A writ of certiorari is a request from a higher court to a lower one informing it that it wants to review the case at hand, and that all records and transcripts from the trial should be sent from the lower court to the higher one.

Filing a request for writ of certiorari with the US Supreme Court is in essence a fancy way of saying "We're attempting to appeal to the US Supreme Court". There is, of course, no guarantee that the Court would take the case, the success on petitions for certiorari is something on the order of 1%.

Ding! We have a winner.

MMORPGs that have classes have tried to have other archetypes (and in games where there are "skills", players end up CREATING the archetypes out of the skills, so it becomes functionally similar. In the end, it doesn't work out, because unless those classes are useful, and useful often, there's going to be complaints from both sides:

1. The people playing that class complain that they can't get a group a lot of the time because most of the content doesn't require them to be there (why take along someone who can debuff the enemies if for all the battles you're fighting this time, you can kill them without those debuffs? Just take along another DPS).

or

2. The people that do the 95+% of the content that doesn't require those classes complain that they have to go and find someone of that class for that ONE moment when they are useful.

If there are hybrid classes out there that are only 50% as good as a Warrior tank and 50% as good as a Cleric healer, no one, at high levels, will want to use them for either role, and the people playing those classes, who may have chosen them early on because they sounded neat, end up feeling robbed when they get to high levels and realize no one finds them useful (EverQuest tried this with the ShadowKnight and Paladin, and had to buff them both significantly). If there's a class out there that has a special buff that's great for a few boss battles, but isn't necessary in most other cases, and it means they're a 25% less effective healer than the other healing classes, no one will want them except during those boss battles, and even then, they'll just take along one. EverQuest started with the intention that the Shaman, the Druid, and the Cleric were healing classes, but the Cleric was clearly better - guess what happened? A large group might have one Shaman, for slowing down the attack speed of the enemies, but had to have a large number of Clerics, you know, to do the REAL healing. Solution - the healing ability of the other classes was buffed substantially until they were nearly equivalent.

And let's not get started on the Enchanter, a class that for crowd control could be amazing, but in many mundane encounters with no need for crowd control, was used for Clarity and little else. Solution? Give 'em more ways to do damage.

In World of Warcraft, the new "random group" ability lets practically anyone join a group that the game puts together as "Tank, Healer, 3 DPS". In the game, in "standard" dungeons, the effectiveness of the tank, healer, etc. in those groups is determined more by their gear (and their individual skills) and less by which class they happen to be. Replace a DK DPS with a Hunter DPS in your average dungeon and assuming similar gear you'll end up with similar DPS.

In raids, sure, it's good, often essential, to have a mix (for example, when Onyxia is flying, you need ranged DPS to be able to, you know, hit her). But if there was a 4th archetype there, right now they wouldn't be needed. Any game would have to be designed from the group up with that 4th archetype in mind as one that is integral to the game. Right now, it's hard to envision what that archetype might be.

IMO, what they're most worried about are price points. The consumer mindset for cell phone games seems to top out at about $5, and a lot of games that, were they released on Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Network might be $10, are $1-2 on the App Store.

The Nintendo DS version of Civilization Revolution was $30 at release. The Xbox 360 version was similarly priced.

The iPhone version is currently $5. It's essentially the same game. The controls aren't as good - and no one is saying that the other two don't have their place, because you don't always want to stare at a tiny screen. Developers have tried to put games for $10 on the App Store. While there's the occasional success, most of the time the reviews are filled with 1-star "$10 for a phone game?" reviews, and the game quickly shoots down the charts and out of the rankings and "Featured" lists.

Peggle for PC is still available for $10. It's the same price on the Xbox 360 (Live Arcade).

The iPhone version is $5.

The iPhone is causing people to shift their view as to an appropriate price point at the same time that many companies are trying to rip out a third of an otherwise complete Xbox or PS3 game so they can sell the rest as "Downloadable content" to squeeze that extra $5-10 out of each buyer. That, I believe, is terrifying to the marketing droids and finance people that actually run these companies.

