...is a ridiculous concept

Aviation safety is not repeat NOT something to play around with. Better for an airline to lose a few million pounds and passengers to be stranded somewhere than for a plane to lose engine power in the middle of the Atlantic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_cloud#Aviation

Explain the situation to your students; give them the options available with pros and cons for each; and let them decide for themselves.

...because he's too busy using the Drake equation to prove he can't get girlfriend

I work for a small (~50 person) software development firm. I have no experience on the business side of the house, so I'm open to the possibility that I'm missing something really basic here. With that said, why would a company let a software audit happen? It seems like the only possible outcomes are bad. It's not like the company can realize any revenue from an audit (and could quite possibly end up paying money to buy licenses), and even if the auditors don't find anything bad, there's still the overhead of dealing with them in the first place, i.e. dealing with auditors diverts resources away from revenue-generating activities. So the best outcome one could hope for, from a software audit, is slightly bad. Software auditors aren't government organizations, are they? Do they have warrants or magical lawyer powers that enable them to legally do this? Why not just ignore their calls and refuse them entry?

Remember that the goal of any company including EA is not to make games, but to make money. They calculate they'll make more money by forcing people off the old games (at least the online parts) with the hope that some or most of those people will then upgrade to the newest version of the franchise:

All of us at EA would like to thank you for your valued participation in our online gaming community and hope that your enthusiasm for these games extends to our current lineup and beyond.

Other posters have expressed the hope that they'll release source code to the old games so that community-run versions of the servers can be developed. I submit that EA has a greater monetary incentive to keep the source closed - they can save a ton of money on development costs by slapping a new logo on last year's game, changing the version string, updating the player names, and releasing it again next year.

(soapbox alert) So why even play these games at all? What do you get after an hour of playing video games, besides a headache and high blood pressure? Why not go play an instrument, or play sports for real, or do something to improve yourself or the rest of the human race?

You're getting a bachelor's in CS, so why in the world would you want to work IT? There is a huge difference between programming and IT work. IT guys administer servers, troubleshoot workstations, fix network issues, replace busted hardware, and so on. Programmers create the software that the company sells to make money. Think about that and what it implies for a second. You're not going to use your CS degree in an IT job. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on IT; both IT guys and programmers are invaluable to a company... I just don't understand why you would waste a CS degree doing what amounts to grunt work for nothing. Given that you've invested the time, money, and mental effort to get a CS degree, I think you'll find something with the words "software", "programmer", "coder", and/or "architect" in the job title/description to be much more rewarding for you financially, professionally, and creatively.

Couldn't they have told me this one week before I OD'd on tryptophan, not one week after?

You would think ARTS would be a more psychologically pleasing acronym than RATS, but what do I know, I'm just a code monkey...

If the software plainly states that it will be sharing a file with other people, then you cannot say 'I didn't know I was sharing it'. Likewise, you cannot say that it installed without your knowledge nor can you say it installed but you couldn't uninstall it.

Couldn't you still claim that someone else installed it on your computer, without your knowledge? For example, your 12 year-old son, who may know more about computers than you, but doesn't have the (legal) capacity to agree to a software license in the first place?

Is the Ribbon UI that groundbreaking? To me, this argues that we are just shuffling & renaming things and calling it a new version. Software word processors have been around for at least 30 years, are you really trying to tell me that this "innovation" will change everything and make me super productive? Honestly, development on this could have stopped right around when mail merge was added and I think we'd all have been fine with it.

At first glance, Ferrell adds, the multiple connections to his PC looked on his security alert system like some kind of SQL attack.

Oh really.

Agreed.

You just started taking CS classes? What are you worried about, someone is going to steal your Hello World or ArrayList implementation? Seriously though, anything you code in there has prior art - perhaps from the students who took those courses last semester.