It's simple - I don't want to penalize the maker since he might stop making more products that I enjoy, instead catering to a less vocal consumer :) . And yes, if the product in question is art, then I have no other choice than to simply not enjoy it. With software you can almost always say "Go get [some other freeware, opensource or Free alternative]", but art does not work that way - you can't really make an alternative to, say, Futurama, Watchmen, Duke Nukem 3D or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - you can make art similar in concept or execution, but all of the characters, settings, plots, visuals and audio are substituted into something else that might not pander to my personal tastes. While art is just another commodity, and in the end I could go by without it, it would definitely make my life that much more empty. Art inspires, shapes character and belief, it is as close to a personification of culture as you can get. There is a lot of it around for free, sure, but some works, even if crippled with DRM, deserve to be seen - they're just that good.

(I almost Morbo'd that one sentence.)

I believe works of art are unique in themselves. There is no known case in history of two different artists creating an identical, or at least very similar piece of work without knowledge of the other attempt. This is why I want to support artists whose work I enjoy, because nobody else would be able to give me those exact same experiences. If I refused to try their offerings based on some philosophical grudge, those works would be forever lost to me. Some of the best pieces of art that influenced and continue to influence me were locked down by either abusive copyright law or nasty DRM, so I might even go as far as to say I would be a totally different person today if I hadn't experienced them.

To you and whoever modded op insightful: unicode needs some sort of character that marks jokes, like ENDOFJOKE or something. Also, I wonder if that algorithm from a newsstory couple of days ago that was supposed to detect sarcasm could be adapted here?

Ancient art represents ancient reality, news at 11!

True, but since I already have a pirated copy, I can just shelf the original into my hall of fame and keep using the downloaded media. I'm not a fan of DRM, but I also don't want to penalize the creators for choosing/being forced to choose a half-assed protection scheme. By buying their products, I show them that I like what they've done and hope they'll keep doing good stuff in the future... though +1 sale on the cash-o-meters of big publishers is hardly even a blip (as proven by, for example, Beyond Good & Evil), so I might as well not bother ;) .

Pah! Finally, those uncultured stem cells will learn the finer arts of high society!

I only download stuff that caught my eye, be it games, movies or music, so i guess i figure under "infrequently". If after a healthy sampling of the downloaded media I am reasonably pleased, I go out to buy the final product. Too many times I got burned by shit not even worth downloading that now gathers dust on my shelves since nobody even wants to buy this stuff secondhand.

That said, back when I was young, where I live, pirating was pretty much the only way of getting multimedia content, discounting crap terrestrial tv and radio, which back then didn't even bother licencing foreign stuff. There were no shops where you could buy legal CDs, no-one here had internet and everything was shared physically, friend-to-friend. The few lucky ones had contacts to crackscene swappers or wallets large enough to support downloading from BBSes, but physical sharing remained the main source of new games, movies and music to sometime around 1998. Good thing too, since polish law states that sharing of copyrighted multimedia content (not software though) is legal if there is no profit and it is done within either family or a close circle of friends (it's not very specific about that, unfortunately).

As someone, who was with the series from the very beginning (Yep, Akalabeth and all the spinoffs too.), I think I speak for all fans of Ultima when I say...

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

That said, I feel this particular title should stay buried under hazy, but beautiful memories, as one of the precursors of RPGs, and a very good series of games. Reviving this as anything other than an RPG game dilutes it's essence - it's amazing storyline, great set of characters and innovative approaches to quests.

...have absolutely nothing on the admins of it-he.org

Read their Ultima sections.

Reeeead them.

As somebody completely unrelated to the submitted entry or Anon-a-blog, I'm also pretty much cool with it!

Let me be the first to voice the opinion of laid off IT workers:

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!

I wish I had modpoints, I'd mod up the fuck out of your post!

I don't know how it works in the US, but in Europe (or at least where I live) there are 348576384756876 different, conflicting coding standards for infrared messages, so the only real place for your Universal Remote is in the trash can.

Not that I condone using phones for remote control...

Based on observation, L4D server searches are country-limited. Living in central europe, I find myself almost always connected to either german or russian servers, which to me isn't in any way good - i get >150ms pings from them, and most of the time they're filled with custom config files that allow such bullshit like three tanks/witches in a row on one map. I would love a server selection option for the lobby leader.

Onboard, no matter how hard it pains me to say it now, isn't always worse than an external solution. Although this particular model wouldn't stand up to, i dunno, an Auzentech or something, it still beats, hands down, most of the crap Creative can muster, with the sole exception of EAX, which is only used for gaming, anyway.