While I dislike how suddenly the financial markets have gotten back into these windfall risky investments, there's little push to stop it, so I guess taking into account the kind of behavior that, you know, actual people would do, is better than nothing.

Most 'risk analyses' done by these things almost go as far as to assume everyone involved acts as Economic Man - the theory that everyone will always act in such a way as to best improve their position, in a 100% rational way. This is a pipe dream put up in economic theory and doesn't always work. If you assume everyone involved acts that way, then some possible outcomes - like the ones we saw in the past year - can't be the slightest bit possible, therefore the models that were being run at the time disregarded them. Of course, the models were wrong - because people don't act that way.

Consider what is sometimes called the Ultimatum Game - everyone's heard of it. Person A has a pile of money to divide between themselves and Person B. They split it, and Person B can either accept the division, in which case each gets their share, or reject it, in which case neither player gets one red cent and the money is lost.

Economic Man theory would say Person A should give the smallest possible amount (let's say 1%) to Person B, and keep 99%, or whatever the maximum share is, and that Person B should then readily accept, because they're better of taking something rather than nothing. In reality, when this "game" is tested, it doesn't work that way - if Person A doesn't offer enough to B (say, 20%), Person B tends to reject it, whether out of spite, or a sense of fairness. The responses change depending on how much money is involved, and culture (different countries and regions have different thresholds) and everyone seems to have their own threshold of course - but very few Person B's say "OK, I'll take one penny and Person A can have $99.99" even if that's what Economic Man would do.

Likewise, Economic Man doesn't see that much of a difference between, say, 10% chance of loss, or a 5% chance of losing double that amount and a 2 1/2% chance of losing quadruple - while real people tend to disregard a small chance of large losses, but be quite averse to a reasonable chance of smaller losses - they'd probably go for the last option, even if percentage wise the "odds" are the same.

Most of these financial models, in essence, assume people are Vulcans, when they're not - they're people, and no amount of economics saying "You should act like Economic Man!" is going to change that.

If they're going to continue using these models, a push to start getting them better is at least some progress.

I guess my thought is, it really doesn't matter if it's the user's fault or not.

If you're a company selling something - a product or service - it's up to you to make it simple to use for the people that are trying to use it (or at least, the people in your target market that are trying to use it), or lose their business. It doesn't really matter if they're doing it wrong. If they come to your site with the same browser and system they have always used and suddenly it doesn't work, well then the fact that it's the browser that's implementing something wrong doesn't matter to them because the site worked well before. Maybe it is. Maybe there's a minor thing the site implements wrong.

I look at this and feel like this is simply a classic case where you have a team of developers that are doing the website at eBay, or any major corporation, and they like having jobs. So at some moment in time there is a necessary site redesign, and they spend months, perhaps years, working on it. Then the site goes live, they spend the next few months to work out the bugs, and there's the question "OK, so, what do we do now?"

So the obvious question is "We start work on the NEXT-NEXT generation website! We'll start on it right away!" And this cycles over and over, because if you say to management "You know what? The website we have is pretty damn good, functional, and we've worked most of the bugs out - there's no need to upgrade", the next thing to say is "So we don't need a gigantic web development team, right?"

This is the only reason I can think of for some of the upgrades I've seen at major websites the past year or so - websites that were previously functional, easy to use, fast, etc. and are now buggy, overladen with crap, etc.

In one of my ASIC design classes, it was practically impossible for the professor to really go through everyone's design and ensure that they all worked properly - they were far too complicated. Likewise, it was difficult for students to ensure, while designing things, that the chip itself also worked as intended, because it was an error correction algorithm being implemented, so you had to sort of KNOW what a desired output would be. So the professor gave a sample input, and the intended output for this input, so that people could make sure their chips worked when they would run them in the design software.

