It will eventually get to the point where you're not actually buying the game,

Eventually? You haven't ever bought a game, merely a license to use it. Ubisoft seems hell-bent on demonstrating why, exactly speaking, this is a bad thing. I honestly can't tell if the whole company is doing some kind of performance art or executing a serious business strategy at this point.

But it's okay. We're due for another video game crash. Let bullshit burn.

Or maybe it would be an idea to not buy from the cheapest seller

What a great moral to the story! "Quit price-shopping, assholes - Pay full retail, or we... will... fuck you!"

Glad to see people feel just peach about that.

Simple, really:

Ubisoft just taught another generation of paying customers that piracy provides a superior product, regardless of price.

Congrats, Ubi! We haven't had a good DRM fuckup like this in a while - Without all your hard work, people might eventually forget how much it (and you) sucks. Keep up the good work!

I always thought Pascal was better for most purposes than C and its offspring.

Ok, has anyone ever written an OS kernel in Pascal? How about bare-metal code which tweaks registers?

Research done has shown that for real mpg improvements you need to be closer than even a computer controlled car can compensate for, and you pay for it by needing to brake so often that you burn off any potential savings.

Computer controlled cars might be able to do it better, but do you trust the signals from the lead car?

Then you'd have all the taxpayers who haven't had a traffic ticket lately clamoring for more and more expensive tickets to be written. ;)

If you're bombing your own population you've already lost.

Besides, a B-52 is even more fuel hungry than the tank.

I think this is why it managed to say 'secret' for so long. When you were briefed into the program you realized that:
1. The plan was incredibly unlikely to ever go 'live'
2. If the plan DID have to go 'live' things were so FUBAR that it was the best remaining option.

We need continuity in government. So long as the military command(majority of surviving government due to being designed to survive attack) gives command back over to civilians in a reasonable timeframe*, we're good.

*2-4 years? Enough for a new election cycle, at least.

No doubt filed between the plans for invading Cameroon and Cape Verde. Updated once every 5 years. It's one of the important ones. The two I mentioned are on a 20 year schedule.

I don't know, the world's 2 most ancient professions are still around... ;)

Actually, I'd imagine that truck drivers, especially long haul, would suffer before taxi drivers.

The taxi 'industry' would be fine, perhaps even invigorated by this. Fire all the nasty taxi drivers, have a computer do dispatch, etc...

Reduce costs enough and people will be less likely to buy a car rather than just renting one when they need it.

As you say - need a heavier vehicle, rent one, even over the phone. Heck, buy something and arrange for delivery. It'll drop the package wherever. Though delivery services at that short range are often cheap enough to be worth the human labor placing it in it's final location and hauling the old one away.

Sometimes they're sitting there between calls doing paperwork.

The problem with cutting their budget is that traffic enforcement(writing tickets) generates revenue, solving crimes doesn't. So you'd be forcing them to write even more tickets.

Even in areas where the police department doesn't get a cut of ticket revenues, generally the legislatures will alter funding - IE give the cops money to be able to afford to write tickets where the money from the tickets goes to the schools. If they don't write enough tickets, they'll be questioned by the budget committees.

I wonder if any of these plans are still being updated, even if it's only by some guy in a basement office someplace.

Obviously China is still of interest, but most of them are extremely unlikely, although you wonder if there are times where it gets thought about. France after the attempt on De Gaulle or the possibility of a left-wing revolution in 1968, maybe even about Marine LePen. Mexico might warrant some kind of what-ifs around a failed state status. Germany and Japan are occupied by US forces now, but maybe there's some political theorizing about a populist/nativist Japanese party gaining power. Germany seems like the worst candidate, with the only situations I can imagine revolving around a collapse of the Euro and some kind of German administration of European economies, which seems unlikely.