Bell Canada pays $10M over misleading ads

Article



In one example provided by the Bureau, Bell's website advertised a bundle for home phone, internet and TV services starting as low as $69.90 per month. The lowest possible price, after the mandatory fees, was $80.27, or 15 per cent higher.

Customers purchasing any of the services individually were also faced with the same misleading information, as additional fees were excluded from those advertised prices as well, the bureau said.


I found out all about extra fee's on Rogers as well. Did you know if your balance doesn't reach zero for a few months they tack on an extra 25$ a month ? I thought I was paying my bill off and then some, but because of this extra fee I was actually slipping farther and farther behind...

Bell wouldn't turn off the internet , so I had to buy a stupid 7$ / month internet fee for a connection that was totally worthless and not actually useable. If you had a data phone you were forced to take a data plan you could't turn it off.

Their cheap phone broke , and I still had to pay the monthly fee for four months while they took three tries to repair it.

They cut a hundred bucks off the price of the phone. In exchagne for making me sign a three year contract.

Yeah ... I've dealt with Bell before. And Rogers.

Never again.

edit : forgot to mention the oldest trickin the book used by both bell and rogers. You have 30 days to change your mind and cancel their services without being bound by their contracts. But it's usually closer to 60 days before you receive the first bill and find out about the extra charges that cannot be avoided.

Plus they make you stand in line to sigh up and shove a six page contract thats all fine print and demand you sign immediately while there's 10 people behind you impatiently waiting ...

How do these people get repeat business ? I can understand you were tricked the first time , but why do people go back ?

EA must die! Several reasons why EA is bad for gamers and the art of gaming.

One of the most amusing things you can do with a blog is find some artical that you totally disagree with , and tear it apart paragraph by paragraph. The blog in question where the artical was posted won't let you post on them , of course, but still , you can do it on your own and then just drop links everywhere.

http://www.gamespot.com/users/Lucavix/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25672615


Have you ever heard of the series Dungeon Keeper? Dungeon Keeper was a Bullfrog Studio's creation that was a cult hit in 1995-97. In 1999 Dungeon Keeper 2 made the game entirely 3D, and it still looks acceptably good by today's standards. The game was known for it's wickedly dark humor, it's interesting cast of creatures and heroes, it's humorous parodies, and it's dark yet fun atmosphere.

I played dungeon Keeper. Even in it's heyday it was a mediocre at best game. The reversal of playing the dungeon full of evil monsters instead of the hero's trying to fight their way in was interesting at first , but it didn't translate well into a game. And you can only slap chickens so many times before you become bored of it.

Dungeon Keeper 2 ended with a teaser for Dungeon Keeper 3, but Dungeon Keeper 3 was canceled. Because EA had limited sales of Dungeon Keeper 2 after their hostile acquisition of Bullfrog Studios, Dungeon Keeper 2 never generated enough revenue and most people obtained it through piracy. Dungeon Keeper 3 was considered too risky, and it was literally cancelled to free up the studio and funding for Harry Potter - Quidditch. This is but one reason EA is bad for the industry, but oh there are more. So many more.

I'm not following your logic. The game lost money , they stopped producing the series. Thats not "bad for the industry" , thats good. People vote with their pocket books, and they voted that game out.


I have no doubt the piracy issue could be fixed (most games require you to log on and registure before you can play them , thus getting rid of piracy and explaining why mmo's are so popular) but if the game was losing money , no one really wanted it anyways. I know I don't miss it.

Westwood Studios, responsible for such games as Command and Conquer: Renegade (believe it or not that game did very well online) fell into EA's clutches with it's ambitious Space MMO Earth and Beyond. Having the server power to host such a game, EA used Earth and Beyond to ensnare Westwood Studios. EA then moved on to lock Westwood out of making decisions effecting the game, and slowly destroyed it. All plans for PvP introduction, extended career paths, and so on were canceled, and then EA moved to cancel the game and abolish Westwood Studios. Earth and Beyond players had their accounts deleted, and critics often allege that the entire purpose of EA's acquisition of Earth and Beyond was to eliminate Westwood Studios as competition. But wait, trust me, there's much much more.