On the turn-in day, everyone turned in their huge heaps of paper that covered their design - again, practically impossible for the professor to 100% go through. Included also was a printout of everyone's signals within the chip - intermediate ones, and the final output. And of course, >95% of the things turned in gave the correct output and had everything correct inside.

So the professor starts his lecture, and then stops and says "OK, everyone up!" And we headed to the computer lab, where he made everyone sit down in front of a computer, one by one, load up their chip, and gave a new input string (maybe 300-400 bits), and made each person run it.

Approximately half the class had the output of their chip be the same output for the original "sample" input he had given so people could test - that is, their entire big ASIC (because it had to LOOK complex or it would be too obvious it didn't do anything) was essentially a giant set of fake elements which actually did nothing except give the appropriate output - for the ONE sample input.

I have to admit, mine worked for the original input, but when he gave the new input, my output was correct for the first 399 bits - but the 400th was incorrect. It should have been a 1, I had a 0. It seems that no matter what the input was, my last bit (regardless of the number of input bits) had a stuck-at-0 fault. But since his sole sample input had a 0 as the final output bit, I never detected the fault. However, in this "second sample", the last 30 or so output bits were all 1's, and the difference between 29 '1" bits in a row and 30 "1" bits in a row in terms of looking at a long line quickly (as the professor was) is not noticeable. I saw it, but the professor didn't, and I got credit for the chip.

I agreed with you (but thought it was all very obvious) up to this point:

I remember a friend of mine getting suspended in elementary school for saying "I wish you would die" to someone who had been bullying them.

Actually, I think it IS a horrible and dangerous attitude when a kid says something like that. It may not be much of a threat then, but it shows that the child is being allowed to mature without the necessary coping skills for teenage and adult relationships, which she'll one day have to deal with. I think the parent who taught the kid this kind of attitude should be focused on more than the kid, but definitely, I think kids with this sort of behaviour should be detected, taken aside, and taught a wiser approach to life.

Sheesh. I remember when I was in either kindergarten or first grade, someone was bullying me, and I said to them "The world would be a better place if you were dead." They started crying (at the time, all I was thinking was "Ha! That stopped them."), and went to a teacher, who pulled me aside, and explained to me the actual ramifications of what I had said. Hell, I was in first grade. At that time parents still tell you that the dog "ran away" rather than died, and even if they had, you don't always understand at that age what death really means. But when the teacher told me that what I said was inappropriate, and I asked my parents about it later, I - at least as far as I could at that time - understood what was up and I didn't do it again. That's all that needed to happen. It makes me shiver to think that had that happened today - 20 years later - instead of then, it isn't unlikely that I'd have been hauled away and suspended.

I recall another case in 2nd grade where we were asked to draw a real flag we had seen (either in person or in pictures) that wasn't the American flag. Most people drew the state flag, or the Canadian or British flag. I didn't know any of those. I didn't even know the state flag at the time. But I had seen my parents watching a documentary on World War II (although I didn't really pay attention) so I drew the only other flag I knew - the Nazi one. The teacher took it away, pulled me aside and explained a bit about World War II, and that that particular flag wasn't appropriate, and told me to ask my parents about it when I got home, which I did, and it was clear that it wasn't really appropriate for school. Simple. She gave me a book of flags and I picke a different one and drew it. Kids really can be quite understanding if you give actual explanations beyond "BECAUSE WE SAID SO". Again, today, I'd probably have been expelled before even being told why what I had drawn was inappropriate.

I can think of numerous things that I saw happen to all sorts of students back in school where the "proper response" - the teacher/administrator coming in and being the 'adult' - led to long-standing resolutions where kids understood what was up. Things like suspension were rare and for the most severe cases. But these days you don't see it - the fear of lawsuits, the fear of decision-making, has led to a school culture where a single aspirin pill may as well be 2 kg of heroin, and a plastic knife may as well be a machine gun with cyanide-tipped bullets.

