I have over 100 hours into TF2 at this point and I'm a pretty good spy (the best regular on a couple servers). I just want to say that I doubt that buying the entire inventory of the store will make you much of a better player. Assuming the items are balanced, a crappy player is still a crappy player. I for one am planning on keeping my current spy loadout (though I may check out that new revolver when I get it in a drop). With item trading and random drops you can get whatever weapons you want for your primary class or two w/o too much trouble. The only thing I don't like is how total newbs can have 5 or 6 hats. Hats were originally a status symbol, because you could tell that a player had been around for a while if he had a decent hat for his primary class. On the bright side, trading will allow you to get the hats that you want easier...

Have I played C&C 3 on the Xbox? Sure and it felt like crap. Starcraft on the N64 was fun until I found out how much better it was on the PC. RTS's cannot be played nearly as easily without a mouse.

Is Starcraft 2 on your console? Did the Orange Box get any of the massive TF2 updates on console? Every platform has its exclusives. Fortunately, PC is where all the best FPS and RTS games land. Would I like to play some console exclusives? Sure, but not at the cost of the console + $60 a pop.

Some of the companies in the aircraft industry (at least here where I live) use OpenSUSE for their Linux clusters. I'm not sure if that's an overall standard or if the engineers just prefer SUSE.

Perhaps for cheap sata drives. SAS drives are routinely available in 73GB capacities.

What about controllers, trays, etc? What are these drives going into, servers with software raid? You can't just buy a bunch of 4U servers, stuff them full of drives and share them through iSCSI. That's how you run a porn site, not a data center. How do you handle drive failures, hot spares, etc?

They may not use such software, but I guarantee you they're using "super expensive storage 'solutions'". What do you think they do, plug 10,000 $1000 consumer grade storage arrays into a 1Gb iSCSI san? Massive corporations can afford the very best (in fact, they probably need it). Controllers with 8Gb redundant connections capable of servicing 20 or 30 drive trays of 10TB each...

a D is a failing grade. When I was in high school (at least in my house), a C was a failing grade as well. The only time I ever got a D was in Spanish class (and honestly that was because I just didn't care). Most of the kids that fail are either lazy or stupid, with a small percentage actually being learning disabled. Schools pass everyone nowadays unless they are held back for disciplinary reasons. They just stick them in the "Special room" for a couple hours a day and then hand them their diploma at the same time as everyone else. If you go to public school and don't have straight A's, you aren't trying hard enough.

What it sounds like to me is that MS thinks that you owe them. They're doing you a favor by fixing any problems that you find (and if it takes them 6 months, well darn it it's because they were busy patching another Windows activation exploit and that is certainly more important). Were I to find a security flaw with Windows, I would probably release it for all the world to see... without notifying MS. They have paid employees to find and fix these problems, guess they don't need my help.

Use steam to verify the files once you drop them in the steamapps folder. There. Done.

You're talking about huge megafarms with thousands and thousands of underfed animals and poorly paid workers. The average farm/ranch is completely different.

More like completely pointless with obscene amounts of depravity.

Unless you played recently (since beginning of phase 2), you were probably playing with human enemies. CoOp games vs AI were disabled in phase 1, with the exception of custom games vs very easy AI (like I described above).

Then you are really terrible, playing a harder AI than the "easiest", or lying. On the easiest AI setting they rarely send more than one or 2 basic units to attack your base. I could stop that kind of an attacking force using only workers if need be. You have to play on hard vs the AI to even come close to matching a low-skill human player. Even on very hard the AI isn't great. They macro efficiently on very hard, but they expend all of their attack units with each attack on your base. All you have to do is hit them at a choke, destroy their army, and retaliate with whatever you have left to win. Teammates who won't choke or won't barricade their entrance are your biggest enemies.

But the fact is, option 2 will always be there in some form or fashion. It may take a few months but there will always be someone willing to spend the time to crack games; especially when the companies keep touting their "foolproof solutions". DLC won't even solve it. Borderland's and Dragon Age's DLC has been pirated ever since they released it. Borderlands and Overlord 2 were both obscenely stupid examples of DRM in that they used securerom but didn't require a unique key for online play. They could have skipped the securerom but without requiring unique keys they might as well have given it away for free. Steam isn't the best choice, but it's a far cry from the alternative. When it became easier to just wait for a good sale and download the game (with auto-updates), I stopped pirating games. Given, I have a lot more disposable income than I used to, but I don't think that my gaming habits would change much even so.