The one time I don't have mod points...

This was similar to my experience. I bought about an album a month before Napster, while Napster was around I bought at least an album a week, and after it went away I dropped back to about two albums a year. I'm now back to buying the equivalent of about an album every other month through iTunes.

So, a decade later and I'm still spending a lot less money with them than I was when Napster was around. Multiply that by everyone else who acted in similar ways, and it's not so hard to determine the real reason for their declining income.

It was not designed to produce a two-party state. There's a great deal of evidence (for example, Federalist Paper #10) that many of the designers of the Constitution were, in fact, trying to create a non-partisan system. Unfortunately, with few real-world examples to take lessons from, they did not see how the system they were designing would inevitably lead to a two-party state.

It's no accident that most democracies to be founded after the United States have chosen not to directly copy its system of government.

Most of the sex cam sites house nothing but women trying to make a living. Some of them do indeed claim more hardship than they actually have in order to entice western men to send them even more money than they already paid for the sex show (usually around $1 a minute, of which the women get 25 to 50 cents at most).

Western men who get "scammed" this way are usually out a couple hundred bucks at the very most. Women legitimately looking for a husband who get scammed by western men just looking for sex often find themselves having lost their virginity in a Catholic country where that is still incredibly important.

The alternative to sex cam sites for these women is often actual prostitution. A far more dangerous occupation. It's telling that the penalties under this law were an order of magnitude higher for sex cam work than they are for prostitution. Makes you wonder what the real agenda for the law's backers was?

"sometimes they want shows in Skype, you pay by Paypal etc but the show you get will not be what you paid for"

Really? Let me guess, you paid for the girl to have sex with her underage sister, and all she did was show you her tits? Cry me a river. Most of these women are from the poorest families in a poor country. Making their quota on cam can determine whether or not they eat that day. If you're so worried about getting your money's worth, then just stick to the main sites rather than setting up private shows on Skype.

I'd like to see these women have better alternatives to working the cam sites, not forced to go into even more degrading work because the law created outrageous penalties.

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.