'I believe their argument is that while DRM doesn't work perfectly,' says Wardell, 'it does make it more difficult for someone to get the game for free in the first five or six days of its release. That's when a lot of the sales take place and that's when the royalties from the retailers are determined. Publishers would be very happy for a first week without "warez" copies circulating on the Web.'"

Let us consider, for a moment, a DRM-loaded game from the past year.

Spore.

Its DRM was considered by some to be so limiting that some people simply never played the game. People were exasperated that, at release, it allowed only one user account per copy. That installs couldn't be "restored" by uninstalling the game (many of these things have been added since).

OK, so all that said, copies of Spore were still readily available for download a week prior to release on torrent sites all over the world. Despite cumbersome DRM, that in some cases prevented actual customers from being able to extract full enjoyment from the product they purchased, anyone that wanted a DRM-free copy could still have gotten one prior to the release of the game.

Lesson: It. Doesn't. Work.

Maybe...maybe it prevents someone from taking the game to a friend's house and installing it, or the like. But it isn't preventing wide-scale piracy, even during that "critical first week".

That is the best game ever. Achievement Unlocked!

The issue I have here is that it seems like the fact that this is just opinion is no longer relevant - the poster went there, didn't like it, and posted so, and suddenly it's defamatory. What if that was their actual opinion of what happened? Why would someone make that up?

It feels like everything even a tiny bit negative is suddenly grounds for a lawsuit.

Food critic gives a bad review? Don't make better food, sue the critic, the newspaper, and the corporation that owns it for defamation, even if the fries WERE soggy that day.

It seems like the issue is it's way cheaper to try and suppress negative information (even if it's simply random people's opinions) - and furthermore make it clear that it will be extremely costly to even utter such information, by way of having to defend oneself in court, even for pure opinion-laced statements. Some states, if I recall, have laws and remedies available when companies sue under such circumstances, but many, it seems, do not.

And hell - I've noticed that in some countries, forget opinion - it's getting to the point where even truth is no longer an absolute defense to libel, because truthful statements can still be "defamatory".

"Fame" and "Respect" shouldn't be a right just via the existence of a person or company, it's one of those things that is (or used to be) hard to earn, and easy to lose. What's the point of having a review or sharing thoughts if any negative one leads to a lawsuit?

The reality of government interference makes this unlikely.

To whit:

First, in many areas, it simply isn't possible for competition to arise because deals have been made with local government preventing additional licenses from being granted - Verizon, for example, has had difficulties getting FiOS into some areas because cable companies have simply paid off the local government to block any and all other possible licensees. Since in any area each provider must be licensed at the city, county, state, and federal level, any one of those entities can block expansion, and they do. If there's only one or two providers (for example, one cable and one DSL), people could lose access to content they want and have no way to obtain it due to lack of competing service.

Second, the existing pipes were laid often with heavy subsidies from federal, state, and local governments, making it difficult for a competitor to lay their own infrastructure. If existing Company A laid down their lines with government subsidies, in the event that a competitor can even get a license to operate, Company B will generally get no such subsidies, and thus may have to charge so much more for service (to pay the cost of laying the lines) that no one would choose them over Company A - thus they don't bother to try to lay them in the first place.

I would say that in the case where traffic can be assured to be going from Point A to Point B without going through any lines or equipment that was subsidized by US taxpayer, and in an area where there is no local or state government preventing suitable competition for service, one could argue that the entities involved should be able to the control the traffic. Since that is, in today's world, practically impossible, I believe they should remain neutral.

Right now, every time it is more convenient for someone to say "It's a license! Not a 'sale'!", they get to say that. It's in the EULA!

Yet every time it's more convenient for them to say "You bought it! It's yours!", they get to say that too.

If you lose a book, no one would say you get a free book - you bought the book. Sure the book is covered by copyright, but that doesn't mean you "licensed" the book. You lose it, then you have to get another one.

