you would. Also, that they do in fact hold your career in their hands, so failing to do so entirely will be very, very unpleasant.

You'd need a system in which you could "verify" that you voted for a specific party even if you didn't, and without it being possible for a third party watching the process to know whether you were showing your actual vote or your "boss friendly" vote.

Patent's goal is exactly the opposite of that though, because to get a patent you are supposed to be required to divulge exactly how your $PATENTABLE_THING functions. The alternative is Inventors keeping their methods and designs secret until someone else figures is out, rather than being given legal protection for a limited period of time in exchange for divulging their methods and designs.

The amount of time that protection lasts might be too long (especially for copyright, somewhat less so for patents), and (in particular for patents) might have expanded to cover things that it logically never should have (business method and software patents -- software is essentially by definition a formal way of describing mathematical formula that can be interpreted by a machine; math is not patentable; q.e.d. software should not be patentable, let alone be protected by both patent and copyright [is this the case for any other kind of works?]).

We'd best make it a criminal offense to sell certain books, movies, music, comics, etc to children because they might be corrupted by the evil influence of Elvis' hips. With more or less the sole exception of pornography, these are unhindered by law -- why should video games (which have a rating system similar to movies with similar voluntary enforcement, note that books have no such restrictions) be the exception?

That it's OK to outright disregard the rule of law in a foreign country in order to have those things, because if they are remotely careful they probably won't get caught?

No reasonable person is "anti-immigrant", nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. There exists a legal route for immigration though, one that, again, most of us are descended from someone who dealt with.

It's worth noting that he doesn't need probable cause, just "probable cause" as well. The law's author's went out of their way to avoid the phrase probable cause because that phrase has legal precedent attached, instead using a phrase that sounds like it should have a similar meaning but doesn't innately carry that meaning.

Goes to show how long it's been since my subscription was last active. =p

Now, do the same for me! =)

Actually, there *are* ads in CoH. They have to be enabled by the user (they are opt-in) and the replace certain textures in each zone, literally replacing some in universe advertising with paid advertising (that the game is mostly in an urban environment makes this not terribly jarring -- the less urban areas just don't have ads, because it doesn't make sense for a billboard to be in, say, the middle of a graveyard).

Premium players can join SGs, but only VIP (subscribers) can create them.

Which presents an interesting question for me -- I have a SG. All the members are either me or my nephew. We'd both be grandfathered in as premium. Does not being able to *create* a SG limit what we can do with an already existing one? Does that mean a free or premium player who wants to create a SG just needs to sub for a single month to get it made?

You start seeing more variety in environment later on, when you aren't raiding office buildings and warehouses all the time and thus gettng maps with the office building and warehouse tilesets. The villain side has a lot more variety in environments early on than heroes do as well.

I was always personally fond of the Portal Corp missions which mix things up a bit.

I'm hoping CoX does something similar to DDO's approach, actually. Let me buy the bits and pieces I want for keeps, or let me pay a sub and rent everything at once. If I want to play dark elves but not favored souls, and I want this adventure but not those other ones I can simply buy access to them for a few bucks, if I want *everything* then I can have that two with a sub or a much larger outlay of money to the store.

I know CoH is going to have a "premium" option that grandfathers in certain things if you have a previously paid account from before it went free.

I've seen arguments claiming that we need better intersectionality protections, you know for the cases where your employer doesn't discriminate against women or black but does discriminate against black women. That way unless you do something criminal, it's impossible to be fired, not promoted, or receive less than company average raises if you are, say, a transgendered lesbian who has one Latino parent and one black parent. You know, so that you are sufficiently minority to be unique within your employers workforce, and thus anything that could be a slight against you is discrimination against your particular intersection of minorities since 100% of black/latino transgendered lesbians who work for the company have been slighted while a substantially smaller percentage of white males were. =p

Clearly his opening was being facetious, you know by suggesting doing precisely what other "minorities" have done.

Personally, I'm all for equality. Equality however is *not* giving explicit benefits to people for being a racial minority or female.

I find discussions of the gender wage gap especially interesting. Currently women are paid ~2% less than men in terms of hourly pay rate once you remove all the variables other than gender (meaning persons of similar educational background in the same general geographic region in a similar industry fulfilling similar roles with a similar work history). I wouldn't be surprised if that is accountable due to things like differences in bargaining approaches, and you know, the error bars on those numbers.