Well, that's both vague and incorrect. Even if it applied to your individual case, it's still the norm in many transactions.

Are you trying to compare the two? Like, damaging a rental car is somehow the same as the rental car company jerking you around and you publicly describing your bad experience? NOT THE SAME.

No, YOUR statement is simply not true. Chargeback can be a pain but if you have a case it is accepted the majority of the time. And in THIS case (when it's literally used as a "fine" for restricting free speech) it's almost a no-brainer it will go through.

For a GOOD credit card customer they make more money on the customer than some single shady hotel transaction in the long run. And when it's dozens of customer (who will probably have legal standing if they care to take it beyond simple chargebacks) it's just not worth it for the credit card company to resist. And in this actual incident they actually got a quote from a cabinet minister saying it was uncalled for, so if they would basically be batshit insane f-you to the British government refusing to reverse the charge...

I can't imagine a credit card company would approve of their card being used to "fine" customers. Accept an IMMEDIATE chargeback (which I assume they will, as the charge is insane) and tell the company one more violation and their contract is cancelled.

And then, good luck with a hotel accepting payment "cash only"...

True. Go ahead and sue over $40. You will lose 100x more time and money suing, and it will be extremely difficult to prove that a game company did not intent to implement features of a game from the initial project plan (since almost all game projects bite off more than they can chew).

Except apparently the chargeback goes against the project "creator" not Kickstarter:

http://ignitiondeck.com/id/cro...

Nah, even though I originally called it that, it's not really an investment in a legal sense if you can't take any value back out of it. If the only value you ever get out is a product, it was either a purchase or a donation with a reward/gift. Legally it seems closest to the latter since there isn't any guarantee of product, and there isn't any way (except for the discretion of the company) to get your "investment" back...

Good point. Kickstarter is billed as a micro-investment, but in reality it IS a donation. The reward is basically like getting a coffee mug for giving to PBS, but it's delayed by a year and if PBS goes bankrupt in the meantime you can kiss your mug goodbye.

No, you are absolutely not in this case. Kickstarter is microfunding investments in a project/company, not a purchase of a product with a specific guarantee or warranty. The fine print says as much. Sure, if they absconded with your money for a vacation you could try to sue them. But in this case they tried in good faith to deliver what they could and ran out of cash before implementing all features (not only common but almost universal in the games industry - if you haven't seen this a dozen times you are not a gamer).

This is ABSOLUTELY incorrect. It's not a payment at all, you are NOT buying a product. You are investing in one, and you get a reward if it succeeds. Luckily the majority do, but if they declare bankruptcy and don't product anything because of mismanagement or just bad luck, you get to line up as an investor to collect/sue for any capital invested, which means you are 99.9% shit outta luck.

Welcome to the world of "venture capital." Just luckily for the investors it's $50 at a time and not $50M.

No, a lie is when you say something you know isn't true. Changing your mind (or in this case, adapting the product to reality of schedules and finance) is NOT A LIE. And it happens every freaking day in development.

You could say that (and in a way it's true), but technically there is no "buyer" since it's NOT a purchase, it's financial backing of a project.

Not much different from venture capital, except by giving $50 instead of $50M you don't get a board seat and massive returns if successful, you just get a possibly sketchy promise of a "reward" for your investment.

Sure, it sucks when projects don't meet their exact launch goals, but I don't have too much sympathy for the "backers" on Kickstarter in general.

The whole thing is clearly labeled as "crowdfunding", not "preorder". If you want to preorder a game, go to Gamestop. If you want to be a backer, i.e. basically micro funding of a startup project, go ahead and use Kickstarter, but in that case you really aren't *guaranteed* anything. There will be poorly managed Kickstarter projects that fail miserably and blow through their investment without ANY decent return/reward. And since you basically agreed to be an investor in the venture (that's why you get a "reward", not a "purchase"), do you know what you can do about that in most cases? Jack and shit.

Well, it may be anecdotal and hyper-focused on "the new kid on the block" but there are plenty of items in the news these days about incidents with Uber drivers...

And I can tell you second hand (I have a couple friends or acquaintances who have passed the Uber X "checks") that it's a trivial process that almost never gets rejected. The taxi licensing process in the US isn't all *that* hard, but it's still a lot more strict - and government regulated and *public*, not controlled at the whim of a private company with a vested interest to hide problems and doesn't need to publish its process or data.

But I'm not even really knocking Uber's system, the original comment just asked: "Forget about questions of fairness, step back and look at first principles and evaluate whether the regulations are of value to society. Were these rules ever necessary? If so, why? Do the same reasons apply to Uber and Lyft?"

And I think the answer is, whatever method is used to check and enforce them, yes, taxi/rideshare/whatever regulations are absoluately a value to society and were (and still are) necessary (in some form).

Heh, "distress" = "distros". Thank you autocorrect.

As of less than a year ago TRIM was still not enabled by default in mainstream Linux distress... has that changed?

And even if it has, clearly that means it's not as big a deal as this article claims...