Do hardware manufacturers provide refunds to people who paid full price for hardware when it came out, as the price gradually goes lower and lower?

Should they?

Economies of scale. Having this single source is the most economically viable option for this particular cheap but costly to manufacture drug. Building and maintaining the laboratories needed to generate this stuff is not cheap and not worth the cost it would require.

Being modded down on slashdot isn't the same thing at all. The "offending" comments are all still there and easily accessed. Finding dissenting opinions on Wikipedia is a lot more involved, requiring you to iterate through the article history comparing the past and present for differences.

Hell, I view slashdot at -1 just so I don't miss comments that shied too far away from the groupthink.

Nope, it's still just as bad, if not worse. Just last week I had some contributions I made to an inconsequential article on a particular anime reverted because apparently, and I'm paraphrasing, "someone else handles all the summaries" - I mean, what? Looking at it now, it's still as empty as it was when I first saw it. Whoever they're relying on to do them isn't. It's bizarre.

The point is public perception. It has nothing to do with rational thinking.

No, lets put "thief" into the context of the actual article here, replacing "hacking" with "stealing": "We like stealing things and we don't want to stop"

We know what sort of negative connotation "hacking" has become despite it being the most ridiculous thing, but the "thief" angle is actually a pretty good one. If I say I'm a thief and I never want to stop thieving, it sends all kinds of negative connotations about who you are and what you do. Maybe you like stealing from people whom you have a prior arrangement to test their security, seeing how much loot you can get away with to show them how secure or insecure their home is with no intent to keep any such loot. Do you think the average person is going to think an angle like that is present, or just that you really like stealing things from people?

It's crap, but fairness is not a part of this. It's all about perceived notions by laypeople. Hackers are just bad people. That's the thought.

The Supreme Court of the United States, the highest federal court in the country, doesn't have the jurisdiction to challenge the NSA? What kind of bullshit is that?

I think you missed the point. They're not saying doing things at the bleeding edge today is easier than the bleeding edge yesterday, they're saying doing the things bleeding edge yesterday are easier today.

Not me. I've been very proactive about avoiding G+ (not on privacy grounds primarily but because I have no interest in having pointless social network profiles floating around). My youtube account isn't associated with a G+ account at all.

Maybe it's because my Google account is essentially tied to their domain services and I have all G+ stuff disabled on their dashboard. Trying to go to G+ at all presents me with a nice "Google+ is not available for your organization" message.

Don't be upset because a multiboxer killed you in a battleground 5 to 1. He's not referring to stomping on individual players in a battlegrounds when he talks about challenge.

Your example isn't really relevant here. The things being botted in Wow are akin to simply moving all your pawns forward and taking any pieces you can happen to take in the process. Wow bots do not play even close to "half-way well." Wow bots brute force the absolute easiest parts of the game with minor or no combat in the most inefficient manner possible for marginal gain because that's all they're good for. There exists no wow bots that can play like a player could, and there likely never will due to the complexity involved in such a task and no one willing to work it out.

I really hate this mentality. An account I had since the game launched became very loosely associated with botters a few months back (I was buying large quantities of herbs for a discount from someone who could have been a botter) and my account was permanently banned a couple weeks later for being associated with botting accounts. There were no blemishes on my account prior, but Blizzard didn't want my money enough to keep my account alive.

Clearly they do ban users for being in the botting scene (and apparently even those who buy unspecified quantities of materials from bots knowingly or not [guess we're just supposed to know deals are too good to be true or not, even though in retrospect I don't think the deal was that great at all])

The email they sent me sounded like a joke, at first, or a poor phishing attempt, because it basically seemed to allude to the idea that I didn't personally do anything wrong, but because I was, quote, "associated with World of Warcraft licenses that were closed for participating in exploitative activities", I was a threat that had to be put down as well. At the end they state "Engaging in or associating with exploitative activity violates the World of Warcraft Terms of Use." which means they can and will ban people who simply buy things from bots. I guess I just bought enough herbs from one that finally tripped Blizzard's threshold on my reasonable disbelief that the person wasn't a botter.

Whatever the case, I no longer have an account I had for 9 years and have spent a great deal of money on the service and supplemental services. If they didn't care about losing my business, I really doubt they care about losing others.

There was even a "<3" at the very end.

They sound like sociopaths to me. Not a kid coping with what happened.

Just make sure you don't pick those frogs that can switch genders.

Only..?