Perhaps for cheap sata drives. SAS drives are routinely available in 73GB capacities.

What about controllers, trays, etc? What are these drives going into, servers with software raid? You can't just buy a bunch of 4U servers, stuff them full of drives and share them through iSCSI. That's how you run a porn site, not a data center. How do you handle drive failures, hot spares, etc?

They may not use such software, but I guarantee you they're using "super expensive storage 'solutions'". What do you think they do, plug 10,000 $1000 consumer grade storage arrays into a 1Gb iSCSI san? Massive corporations can afford the very best (in fact, they probably need it). Controllers with 8Gb redundant connections capable of servicing 20 or 30 drive trays of 10TB each...

a D is a failing grade. When I was in high school (at least in my house), a C was a failing grade as well. The only time I ever got a D was in Spanish class (and honestly that was because I just didn't care). Most of the kids that fail are either lazy or stupid, with a small percentage actually being learning disabled. Schools pass everyone nowadays unless they are held back for disciplinary reasons. They just stick them in the "Special room" for a couple hours a day and then hand them their diploma at the same time as everyone else. If you go to public school and don't have straight A's, you aren't trying hard enough.

What it sounds like to me is that MS thinks that you owe them. They're doing you a favor by fixing any problems that you find (and if it takes them 6 months, well darn it it's because they were busy patching another Windows activation exploit and that is certainly more important). Were I to find a security flaw with Windows, I would probably release it for all the world to see... without notifying MS. They have paid employees to find and fix these problems, guess they don't need my help.

Use steam to verify the files once you drop them in the steamapps folder. There. Done.

You're talking about huge megafarms with thousands and thousands of underfed animals and poorly paid workers. The average farm/ranch is completely different.

More like completely pointless with obscene amounts of depravity.

Unless you played recently (since beginning of phase 2), you were probably playing with human enemies. CoOp games vs AI were disabled in phase 1, with the exception of custom games vs very easy AI (like I described above).

Then you are really terrible, playing a harder AI than the "easiest", or lying. On the easiest AI setting they rarely send more than one or 2 basic units to attack your base. I could stop that kind of an attacking force using only workers if need be. You have to play on hard vs the AI to even come close to matching a low-skill human player. Even on very hard the AI isn't great. They macro efficiently on very hard, but they expend all of their attack units with each attack on your base. All you have to do is hit them at a choke, destroy their army, and retaliate with whatever you have left to win. Teammates who won't choke or won't barricade their entrance are your biggest enemies.

But the fact is, option 2 will always be there in some form or fashion. It may take a few months but there will always be someone willing to spend the time to crack games; especially when the companies keep touting their "foolproof solutions". DLC won't even solve it. Borderland's and Dragon Age's DLC has been pirated ever since they released it. Borderlands and Overlord 2 were both obscenely stupid examples of DRM in that they used securerom but didn't require a unique key for online play. They could have skipped the securerom but without requiring unique keys they might as well have given it away for free. Steam isn't the best choice, but it's a far cry from the alternative. When it became easier to just wait for a good sale and download the game (with auto-updates), I stopped pirating games. Given, I have a lot more disposable income than I used to, but I don't think that my gaming habits would change much even so.

I do, because I enjoy playing my games at 1920x1080 on high graphics settings with a decent frame rate. I think playing at low res on a crappy monitor degrades enjoyment of the game. I have a few friends that don't mind playing at 1024x768, and a couple more that still try to play the latest games with onboard video ("I can run Crysis if I set everything to low right?"), but that's more because they're cheap than because they don't care about high performance. That isn't to say I would go out and buy a $500 graphics card to get a few more fps, even a $200 card is pushing it.

Do I trust Google, MS, Apple to tell me the truth any more that I trust CNN, Fox, etc, to? Absolutely not. On the other hand, I expect corporate spin from the former, but I have a right to expect ZERO spin from the latter. For me it's a difference in expectations. I expect a journalist to be fair and impartial. It rarely happens, but that is the way it should be. I expect a tech company to be fair and partial to its customers, but still do whatever it takes to sell their product.

That was the reason I quit using IE6. Firefox didn't have that terrible UI responsiveness issue on my machine, while IE certainly did. Well, I guess that and the tabs were the reason.

I'm terrible with opening too many tabs. I have a habit of opening 50 or 60 and then exiting the browser (but saving my session). The next time I'll open 50 or 60 more. I remember one time closing the browser and intentionally not saving my existing tabs, Firefox warned me that i would be losing 450 some tabs if I did so. I never had any performance issues unless I have a flash window that's acting up. Chrome on the other hand starts eating up my memory with only 50 or 60 tabs.