I knew there was a reason why I hated Electronic Arts

I have a love/hate relationship with Electronic Arts (EA).

I’m an avid gamer. Have been so since my teenage years, over 20 years ago. I especially enjoy sports games.

I used to own a Sega Genesis – or Sega Megadrive as it was called in Europe – when it was the height of video gaming universe. It’s around that time when EA started their long running sports game franchises based on the professional sports in the United States. Their hockey games on the Sega Genesis were especially good. I bought almost every version they published, and they published one every year. Allowance money was gone very quickly on those games.

Fast forward to XBox and XBox Live! times. Well, EA decided not to grace us mere mortals with games that would play on XBox Live! That didn’t sit too well with most of us, and by this time Sega’s ESPN sport franchise games had caught up or in some cases surpassed the quality of the EA games. I was happy to flip the finger at EA, and put my money on Sega’s games. This decision was made even easier when Sega decided to drop the price on all of their 2K5 games to $19.99, online play and all.

Now someone married to an EA employee posted a long article about the despicable working conditions EA is forcing on their employees. Read the story, it’s quite amazing, although familiar to most of us who at some point have worked for a publicly traded mega corp, how EA, which is by far the most successful and profitable game publisher out there, can treat their employees so badly.

You would think EA could afford to spend some of the roughly $1.85B they make in gross profit for the benefit of their hard working employees.

-TPP

RIAA’s lies exposed by an internal study by one of the majors

RIAA has claimed, for years now, that p2p networks and other online “pirate” channels are killing the music industry and causing the majority of the decline of music sales for the past few years.

The Economist article linked references an internal study conducted by one of the major record labels. The article goes on to say:

According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy. No-one knows how much weight to assign to each of the other explanations: rising physical CD piracy, shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself.

The article also suggests most of the problem is due to the overall lack of quality and creativity in today’s music, and the major publishers’ focus on producing mega-hits instead of creating long-lasting careers for their artists. There appears to be some support to this theory from the major music publishers themsevels, as the article demonstrates.

-TPP

Ohio is a dead heat

At the time of writing Florida appears to have gone to Bush, so Ohio is almost certainly the deciding state.

Right now the votes go as follows:

Bush: 2,245,388
Kerry: 2,112,297

But if you take a look at the county level votes Cuyahoga, the most densely populated county in the state is voting overwhelmingly in favor of Kerry, and only has 76% of the votes counted. Assuming the votes are being tallied at an even pace, there’s roughly 100,000 votes left in the county, of which roughly 65% will go to Kerry. That’s 30,000 more votes for Kerry than for Bush.

Bush will win Ohio by about 50,000 – 75,000 votes, and will get elected again.

-TPP

Jenna and Barbara Bush – porn spammers?

A subscriber to SPAM-L, an anti-spam mailing list, reported receiving spam supposedly from the Bush daughters. Well, it’s really from the George W. Bush re-election campaign, but it’s signed in the Bush daughters’ names.

Here’re the relevant mail headers:

Received: from mailer1.georgewbush.com (mailer1.georgewbush.com
[65.172.163.151])
From: Jenna and Barbara Bush <bushcheney04.com>
Subject: Behind-the-Scenes with Jenna and Barbara

Behind the scenes with Jenna and Barbara? I take it that the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign didn’t quite think this completely through. I wonder what that subject line looks like in between the other kinds of spam people receive. Let’s see, shall we:

Pertty Woman Dvd Quality Movies!
Big and horny sluts – Real Big Women
Please her everytime
Behind-the-Scenes with Jenna and Barbara
Young Celebrity sex pics

Which one of the bunch is the non-porn spam?

-TPP

Florida 2000 – child’s play, 2004 will be worse

If you thought the 2000 presidential elections in Florida were bad, just wait till November.

Greg Palast, the American born reporter now living in UK who also broke the story about the voting list irregularities in the 2000 Florida elections, is reporting the Republicans are planning on disrupting voting in the state’s African-American voting districts in Florida.

There are reports from several states of similar tactics by the Republicans:

Voter registration forms change party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in Pennsylvania
Mass voter challenges in primarily Democrat communities of Ohio

Obviously forged or false registrations are an issue, but it looks like the Republicans are going out all barrels blazing trying to block as many Democrats from voting as possible.

Instead of trying to encourage people to vote, the Republicans appear to be doing their best to get people NOT to vote. What is wrong with these people?

-TPP

All men are created equal, unless you’re an alien

No, not the ET kind of an alien, but an immigrant in the United States.

The life of an immigrant, legal or illegal, in this country is filled with fear, uncertainty and confusion. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), nowadays called The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a department of Homeland Security (DHS), you will know exactly what I am talking about. Since my immigration process is still ongoing, I will not discuss specifics about my personal experiences in public using my own name.

The article I am linking to describes a DHS crackdown on “alien criminals” (sounds like a scene from Men in Black, doesn’t it?). The immigration laws in the US have restrictions on who can apply and retain immigrant status in the United States, and rightly so. One of those restrictions is immigrants can not commit crimes involving moral turpitude (conduct that shocks the public conscience) and if they do, they can be deported at any time. That’s all good and well, if it wasn’t for the “effectiveness” of how DHS applies it.

Since immigrants are not US citizens, they generally have little or no rights when they find themselves in the opposite side with the law. Abusing this fact, DHS regularly holds immigrants for months with no legal presentation while they are “processing their deportation documents”. In fact, immigrants have less rights than serial killers, war prisoners, and, yes, enemy combatants.

Like many detainees, Mr. Venant had passed through the New Jersey jail without being seen by Mr. Lonegan, the lone Legal Aid lawyer whose weekly legal clinics function as a kind of triage. Because immigration proceedings are officially civil, not criminal, those who cannot afford counsel have no right to a public defender, and legal volunteers are scarce.

“Everybody loves asylum cases, everybody loves to defend the Buddhist monk,” Mr. Lonegan said. “But the guy who’s got the green card, with a wife and child, here for 30 years, and is being deported for a nonviolent offense, and the punishment does not fit the crime, he does not get a lawyer.”

You wonder what sort of crimes are we talking about here. Well, the 20-year legal permanent resident (green card holder) whose situation was described in the article was using and selling fake metro cards in New York City. Might as well crack down on all NYU students, and jail them for months with no legal representation. For this horrible crime, he was sent to a Federal Detention Center in Lousiana generally used to house violent criminals to wait for his deportation, indefinitely, if needed.

For a nation built by immigrants that sure is an interesting way of treating immigrants.

-TPP – you are a descendant of an immigrant family, unless you are of native american heritage