A nice conspiracy theory. Maybe even a few hints of truth. But Command and Conquer was a StarCraft rip off from the get go , and inferior in every respect (I've played both). The only thing that game ever did for me was convince me to go back to starcraft.

Played that horrible World of Warcraft clone Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning yet? It didn't start off the horrible unoriginal mess it is, it was initially an incredibly ambitious project and a full PvP experience that was supposed to cut out grinding all together. Electronic Arts thought the project was too ambitious, and forced Mythic Entertainment to go a different rout, copying World of Warcraft. EA then began cutting funding and putting increased pressure on Mythic Entertainment, eventually forcing Mythic to release Warhammer Online unfinished, with several playable classes removed. EA then moved to sell back the cut and unfinished content in an expansion pack. But wait, there's more.

Except that the "full pvp" experience generally alienates 90% of your paying customers , as they found out the hard way when Ultima Online first came out. After which you're desperately trying to salvage something by making an imitation game ... yeah it needed to die. Full pvp games have been tried, and have died for good and proper reasons.

Played the Sims lately? How about The Sims 2? Did you find it suspicious that after fleecing you on expansion packs for the Sims, they reset it all with the Sims 2 and began the cycle again? Now they're doing it with The Sims 3, which is actually a good game (that one out of ten EA games worth playing) but they're already going expansion crazy. This time with Micro Transactions but rest assured a full fledged Expansion pack in already in the works and will also come with a swath of "Pay to Access" content. Unfortunately for EA this financial model encourages piracy, and many gamers including legitimate customers who actually purchased The Sims 3 have already downloaded all of the Pay to Access content via third party sites.

Everyone is experimenting with pay to play (except TOR) in various forms.
And having seen wow with half the guild members at max level , maybe resetting it all when starting a new game is the way to go. Certainly the lower levels wouldn't be so completely empty any more.


And the phrase "financial model encourages piracy" is just blaming the rape victem for getting raped. It's a complete non starter. Pay these people to make games, or they will stop making them. It's just that simple.

Moral Outrage is not the only reason Spore is the most pirated and boycotted game ...

Due to moral outrage ,you will now commit immoral acts , like theft. Oh thats a good argument.

Moral Outrage is not the only reason Spore is the most pirated and boycotted game of all time though. With Spore EA decided to introduce invasive DRM policies, that limited Spore to three installations. This punishes legit gamers but it doesn't punish Pirates, who never have to suffer the effects of DRM. With no warning, EA also slips SecuROM onto people's computers, and while this doesn't cause problems most of the time it is known to make CD/DvD Drives, particularly writable drives, to stop reading properly. In fact, it's known to disable drives all together sometimes, though this is rare. My only experience with SecuROM causing me problems was when I tried to play the old game Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. For some reason SecuROM seemed convinced I was using a virtual mount even after I had installed the game, and I was forced to download the version of the 1.3 patch that disabled the need for a CD check. Others have reported similar issues with other games, but the problem isn't so much with SecuROM, it's that EA installs SecuROM without warning or permission, which brings up a whole lot of legal issues. Since SecuROM has been stripped from most pirated copies of Spore, it also encourages Piracy. But wait, there's more.

This I will grant you. Loading up my computer with buggy software to crash it is now stepping into the territory of the virus writer. I don't care what you put in your end user agreement, I want that piece of crap off my computer and I don't want your games under any circumstances.

That being said, there must be a dozen different ways of securing a program from piracy , in this internet age, without having to load anything even remotely like malware on your computer. MMO's do it all the time. And new games typically are written with some kind of link to the internet so you have to have an account so you can't steal it. Think pokemon, essentially a single player game , but if you want to trade pokemon with other players ...

EA bought up exclusive rights to the NFL, no other gaming company can make an NFL game now. Without competition, EA released the same game over and over again with very minor alterations, often quite literally keeping all the same gameplay bugs with each season. Most gamers aren't football fans, I know, but this is an example of what EA does to the industry. It monopolized the NFL license and has since driven it into the ground.

