Ok, has  WoW been using this world since the beginning (some years now) or just recently have they migrated to what these guys say is theirs? If they have been using it all along (WoW in its present form was released in 2004) then has there been communication since then? Or are these folks (probably at the advice of their lawyers) suddenly saying, "You know, they have nicked your code." I have a lot of doubt for someone who knew there was a new game in town of the genre they program for and not made sure it wasn't "borrowing". I suspect also some lawyers are at the root. Next it will be Everquest and LOTRO and who knows what (these are just the games I know and there are some similarities in their "worlds")

Where to draw the line? Will Blizzard stand up to bullying or pay them off? How about SOE? If they decide a game like EQII has done the same thing then you can kiss that one good-bye. I doubt if it has even began to be recovered from last years account disaster.

I hate the US law system. Too many big-bottomed lawyers - women as well as men - are looking all the time for where they big but is and who then can sue instead of who they can serve. Anyone notice that a short time after a drug is released and being advertized that the lawyers are advertising class action suits even if the only thing anyone did was forget to dot an "i".  So I don't believe a bit of it if a company has waited 8 years to sue.

Translation = Utter scumbags!

OT: Isn't money and the never ending pursuit of it absolutely awesome. I read that an MIT study projects that global financial collapse will occur in 2030, at which point, things are going to get very real. Maybe it's one of those things that conspiracy theorists and doomsayers look forward to reading about, or maybe there's an element of truth to it. On a kind of related note, a friend of mine once pointed out this very thing was going to happen sooner or later, and he directed my attention to something called "The Venus Project". I highly doubt that it would work for a number of reasons, but at least someone's proposing an alternative to how things are now.

Taxes are a necessary evil that benefits everyone. This only benefits the patent troll companies, in detriment of everyone else.

It will occur long before then, given much of the world hasn't recovered from the last one and Chinese growth bubble's not too far off bursting.  When that happens these patent scavengers will get jack shit cos the cash flow will have dried up across the board.

And if anybody thinks the last GFC was bad, the next one will be significantly worse and prolonged.

Since Nike started in and headquarters in Oregon, we had several people in an uproar about Nike using Chinese plants. Yeh, duh. These are the plants that necessitated the damning of the Ganges river and burying flooding priceless artifacts. These are the plants, while giving people a boost in income they well could use, at the same time throws away people who get disabled while doing the things they require. No safety gear, no fire protection, no insurance (no medical care anyway) All of this documented long before it hit the news. Then they point fingers at the companies that used the same plant and the one down the road in a "they do it too" type response. Now they say, "we didn't know that" and point fingers at the factory. Don't you love "made in America"? As long as a certain percentage of the stuff is made in the USA, then they can call it "Made in America".

Pretty soon everything in America will say "Made in China" because nobody can afford to work for those wages. Don't get me started about the Panama Canal and the US government in their great wisdom.

Ah, Starkers, I like you because you speak your mind, but I don't agree with that last part, at least not the way you generalize it. It's phrased as if the wealthy guy owes something to the community, i.e.; as if he obtained his wealth fraudulently. That might be true in some cases, but you would be surprised how most of the 'new money' is actually made of guys who work their butts off (workaholic) and don't stop working just as hard even when they become wealthy.

Assuming the wealthy guy did not deceive anyone to get where he is, then he doesn't owe *anything* to *anybody*. He earned his fortune fair and square: the community transferred money to him willingly, in exchange for a product or service he created.

Furthermore, this guy created wealth around him by giving rise to *sustainable* jobs. Compare this to those who win millions in the lottery and then generally squander it all away in just a handful of years, with nothing good coming out of it.

So, for a guy like this, it's not fair to say that he 'owes' something to the community, or to tell him what he should or should not do with *his* money. If he decides to give some of it away to those who need it the most (but keep in mind this is not always good, since you should teach people to fish instead of just giving them a fish), kudos for him and we should all be grateful for it. But if he decides to keep it all for himself, well, it's his money, so it's his decision to make as well.

Being able to see both sides of the story is a good thing.

I also hate what is being done to the middle class (of which I am a part of) and how their rights and buying power are slowly being stripped away. But trust me, you guys in the US still have it good when compared to places like Portugal and Greece, for instance. Judging by the way things are going, not sure how long that will last, though.

However, there is one thing people should be aware of: distributing all the wealth in the world to everybody would not make anyone rich, it would just make everybody poor.

When Spain conquered most of South America back in 1500, it had a HUGE influx of gold. Think that made everyone in Spain wealthy? Think again: inflation shot up in instead, and the price of *everything* tripled. But that was not the only effect: Spanish goods became uncompetitive on the foreign markets, and the Spanish themselves began buying foreign products, resulting in a lot of money living the country, which only made things worse.

Inflation happens because of the law of supply and demand, when a sharply increasing amount of money is chasing after a relatively fixed output of goods and services. Because the output is fixed and there is not enough for everybody, prices go up.

This is also what happened with the housing bubble: since nearly everyone could now buy a house (even those who could not afford one), prices went up and up and up. The whole thing came crashing down when those who could not afford one in the first place started defaulting on their mortgages.

So, not everything that glitters is gold.