What? Though since you've never played online you probably don't know that RMT exists in Diablo 2 as well, and this is an effort to combat the most negative associations that go along with RMT (cheating/hacking/scamming).

Also, I think you are mistaken by assuming that the majority of D2 players didn't play online.

Least of all the ones running Ubuntu.

From a cost per playtime standpoint, I'd reckon that Warcraft is a pretty good deal for $150/year. If the average gamer completed one new game per month or played only Warcraft in that entire year, they'd "save" about $600 in that year (assuming $60 for a game) by playing Warcraft.

Now if you played the game as much as you'd play a single typical offline game (and still paid for the year), then yes, it's a very expensive game.

I'm not really sure if you know what you're talking about. Xbox Live has been around in its current incarnation for 5 years. Not only can you digitally buy the smaller online games, but they even sell (some) 360 games that way now. That doesn't seem to be crashing and burning. I don't think Sony had any major problems before this current one, either.

Also, id as a major company? They make great tech, but as a game company they've been a nonfactor for a very long time.

The reason they do this is to prevent their employees from competing against the company. WP7 apps that get put on the WP7 app store would compete with Microsoft's own apps.

What if your free time was spent creating an Office-style suite that would directly compete with Microsoft for dollars. Should they just turn a blind eye to that?

That might be misconstrued as tinfoil, if, you know, H.264 wasn't an already popular video encoding format.

Oh wait, it is already popular.

All those games listed except for Demon Souls are made by Sony, so it's kind of like saying "You can't play Super Mario Bros. on your PS3."

And the sequel for Demon Souls will be available on the 360.

Torchlight didn't have, as far as I know of, a compendium site that listed every possible drop you could get. I've recently come to the realization that that is one of the major differences between Diablo (2) and it. Having a list of what you could get gives you goals that keep you playing.

Instead I played through the main "story" of Torchlight and stopped right after. Random dungeons with unknown loot was not a good enough reason to keep playing.

Yep! But the inverse is also true. Other websites will be very happy to have all the traffic that's no longer going into Blizzard's forums.

Of course it was fixed two months sooner. It was out in the wild, whereas beforehand it was not.

A security exploit that's readily known is going to be a much higher priority than one that isn't.

Apple is only trying to "stop" you when you use their devices. They aren't trying to stop me if I'm using Firefox or Chrome or whatever on some other OS (or even on OS X).

This may be a flawed analogy, but wouldn't it be akin to a company releasing a car that only ran on diesel? That impedes all the companies that sell only "normal" gasoline. They're stifling competition! If you want to use "normal" gasoline, buy a car that runs on that. If diesel usurps gasoline as the standard fuel of choice, maybe it's because it's better.

I actually took a UFO class in college (Temple University). It was a history elective, one that was exceptionally popular and difficult to get into. The class was positioned as one that mainly dealt with UFOs and their impact (or lack thereof) on society, mainly from a governmental point of view.

Except, that was only the first half of the class. After the midterm there was a heavy focus on abductions, and we had to read a number of "non-fictional" books on the subject. It was a bit freaky if you started to believe it.

Beats me if they still offer this class, I took it in 1995.

Yeah, I remember looking at some Netscape (I think) code a while back, and it was eerily similar to COM.

ID-based class factory models are not that uncommon...

Does the US require that a patent need to be brought to use to be kept valid? Quick scan of Wikipedia says that some countries require it, but doesn't list which ones do.