Wow, did this stir up some memories about my Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast days.
The attitude of the CoH community sounds a lot like the Saberists from JK2. They had all these 'rules' for dueling online and would clog up the deathmatch servers, vote kicking anyone that didn't play their way. Rather than actually play the game, they'd just chit chat in the corner and have duels between the players. Never mind the fact that in deathmatch mode there was a duel key that prevented the agreeing duelists from being harmed by outside forces, the Saberists preferred to just completely overtake servers and ruin game after game with their forced upon "honor" (boy I wish I was making that up). Sure you could try and find a different server, but eventually they had run off everyone else and trying to get a real game going was nigh impossible. Anyone that just wanted to play JK2 (and JK: Academy later on) straight and have a good time was hailed as a griefer, a troll and turned into a pariah.
Is what Myers did wrong? Absolutely not, he was playing as any newcomer would. I know my immediate impression would be: "An arena where the forces of good and evil do battle in order to see who's the best? Sounds like a blast! Wait, all they do is talk to each other and have their robots fight? What the fuck?"
Groups such as the CoH arena community, and the Saberists community before them deserve to be screwed with. While community rules for fair play can indeed be an important part of a game (for instance, acknowledging a certain mechanic is broken and not using it until it's fixed just out of good sportsmanship), when they're twisted around as to essentially ruin the intent of the game, then they've gone too far.

5 bucks say this vaccine causes the virus to mutate and turn into something far worse than it originally was.

It hardly isn't a special case. After all, a decent laptop is hardly a cheap thing to replace, I wouldn't rent it out to just anybody who'd ask. Only those few who I knew wouldn't screw it up.

Course, if someone asked me these days to borrow the Sager I have now, I'd tell them to get bent, even if it was a beautiful gal with big tits giving out blowjobs in return.

When I was an apprentice in the Merchant Marines, I was one of the few who had a laptop in my dorm packed with games and music and what not. I set up a guest account with a massively long password so that those that wanted to could play the games I had on it while I was out and about on the campus doing whatever. The catch is, is that to use it I charged by the hour and I only let certain people use it so that it didn't get fucked up. Food, soda, and cigarettes were all accepted currency on top of straight cash. I had no issues saying no, and if I was busy saving the day in whatever game I was playing at the time, then too fucking bad. I don't care if you want on, it's my rig.

Start charging for access to use your laptop and don't be afraid to say no. I'm guessing most of those students aren't the smartest people in the world and you don't want one of those airheads busting your laptop after all so be judicious in who you'll let buy time. Remember, the customer is always wrong.

Is chicken a la king still the best of the MRE bunch? It's been a long while since I've had a MRE (I'm a military brat).
Anyhooo, I have no doubt that you guys could easily sleep damn near anywhere, after all you guys are Marines. It still is important to get the non-military people thinking about the more 'human' aspects of the logistics behind stationing a squad or two of Marines on board a civvy ship.
Conex boxes on a cargo container ship while secured well, have been known to get accidently 'float tested' so there's the safety aspect there (not to mention the 'oh shit' moment of realizing all your gear is now being inspected by the local marine life). On an oil tanker, you guys would have to find somewhere below the main deck to camp out on (not to mention the potential hazard of shooting guns on the main deck where not even smoking is allowed), so on and so forth.
People tend to forget about all the ancillary stuff when discussing things like this.

Uh, where are they going to sleep? In a conex box?
Just because the ship is big, doesn't mean that it has tons of room for people to sleep. 8-14 soldiers per squad is a lot of extra personnel on a ship. That's 8-14 more beds required, enough food for them, etc. Your average crew size for a ship tops out around 25 people for a merchant vessel and there's only enough living room on a ship like that for the crew and a couple extra people.

There is a bluetooth hack to use the Wiimote on the PC.
http://wiihacks.blogspot.com/2006/12/howto-use-wii-mote-in-windows-as-your.html
So if there is a working emulator, I'm sure with some trickery and stubborness you could get a wii on the pc.
I'm kinda interested as to how well a FPS would control like this. It'd be awful handy since I travel a lot and space can be a premium making mice kind of a hassle at times. Also, if I can get it working as a mouse, then I may be able to further trick it into working as an on the go flight sim control, which would be all sorts of win.

