22 attacked, and none killed.

Point still stands.

They were probably thinking about previous concessions they'd made only to see that money go to executive bonuses and attorney's fees instead of the capital improvements that the money was supposed to be spent on. http://www.vendingmarketwatch.com/news/10829363/bctgm-union-responds-to-hostess-facility-closings

They were probably also thinking of the 300% pay raise that the CEO gave himself while preparing for bankruptcy, along with the lesser raises other executives got at the same time.

I'm still not convinced this was a smart move on the part of the Union, but I can certainly understand what they were thinking!

The Philippines is one of the last countries in the world where the Catholic Church has a dominant voice in politics, so laws attempting to enforce morality are a fairly common thing. For example, it's one of the only countries in the world where divorce is illegal. As a result, many couples today either don't get married in the first place, or else are in a long term live-in relationship with someone while still being married to someone else.

Cybersex in the Philippines was already legally considered to be a form of prostitution before this law was passed. Now it would appear that the punishment for getting naked on a webcam will be harsher than that for having actual sex for pay, which will only serve to drive women away from the relatively safe jobs involving cybersex and into the more dangerous work of actual prostitution.

Just how much more severe is the punishment for cybersex? The fine for prostitution is 200 to 2,000 pesos. The fine for cybersex is 200,000 to 1,000,000 pesos. Average annual family income in the Philippines is 206,000 pesos as of 2009.

My name is very rarely in use by another, which just added to the annoyance in this case. I'm sure if I had been allowed to choose the server I transferred to I could have found one where the name was not already in use, but they decided to prevent that option, and so I decided to stop doing business with them.

There's two reasons why this was important:

1) The RPG element of a MMORPG. A character's name is a key facet of any character, especially in a MMORPG where it's the only element a player has complete control over, all other factors being essentially chosen from a list provided by the devs.

2) More importantly, there's the social factor. People online know me by that name. As I said, I've used it for a decade now, and people looking for me in game look for that name.

Most other games doing server mergers have had a system in place where the oldest character kept the name, as long as that character was over a certain level to ensure that it wasn't just a place-holding alt. Another popular alternative is to allow players to check a server for naming conflicts before doing a transfer and to select a server where a conflict doesn't exist. SWTOR's forcing all transfers to go to a single server prevented this as an option, but they could have still done the first one.

Even when they do the right things, they do it the wrong way. I left as a result of the server consolidations My main, created on day 1 of the pre-release period, was stripped of its name because of a combination of a lack of choice of servers to move to, and no attempt to implement reasonable rules regarding character naming conflicts as a result of the merger. So because somebody's alt had the same name as my main, and my server was the one being merged into the other, I had to lose the name that I've used in every online game I've played for the past decade.

Up to that point I had been the main driving force in getting my friends to stay with the game. I quit that day and everyone I know that hadn't already left, did so soon after.

Emerich's stats are questionable to begin with, and even he has admitted that he used the term "disposable income" incorrectly. Source: http://www.tnr.com/article/82962/conservatives-economic-chart-fox-de-rugy

His response to the criticisms? His numbers come from free online paycheck calculators, and his conclusions are backed up by anecdote. Source: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/84160/disputations-welfare-emmerich-singal-de-rugy

You'd have to ask a lawyer, but I believe there does have to be at least one or two legitimate plaintiffs in order to get things started. In the case of the Netflix suit, there are six "named" plaintiffs.

Sadly, that's not how class action suits work. If you are part of a "class" then you are automatically represented unless you opt out.

Good point. So, the attorneys in this suit are effectively removing the rights of everyone in the "class" to sue over this issue in exchange for absolutely nothing. Further, they emailed me the notice, but in order to opt out I need to send a letter to a post office box in Minnesota. This information is not listed on the page the email links to, rather I had to search a moderately lengthy FAQ to find it.

Valve is doing their customers a service by including this in the EULA.

Most class action suits are scams anyway. Just today I received notice of one that I'm included in being filed against Netflix for alleged privacy violations. The lawyers are seeking $9 million. I won't list the whole breakdown of the proposed settlement, but the lawyers are keeping $2.25 million (not including expenses), while the plaintiffs get a whopping $30,000 to split between however many thousand there end up being.

If Valve screws you over, you can still sue them as an individual, this just limits the ability of glorified ambulance chasers to make outrageous amounts of money in exchange for getting their supposed clients a settlement worth less than the cost of a good meal.

At the risk of getting modded down again: No, they are not. Pledges are a financial agreement between backers and project creators to exchange X amount of money for whatever reward was promised. Yes, you can back out prior to the ending of the Kickstarter Drive period. That's part of the agreement both parties enter into, but once that period is over that is no longer the case.

From the Terms of Use at http://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use:

"Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill."

That's the agreement project creators enter into when they begin their Kickstarter campaign. That's in addition to the common legal protections people have in any agreement made with or without a contract.

You misunderstand the Kickstarter model. Pledges are NOT donations. The project has promised physical consoles in exchange for most of the pledges. If they do not deliver then they would be subject to all applicable fraud laws.

Of course, they could provide a console and then never support it, but that would make them no different than a lot of other gaming platforms over the years.

Can't speak to all of the points you made, but they do go into more detail about "free to play" in the FAQ. They mean that every game must include some free content. In practice that means you might get a completely free game, but it's far more likely you'll get a demo with unlockable content, or a "freemium" model game.