You're kidding, but I wouldn't be so sure. Intellectual property is the only remaining goods the U.S exports. If anything could make the U.S start a nuclear war, it would be something that threatens its economy.

I live in Trondheim, Norway. The City area (downtown) is very small compared to *real* cities like Berlin, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, etc, but the population is above 200,000 now. So I'll settle for "ordinary city". So the city heart is more like a towns, but the population count is more of a city. Same applies to Bergen, I think.

But low latency is just as important. Why is it always the bandwidth which is advertised in big numbers and not the latency?

I abstain from buying because I don't think I can pay enough for so many games in good conscience. The games are decent, and the 20 USD I can afford now wouldn't do the games justice.
The whole "experiment" is useless without this option, in my opinion. They're going to see a bunch of people paying 1 cent going to EFF and conclude "what a bunch of cheapskates", when there is a good amount of people who either could buy later (after the offer limit), or refuse to buy that many games hands-down, because they actually *value* those games at 70-80 USD and think it's too much money to spend.

These kind of people won't show up in the statistics.

How do you programmatically calculate a number or scale of the perceived entertainment value of a Mario level? Beside being able to complete the level and the difficulty, is there something objective one can measure, or does it boil down to simple taste?

If not, then the competition is kind of pointless, since the winner would be arbitrary.

Also, just because you can code, doesn't mean you know how to create the necessary artwork. In my experience, good artists who want to contribute to open source software in general are a rare breed. And even less artists want to help out open source games.

If you don't understand the difference between a O(n) sorting algorithm and a O(n!) one, you're pretty much screwed as a programmer. If you don't know much math in general, *at least* learn time complexity for different algorithm operations. Perhaps this is why software is so slow nowadays? ;-)

Judges from both the first case and the appeal claimed that Telenor *was* "aiding illegal copying", but that they could not be held responsible: http://www.tu.no/it/article240000.ece

Både Asker og Bærum tingrett og Borgarting lagmannsrett mener at Telenor medvirker til at det skjer ulovlige handlinger via The Pirate Bay, men at denne medvirkningen ikke er rettsstridig.

This is doublethink in my opinion. Simply granting access doesn't make the ISPs responsible. I can't help to feel that the courts should have been way more clear in this matter.

What inevitably happens, is that the media interest groups will lobby to make our ISPs liable for 'granting access' to copyrighted works. Our copyright law 'åndsverksloven' is up for reform/ratification this year. And the Norwegian Data Inspectorate's main spokesperson and director Georg Apenes is leaving his post soon, making this scenario even more likely. Georg Apenes has been extremely vocal regarding our individual rights to privacy since he entered his position in 1989, and the government resents him for it. He has been a barrier for 'progress', and I really doubt whoever replaces him will have even 10% of his integrity. Most probably they will replace him with a government-friendly, industry-friendly puppet.

Yeah, I guess OnLive will work the day we break the speed of light, or invent time travel.

Yes, but how many furlongs?

To all those who think Ubisoft should just let the pirates win... you have no idea how frustrating it is to spend many millions of dollars and several years of our life making a game, and then see statistics from our update servers that 15 to 20 people are playing pirated copies for every legitimately purchased copy.

Have it ever crossed your mind that people who buy games with draconian DRM crack the game they bought? Do the in-house statistics take that into account? I had to crack my version of Splinter Cell : Pandora tomorrow for it to even run.

But after we spend 2+ years with hundreds of people working their ASSES off to make something just to entertain people, we would like them to pay us for it. Is it really so much to ask?

Yes, selling broken software and getting paid for it, is too much to ask. If Ubisoft want money, they should do the *opposite* of what they're doing now. Forget about the pirates, and focus on the consumer and his/her game experience. You know.. the ones that pay for software? Stop thinking about "how much one *could* have earned if no one pirated games". It's a slippery slope.

As I prefer to have my office somewhere else than the roof.

The PC port of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance was not bad, it was horrible!
You had to map the keyboard/mouse/joystick to the Playstation 2 buttons via a config tool. I also never got the graphics to display correctly.

From the movie Clear and present danger : http://www.mechcore.net/images/clear-and-present-danger-code.png

Flash works fine in the Nokia N900 web browser, and it has a touch screen.
The browser can also emulate a cursor, when it's needed.
Which is thankfully, not very often. So I think the anonymous story poster is wrong.