But with software, if you lose it, it's "Oh, sorry, you bought the software, it would be piracy to get another." It's in their favor to consider it "yours" for that. But in almost every other way, it's a "License!" that they have full control over.

IMO, one or the other. If it's just a license, then as long as it's registered in some way, if I lose it, give me a new one. If it's mine, then let me sell it when I'm done.

Right now, the corporation wins no matter what I do.

I'm surprised that the employment contracts for those employees did not stipulate that all employee email passing through their systems was subject to search.

Perhaps, in Finland, one cannot sign away this particular right.

After all, many employment contracts in the US specify that one's job is "at-will" and one can be fired at any time for any reason (mine does). However, signing such a contract still leaves you with rights that the government considers as inviolate, such as the right not to be fired due to your race. No amount of signing, even if the contract specifically states "You sign away this specific right" can take some enumerated rights from you.

Perhaps in Finland, the right not to be spied upon by one's employer is such a right. I don't know that, but if Nokia has multiple times been chastised for doing this, one might assume that could be the case.

All software has bugs. The existence of those bugs doesn't necessarily mean that a jury will find reasonable doubt. The defense can argue it, just like the defense will argue that a radar gun was wrong. But it doesn't always work. Lots of people are convicted on DNA evidence, and you can bet that the defense almost always brings up "But the machine could be wrong!" argument. But the technicians generally have to take the stand and defend what they're doing, and the algorithms can be challenged (famously, during the OJ trial).

In this case, given the presumption should be of innocence, shouldn't the accused have the ability to at least make the argument?

Let's make a stupid example.

Everyone remembers the Zune fiasco. The Zune, in essence, is a closed-source black-box music player. You put music in, it plays it, and people don't care about the internals. Everyone - including its manufacturer! - assumed it was working fine and everything was great.

Then, one day, it turns out that one particular model, running one particular firmware, completely messed up, and only on that day. If you didn't turn yours on at all that day, or had a different model, you might not have even known there was a problem. If you ran a different firmware, you might not have known there was a problem. But there was.

The Zune bug wasn't a calamity because music players aren't sending people to jail. But these breathalyzer machines are - in some cases they are the State's only evidence. Who knows whether or not on all leap days they accidentally add 0.03 to the breath test results? What if, after a night of use, their results get skewed upward or downward due to residual alcohol inside the detector? What if there's a register that doesn't get cleared if the officer forgets to do something and it skews the results?

A bug that affects the results doesn't have to be as obvious as the Zune bug in order to exist.

These breathalyzer machines run software that has been patched, patched, and patched again. What specifically were the patches fixing (after all, there has to be a good reason to patch a breathalyzer machine)? What was wrong previously that needed to be patched? Prior to a given patch, was there a possibility of error? Was the one a given suspect was tested on patched? Was the machine re-calibrated after each patch? Does the source code after patch #3 but before patch #4 have a bug that leads to errors, but only on Thursdays from 2:00 to 3:00 AM?

The fact is the manufacturer doesn't want to answer any of these questions, nor allow any 3rd party to examine the things and answer them, and is willing to endure millions of dollars in contempt fines rather than answer them?

To me, that's "reasonable doubt" that the machines aren't everything the manufacturer claims they are.

I had this issue when I canceled my cell phone with Sprint a few years ago. I was getting paperless bills, and paying online. However, the instant I canceled, even though I knew I would have one final pro-rated bill, my account on their website was locked out.

Calling them to ask to send a bill on paper was useless - once they hear you aren't a customer and aren't interested in signing up again you're put into the "On Hold Forever" queue.

Got an email a month later saying I hadn't paid, but of course every email says "Do not reply to this email - if you have questions, log into your account", which didn't exist.

I finally sent them a check for what my standard monthly bill is, knowing it was too much. Since then, for three years, they've been sending me a monthly statement, by snail mail, telling me they owe me about eight dollars. Every month, for three years. Just send me a check!