Not that I disagree with the main thrust of your argument, but if the price for smuggled cell phones does go up due to a smaller supply it would probably push it out of range of some prisoners. So there's that at least.

Of course, then they'll just disconnect you for "uninvited" communications.

"[I]t is a violation of the Agreement and this AUP to[...] (b) transmit uninvited communications, data or information"

I stopped when he used the "word" "ppl". We have a full keyboard here, use it.

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1090513897001074

As with all generalizations, it's just that: a generalization. There are lots of members of both sexes that follow the trend to one degree or another, but in general, if you had to guess a strategy used and were only given their sex for information, you can do better than chance.

It sounds like the GP hasn't played it, but I have. The character creation is better, but not by a tonne. Here are the key differences I noticed:
1) Asymetrical choice for things like gloves, armbands, eyes, etc. You choose things that can be mirrored independantly if you want.
2) You can save the costume and load it again later. I imagine it's a jpeg with some metadata, I haven't looked, but it's really handy. Similar to Spore
3) You can only wear capes with tights or skin. No capes and armor or robot arms or anything like that. You can have wings and stuff with whatever though.
4) Seem to be less choices for cool armor/skin/jackets.
5) No auras
6) Still buggy a bit

So, it's a bit better for the asymetrics and costume saving, but there are a bunch of things that are worse. Like Champions in general, really. I had it pre-ordred, but I don't think I'm going to pick it up. CoH was a lot more fun.

On one hand, you can try out a new power before you have to lock it in. On the other hand, you can't actually see what powers are avaliable later without having one ready to choose and going to the trainer. When you create a character you have no way of knowing what's in the future.

The combat system is neat, having attack that gives energy rather having to stand around doing nothing. It's gives you an absurd amount though, you just stop your main for like a second or two and you're back to full. Not even worth worrying about for the most part.

The UI in Champions is what really did it in. It doesn't have a compas icon on your minimap to point to any missions, much less the current one. Same for team mates. You can't set a mission to be the active one for the group very well. There really doesn't seem to be much point in grouping for the most part anyway, everything is just killing things outside with other people. Too easy to quest-steal. The few indoor missions I ran into were really short, like two rooms.

I wanted to like it, I even thought about the lifetime subscription (you get a lot of benifits). I figured it was a sure thing as long as they didn't make it worse than the game they made before. They did. The whole time I was playing, I was like.. Why am I playing this when I could play CoH instead?

It doesn't matter. Either one will likely cause the other shortly thereafter.

Absolutely. I buy more games than I can keep up with on Steam because they keep putting great ones on sale. If you want me to play your game at full price, it's going to have to be amazingly awesome. Otherwise I'm just going to wait for it to be on sale on Steam. If that never happens, I'll probably just forget about it, because there are way too many others.

Not only that, but it's that sort of sentiment that encourages publishers to just churn out cheap crap on an established universe rather than make something that lives up to, and even surpasses the original.

I refuse to see any revivals that aren't at least as good as the original.

Another factor usually overlooked is that lotteries can be FUN. You spend a dollar, and you can the thrill of comparing the numbers, getting a few right, that sort of thing. On that dollar, how much is accounted for by the entertainment value alone? When I spend $50 on a computer game, that's just money down a hole. At least with a lottery ticket you're having fun and potentially changing your life.

Seriously, this is one of the best Ask Slashdots in a while. People are throwing up tonnes of neat, low-cost electronics projects. This is exactly the sort of thing you should ask a group of geeks.