A better explanation would be they bought up the rights to a game no one wants to play. Lets face it. Gamers want to kill dragons ,not toss around a pig skin. And most people who do like foot ball would rather watch reruns of the game and drink beer than fiddle with a joy stick. Or better yet, go play flag foot ball. Who really plays sports games anyways ? The used game shelves are full of them , meaning whoever actually buys one dumps it fairly quickly . How about the game flopped because it had no market ?

I'm not saying EA is a saint.
But I'm not saying it's a monster either.
EA is a business. It makes games. And if you want those games, they have to stay in business. And that means you have to pay up. This crap about "I'm committing piracy because I'm morally outraged .." is crap of the worst sort. Don't buy their games is your option. Maybe even protest their games. But don't steal them. That's you making up excuses for your crimes. That isn't moral anything.

It's just crap.

The Real G20 Criminals

Toronto police and their partner police forces during the G20 summit were sometimes overwhelmed and caught flat-footed by the "scope and intensity" of the "sustained, serious, and widespread criminality and public disorder" they faced, an internal force after-action review admits.

Postmedia News obtained an advance copy of the 70-page document, which was posted late Thursday afternoon on the police website.

The report, written by unidentified senior Toronto officers and civilians who reviewed extensive video footage and police files, paints a terrifying, almost minute-by-minute portrait of the modern mob in full throttle.

"Last June, we saw levels of violence we had never seen before in Toronto," Bill Blair, the city's police chief, says in a brief forward. "This report takes a hard look at what happened. Many things we did very well.

"Some things we did not."

Read more: http://www.canada.com/news/Police+overwhelmed+intensity+violence+Report/4995817/story.html#ixzz1Q8lP5s6d



Ok. So , what were these people rioting against ? Communists ? Dictators ? Who ? Who is this nefarious G20 that has incurred so much anger ?


http://www.g20.org/about_what_is_g20.aspx

The Group of Twenty (G-20) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors was established in 1999 to bring together systemically important industrialized and developing economies to discuss key issues in the global economy. The inaugural meeting of the G-20 took place in Berlin, on December 15-16, 1999, hosted by German and Canadian finance ministers.


So the g20 are a bunch of elected ministors of democratic governments. And you are protesting against them ... why ?

You don't have a why. I have seen the reports on the way up to the summit , and after. Some organization for the poor wants money. Two idiots who think they're terrorists bombed a bank machine (bank machine , banker , finance minister ...you're destroying private property to protest a governments actions, and you don't even say which actions) in ottawa before the summit.

This riot had nothing to do with banking. It has to do with people trying to steal the stage for their own causes. Any stage. And these things always turn violent.

I give a little blame to Harper for deciding to hold an event with a history of violence in the down town core of any major city. I love the conservatives, but that was a real bone head move.

I give a little more blame to the police for acting under trying circumstances. It seems when the stress is on , we get to see their true colors, and that color is pretty ugly looking, and someone needs to start thinking about fixing that problem up before comments about Canada's police state stop being an exaggeration and start being truthful. Forbidding them to confiscate cameras and recorders would be a good beginning.

But mostly I blame the wacked out anarchists who live to start a riot over anything. The idiots who showed up to protest ...what ? Bankers are evil ? Do you have any specifics ? Or did you just sort of hear that somewhere and decided it sounded good ? Do you even know what you are protesting ? No. You're just stealing someone elses spot light for your own needs.

I blamed the wacko's for this fiasco. Couple of other groups helped , and should be taught not to help, but mostly , I blame the wacko's. Those are the real G20 criminals.

Anti- Islam Lawmaker Aquitted

Dutch far-right member of parliament Geert Wilders was acquitted of all charges in his hate speech trial in Amsterdam. Judges found the populist politician’s comments against Islam may be offensive to many, but that they fall within the scope of protected free speech.


Wasnt there a captured training manual from the terrorists that said they were to assassinate any politicians that are against their cause ?

And they already killed that cartoonist.

While I do not agree with Wilders crude style and certainly not all that he says, I cannot help but think he's about to get "taken out".

Which will only make a martyr out of him.

An Anti-Islamic Martyr.

And so the world goes on in it's insanity...