Filesharing in general isn't going to 'promote' indy bands, it's just a way to get your music out there. You're still responsible for your own marketing and trying to lay the blame on pirates for people having not heard about you is just faulty logic. Get your album out there, get friends to help you seed it, toss an article about yourself on Wikipedia and try to get it linked to the general genre articles. Be sure to put your stuff on Youtube and tag the shit out of it. There's a lot more you can do on the internet to get yourself recognized, but you've got to work for it. Just because you formed a band doesn't mean people will magically show up at your concerts and buy/download your stuff. You can be the best performer ever, but if the only people who have ever heard of you are your dog and grandmother, then that's your own fault.
As far as the top100 lists are concerned, you have to remember that most pirates are tourists. They hop on briefly to download the latest hit album that 'omg their BFF like totally recommends.' So trying to use TPB's top100 list as a metric for success is just going to lead to total disappointment.

Some indy bands have jumped the filesharing wagon and are seeding their own music out there. Battlelore immediately springs to mind as someone who's doing it, and doing it successfully. They give you the entire album and put into a couple of the tracks a "you're listening to Battlelore's new album *insertnamehere*" message. You get to demo the entire album, they get free marketing, extra sales and fans, and everyone goes home happy.

(sidenote: Do check out Battlelore, they're all sorts of win)

The tourists however are an incredibly mixed bag of people. I'd imagine that most of them are the sort who really only download one thing, once in a while but still buy a good deal of media. However, due to the way the industry loves to spin the whole thing, obviously every 'pirate' is a lost customer rather than just someone getting a really fancy demo.
I'm kinda waiting for Demigod sales reports post Stardock fixing up their servers and the game going live nationally before I decree that yes, 95% of pirates are dicks.

You are a pirate!

They can trash on The Pirate Bay all they want, but public sites like that are mostly just for piracy tourists anyway thanks to their notoriously unreliable speeds that make the 'pr0' pirates steer clear of 'em except as a last ditch option. Sure you can try and stem the tide by taking down one of the big, well known ones, but that's really not going to help matters much. Another public site will spring up, having learned from the lessons of the prior one, and will be even harder to take down. The tourists will latch onto it and the whole mess will ramp up even more.
Besides, the guys doing the really heavy duty stuff (i.e. dedicated download boxes with a ritual morning tracker browse through with 24/7 downloading) are all rocking private trackers and encrypted file transfers anyway. Good luck to trying to crack apart the chunk of the piracy community that actually does know what they're doing and aren't 13 year old girls, grandmothers, or drunk, stupid, college kids.

"I am pretty sure that MPAA/RIAA/Big Publishers would like to put the whole filesharing technology back to the bottle until they find a way to monetize it. Then, of course, it would be accepted."
They had their chance a loooooong time ago. They thoroughly screwed that pooch and will have to stop basing their businesses on suing the crap out of people, which they really don't want to do (mostly because I think they enjoy it).

It completely depends on the game, but for indy games, 20 dollars can easily be too much. If an indy game is really good, I personally have no issues paying that much for it, however I also 'know a lot of people' that have to be a bit more frugal with their gaming dollars and won't spend that much on an indy title unless it's fantastic.

10-15 bucks is a really solid price point for indy games, if they're charging less than that then they're just asking for problems.

Have they completely missed Valve's Steam pricing report on what happens when you sell good games for cheap?
At twenty to twentyfive bucks, an indy game that isn't going to have the exposure a triple A game has is going to alienate shoppers that would have otherwise bought it just for the hell of it. It's going to have to be pretty damn good and get a lot of word of mouth exposure in order to be able to reign back in lost potential customers.

Figures that the day my mod points expire I finally find something I'd want to use them on. Anyhoo, while what the British are doing is not exactly the most well thought out plan ever, it's hardly a bad one. I think the more far reaching consequences of it though is not so much going to be in helping to prevent the creation of more radical, extremist Muslims, but instead to help educate the ignorant that not all Muslims are evil, nasty people and instead at least help a little in curbing anti-Muslim rhetoric if only by a little. Like I said, not a bad idea, just not exactly well thought through.

But hey, at least it's news from England that doesn't involve them oppressing their citizens in new and inventive ways, and that's always a nice change of pace.

Why are computer business people so brilliant yet so retarded at the same time? Trying to topple Google is like trying to topple World of Warcraft. It's just not going to happen unless the company does something suicidal with their product. The best way to 'compete' against monolithic things like that isn't about direct competition but instead about offering something different.

Likewise, CCP has discussed creating an Iphone Eve Online app that would allow players to access the game via their phone.