Welp, there's whatever UbiSoft spent on this scheme down the drain. What did they spend on this thing? A million bucks? I hope the one day of protection they got out of it was worth it.

The way I've always seen it is, every pirated copy MIGHT be a lost sale. Sure, some people who would have otherwise bought it will pirate it and not pay. But many of the pirates are people who had zero intention of buying the game anyway, but will give it a spin just to see what it is about if the only cost is one click and a few minutes of bandwidth. A small percentage of those may actually like it enough to pay for it. Myself, I'm not going to pay for nor even pirate Assassin's Creed 2. What does it say when I don't even care enough to show interest in the game for free?

Now, the people who make their living convincing the UbiSofts of the world to buy DRM are of course going to try to assume that every pirate represents a lost sale. "Heck, some of these people would probably have bought a copy for the kids too- so we'll just go ahead and say each pirated copy equals _1.2_ lost sales! That's like a kajillion sales lost! Give us that cool million dollars, and all those pirated copies will immediately convert back to cold, hard cash! You'll be RICH!!!" UbiSoft's decisionmakers have their eyes turn into dollar signs and fork over the million bucks.

Then some guys crack the thing in a day. Does the DRM team give the cool million bucks back if their DRM gets cracked that fast? I seriously doubt it. So all UbiSoft really did was lose a million bucks on DRM and annoy their legitimate customers.

From this alone, no one can tell _your_ habits. They could learn the habits of Panzofran the Blood Elf Warlock, and conclude certain patterns of play time. (Like that the character plays most during evenings in EST- but who's to say it's not the middle of the night in Europe, or mornings in East Asia?)

People can't easily make the jump to stalking _your_ habits unless you reveal your person-character connection somewhere else: 1) Tell people your real name in game or on guild forums or something 2) Write about your character on Livejournal 3) Meet people IRL at Blizzcon or something

Much, much, MUCH better a pile of metal and plastic shaped like a 13 year old child than a REAL 13-year old child.

If someone could get out all their urges on the former, maybe they'd never bother with the latter.
The counter argument is that getting a taste of the former might increase one's hunger to try the latter. But is that really true?

A lot of people I know play games to take a BREAK from realism! Most games aren't meant so simulate reality, they're meant to tap into a world that is a mix of dreams and math.

Games as math- in chess, the logic of one piece "attacking" another is mainly that the board position change. When my knight "takes" a queen, I don't need a realistic depiction of him raping her to death and then beheading her. I just need to know that 4C now contains -1 queens and +1 knights. It's the same in first person shooters or World of Warcraft. In Warsong, I don't care if you fight the flag carrier "realistically" with swords or with awesome beams of color shooting from your hands. I just want to know how much damage it all added up to and if they dropped the flag or not.

Being able to fly in my dreams isn't realistic. But I'm glad it's not. I can jump down flights of stairs in my dreams, I don't want my brain to realistically simulate my shin bones splintering when I do it. I just want the fun. And I want that same dream-fun in my games.

River City Ransom- Two-player human circus. Player1 standing on a rolling tire, holding Player 2, who is himself holding an enemy holding trash can.

Super Mario 2- Building giant bridges out of mushroom blocks instead of using them to crush bosses.

Legend of Zelda- Link to the Past- Doing the Dark World Dungeons as out-of-order as possible. IE, 1,6,7,2,5,4,3. Also doing "hard mode", beating entire game with 0 saves and 0 deaths so that it says "000" at the end screen.

Duke Nukem- Defining hideous, spike-encrusted tractor-harvestors with no set travel path. Without a path, they just went crazy driving in circles- gibbing all enemies they hit. Place in the center of an enemy-filled room.

Super Mario Kart- Red shell orbit drills. Place one player in center of battle map at rest. Other player can fire red shell perpendicular to player such that its maximum degrees/second turning radius cannot lock into player. Juggle as many red shells in "orbit" as possible. Also, run drills where you deliberately allow one player to fire red shell after red shell at you, deploying banana peel or green shell behind you at last second in "flak defense" drills.
 

You could have an intervention:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpkQSB_h5lY

Oh, you want to have an intervention to play LESS WoW??? (It's a comic sketch where some guildmates are trying to lure their friend back into the game- as a result, he misses a three-some with two sexy ladies.)

Good luck competing in today's information economy with nothing but food, water and shelter.

We're not necessarily trying to kill all the mosquitos ON EARTH, just the .000001% within say 5m of a human. I'd position a little point-defense laser turrent in my room while I sleep if it existed. Especially since I live in the first world and can easily afford electricity to run it.

On the off-chance laser-resistant (reflective/ablative skin??) mosquito stumbles into and out of the kill zone alive, it still has to compete with the other 99.999% of mosquitos who didn't get in here.