Maybe this has more to do with the threat of releasing more information "if their demands aren't met" than it does the threat of physical attacks? Maybe there really was some backroom discussion between Sony and the big theater chains to scrap the release because of this?

Or maybe not. It's probably just stupidity.

Maybe there wasn't a legal risk that would have held up in court. What all that legal council evidently failed to mention is the very real threat of crippling litigation that, while ultimately unsuccessful, could still wipe you out in the process.

I guess that's one thing separating the 'good' legal council from the 'best'. The former will stop at examining the laws, the latter will also examine all the ways the laws could be abused to achieve the same result.

I agree with you about Kickstarter but for the past few months Frontier has been selling preorders for the game on their website, clearly labeled as "preorders". For the people who bought those dumping the offline play could be cause for a refund.

It's not that the thing itself is flying away from us at c, it's that all the space in between us and that thing is expanding. Naturally the further away it gets, the more expanding space there is between us and the thing, the faster the thing appears to be receding from us.

In this system nothing is moving faster than the speed of light but the effect is the same: a spacecraft trying to reach that galaxy would need to overcome all the expanding space between, and that would require a speed greater than c. In fact, at that point even light from that galaxy would not reach us anymore, putting it outside our cosmological horizon.

Disclaimer: I may not know what I'm talking about. This should really be in my sig.

Might be the Diaspora mod for Freespace Open, which is really good.

Some back story for those that don't know, Volition (the developer behind Freespace 2) released the source code to the game about 10 years ago when it became apparent that they weren't going to be able to make a third installment. Since then the FS2 community has enhanced the game engine, fixed bugs, overhauled the graphics, added support for all kinds of new peripherals and created several new games, like Diaspora and a Babylon 5 conversion.

If you're a fan of space combat sims you really should check out Freespace Open. Besides playing through the original campaigns I'd recommend Blue Planet (included in the installer) and the subsequent War in Heaven campaigns.

On the other hand I can see this becoming very useful for overcoming fears or certain types of neurological disorders. We recently put together a training program for a clinical trial with Parkinson's patients who experience "freeze of gait". Certain situations (like walking through a narrow doorway) can cause them to become locked in place in a sort of trance until some external stimulus snaps them out of it again. The idea was to train these situations from the safety of their own home in order to better deal with them in public. The clinical trial hasn't started yet, but I'd guess a VR headset would provide a much more realistic experience than a monitor.

More importantly BoA has been branded "too big to fail" and owns so many subsidiaries by now that they don't need to worry themselves with what ordinary consumers think of the Bank of America brand.

EA, on the other hand, was bothered enough to dish out pre-emptive damage control, so maybe some good will come of this.

Well, probably not.

Fines would mean crap to companies and individuals alike if they were levied as a percentage of income instead of a flat amount. Is there any good reason why it isn't done this way?

Anyone who hasn't seen the wonderful things the Freespace 2 Open Source team has done over the years should really check it out. The game itself is $6 on GoG, and since Volition released the source code it's seen a complete overhaul for everything from AI to graphics. The classic campaigns are still there (and are well worth playing through), and there's been some really great fan campaigns released over the years too.

I'd highly recommend the Blue Planet campaign. Part 2 (War in Heaven) is especially noteworthy for really giving you the feeling of being on the losing side of a war, something you don't see very often in games. Part 1 has full voice acting, with voice acting for part 2 still in progress.

Let me tell you about endangered species...

The "War on Drugs" is just as pointless and ineffective yet we're still fighting it almost half a century later.

I'd been wondering who keeps 'liking' videos on porn tubes.

I saw this back during the SOPA trial. During the hearings the people on the left did everything they could to try to push it through, the people on the right were more or less the only ones speaking out against it.

One has to wonder why the $2 trillion+ in taxes we pay every year don't buy us as much influence over the legislative process as $100,000 in campaign contributions by various corporate interests. Why aren't election campaigns funded by tax dollars instead of private donations?

There's an important difference between "knowing" these things while being labeled paranoid or a conspiracy nut and "knowing" these things in relation to hard evidence that you can show people.

It'd be perfect... until you drive into a hail of tiny rocks a few times.