Quote from: Ladybird;683831Oh, come on. You've been a child at some point in your life; I don't believe you've never deliberately ignored someone in an attempt to make them upset (Not an ad hominem, just a statement that children are mean to each other). There are different ways of ignoring people.

I ignored everyone when I was a kid. I didn't do it to make them upset, it's because interacting with them upset me. Ignoring is any individual's right as a person. That's no more doing something to that person than offending them is causing"injury". There may be different motivations for ignoring people, but there's no type of ignoring that's tantamount to bullying a person.

Quote from: everloss;683370Games have always been around 60 bucks. NES games, SNES games, Genesis games, Playstation, on and on and on - 60 bucks..

That is a simplification. From the N64 era you started to get prices around $60. Prior to that, it was all over the map, but generally $10-$15 lower.  Complicating matters is that USSRP (suggested price) and street price were not always the same, though there were far more controls over this than, say, PC software.

You could also get much higher if the developer was Japanese and was padding their pricing to bring it in line with what they were charging in Japan. Plus, the yen was constantly gaining value over the dollar throughout that entire era.

Prices also deflated a bit after release, like now, and then there was aftermarket.

In the xBox vs Playstation era, it wasn't entirely a sure thing that average prices over $50 would be sustainable - but happily for developers, they were - especially since the cost to develop for those platforms plummeted because of tools licensing.

I don't know, Ladybird.  Are you really making the claim that there's no use for the full vocabulary?  Somehow "slog off you fartface" doesn't seem to communicate the same emotions.
:-)

Quote from: mcbobbo;683857I don't know, Ladybird.  Are you really making the claim that there's no use for the full vocabulary?  Somehow "slog off you fartface" doesn't seem to communicate the same emotions.
:-)

It's all about context.

Someone cuts you up, sure, write them a letter querying why the "Father:" space on their birth certificate says "unknown, consult Afghani telephone directory", ask them what their mother was doing with the entire active Welsh national rugby squad last night... wrap it round a brick and chuck it through their windscreen.

You've got a legitimate complaint about the writing in a video game, write it out properly, explain why you're dissatisfied with the game and that you don't feel it provided what it billed, and send it to 'em; you're much more likely to get looked at. Start swearing or being offensive, you're just going to go into the recycle bin, and you're poisoning the well against anyone who can write that letter and help get you what you want.

Quote from: noisms;683693Exactly. The laws already exist. Harassment is a tort and/or a criminal offence in most jurisdictions. Defamation is a tort.

More importantly, people need to behave like grown-ups a little bit more.

It's not quite that simple.  How do you press charges against someone who resides not just in another state, but another country?  How do you subpoena the records of someone who has basically created a bogus account in order to find out who's really behind the harassment?  How do you get prosecutor's offices to go to a large amount of expense over what amounts to name-calling and potentially groundless threats when they also have to pay for investigators, attorneys, etc.?   When it comes to the tort system, how do you handle it when the aggrieved party has no funds to file a complaint, at the state or Federal level, or to serve someone across state lines, or to do the investigation needed to determine who is Assclown69?

In addition, there are evidentiary hurdles to get over when proving harassment.  These have proven to be fatal even in serious witness-tampering cases, I can't imagine the courts are going to waive them for lower-severity cases.

Honestly, the answer to my mind is going to be walled gardens and internal corporate policies, rather than the legal system.  The legal system is not designed for these kinds of cases, at least in the US, until they get so serious that the aggrieved party has usually had to deal with an enormous amount of harassment.

(Even bullying cases are mainly designed for people close to one another geographically and jurisdictionally.)

Quote from: Future Villain Band;684057It's not quite that simple.  How do you press charges against someone who resides not just in another state, but another country?  How do you subpoena the records of someone who has basically created a bogus account in order to find out who's really behind the harassment?  How do you get prosecutor's offices to go to a large amount of expense over what amounts to name-calling and potentially groundless threats when they also have to pay for investigators, attorneys, etc.?   When it comes to the tort system, how do you handle it when the aggrieved party has no funds to file a complaint, at the state or Federal level, or to serve someone across state lines, or to do the investigation needed to determine who is Assclown69?

In addition, there are evidentiary hurdles to get over when proving harassment.  These have proven to be fatal even in serious witness-tampering cases, I can't imagine the courts are going to waive them for lower-severity cases.

Honestly, the answer to my mind is going to be walled gardens and internal corporate policies, rather than the legal system.  The legal system is not designed for these kinds of cases, at least in the US, until they get so serious that the aggrieved party has usually had to deal with an enormous amount of harassment.

(Even bullying cases are mainly designed for people close to one another geographically and jurisdictionally.)

I agree with you that walled gardens and corporate policies are going to be the main thing, but I still think that this is a big area of potential expansion for tort lawyers, especially in a liberalising legal market. And alongside that I think it is inevitable that there will also be increased criminalisation of online harassment and similar. It's happening already in England regarding comments made on twitter.

Quote from: noisms;684070I agree with you that walled gardens and corporate policies are going to be the main thing, but I still think that this is a big area of potential expansion for tort lawyers, especially in a liberalising legal market. And alongside that I think it is inevitable that there will also be increased criminalisation of online harassment and similar. It's happening already in England regarding comments made on twitter.

I agree with you in principal, but in my opinion one of the big factors in the liberalization of the legal profession is simple cost -- the average litigant in most common family law or lower court matters simply can't afford an attorney, which makes collateral issues like out-of-jurisdiction service, investigation, and subpoenaing phone or web records to be out of the common person's capability.  Also, America's got larger issues in that service across state lines usually means the courts have difficulty enforcing summonses except in special circumstances (restraining orders) or it kicks it up to the Federal level, which is all the more expensive to file in.  

Right now, protective orders have stepped in to fill this void, but they're mainly aimed at domestic violence and not online bullying.  It's interesting to consider a world where conventional peace orders expand to deal with that kind of matter, though.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;684082I agree with you in principal, but in my opinion one of the big factors in the liberalization of the legal profession is simple cost -- the average litigant in most common family law or lower court matters simply can't afford an attorney, which makes collateral issues like out-of-jurisdiction service, investigation, and subpoenaing phone or web records to be out of the common person's capability.  Also, America's got larger issues in that service across state lines usually means the courts have difficulty enforcing summonses except in special circumstances (restraining orders) or it kicks it up to the Federal level, which is all the more expensive to file in.  

Right now, protective orders have stepped in to fill this void, but they're mainly aimed at domestic violence and not online bullying.  It's interesting to consider a world where conventional peace orders expand to deal with that kind of matter, though.

In England at least the law market has recently been opened up so that, among other things, non-law firms ("alternative business structures") can provide legal services under license. This should in theory drive costs down, so that's why I think we will see an expansion in the legal services available to normal people.

Quote from: noisms;684086In England at least the law market has recently been opened up so that, among other things, non-law firms ("alternative business structures") can provide legal services under license. This should in theory drive costs down, so that's why I think we will see an expansion in the legal services available to normal people.

Ah.  I was unaware of that.  The law has here is still undecided on things like non-lawyers providing traditional legal services even to the extent of form creation, but it's opening up in the sense that more and more power is being provided to folks who want to litigate pro se.  (At least in my neck of the woods.)