Absolutely. When I bought my car, buying used meant I could buy a Lexus IS with a powerful engine and all the extras you get in the high end of the car market. And she only had 60k kilometres on it.

If I went to buy brand new, the same amount of money would have got me a functional sedan but with pretty much the bare minimum in performance and features.

I played Quake II as soon as it was released...back in the day. But I only played the mission packs last month - got them for free with my copy of Quake 4. Both mission packs were really enjoyable - quite challenging for an experienced player and lots of hardcore action against enemies that can take quite a pounding. It's very satisfying when you unload 10 rockets or a handful of rails into a big bad dude and watch him keel over and blow up.

There was an even better one in one of the Quake II mission packs. In one of the levels you can barely glimpse an invulnerability power up high up in the ramparts...naturally an experienced player would identify that a rocket jump or two will enable you to get up there. But as you approach the power up after rocket jumping onto the ledge, it suddenly vanishes and the message "no prize for you, rocket man" pops up! If the developers had a sicker sense of humour they might have made a badass enemy or two suddenly teleport in too!

Sounds like an ordinary day at Microsoft?

The problem is that companies never get more than a slap on the wrist for pulling stunts like this - commercial regulatory bodies in most countries are far too easy on them. As a previous poster said, it is usually a token fine and none of the executives ever get jailed. So I guess most companies do a simple calculation along the lines of:

Profit = Initial Sales from Lies - Estimated Fine when Caught - Dip in Sales from Bad Publicity.

It would seem that the "Profit" term still comes out as a big number so there is no real disincentive there unless regulatory bodies clean up their act, or the public starts voting with their dollars in a significant fashion.

That is a remarkably insightful and prescient speech from ~170 years ago that basically explains the problem with DRM today. If copyright is perceived to be enforced unfairly and to the detriment of the end-user then people will work towards undermining it: "Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot." The Pirate Bay is one example of this phenomenon.

No but I'll give you a cheeseburger, ok?

I just wish they could be more like the letters in the "Penthouse Forum"... :)

Indeed. You could say NASA learned the same sort of lesson through Challenger - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_launch_decision

Agree totally about the driving part. There's nothing like day after day of gridlock to make you start to hate your car! After about three weeks of driving my new vehicle to work I decided to fall back to public transport or carpooling with others. Now I drive my car outside of peak traffic hours and every trip is fun. Plus with less traffic around I get to really put the foot down now and again!