You wouldn't be asking that if you could see the papercut on my thumb.

They might delete their copy, but first they'll delete your copy, accidentally, of course, and somehow they'll manage to have a daily backup of everything else on the machine that they used to delete your data except for your data.

Really? As someone that fought cheating in a Valve game in the first year or so they were implementing anti-cheat measures in their games, I have to say it's incredibly hard to detect cheating, and one of the major problems early on was that people released the source code for their cheats, making it incredibly easy to customize the cheats to the point that they were harder to detect. What he says should be more or less true, as long as he's not leveraging an obvious hack that ends up looking like a million other cheats when Valve scans his system. The people that get away with cheating the longest are the ones that hold back and don't leverage all of the advantage they gain from cheating, and don't release their hacks. Once a hack is public, it's only a matter of days before Valve can implement detection and possibly disable the hack by changing whatever the hack is manipulating in memory. If they delay banning of cheaters, it's only to allow them to detect more cheaters, because within days of the bans starting, the new version of the cheat is released, and the cycle starts again.

While I would generally not play an FPS on a console for a variety of reasons, I will say this as an argument for it:
1) You can connect a mouse + keyboard to a PS3, it's called USB, or bluetooth. 360 users should gripe to MS about the crap they've pulled with that console
2) Console games are usually tuned to run at a consistent framerate at the console's standard resolution options, all of which makes most of the processing advantages of a PC moot, unless the game gives an advantage to players with a higher framerate than what the console is capable of, and you're running it on a PC that is capable of maintaining an advantageous framerate at the resolution at which you are playing.

There are many examples of the latter, but the problems people have getting consistent framerates out of games are not exactly new (though with current hardware and the way developers have built the games to configure themselves to the hardware on install, they're not as big of a problem as they used to be).

EA wanted lock-in on user data and the ability to decide whether or not people could access their services, which is why they refused to play nice with Microsoft until they changed the requirements. EA games don't necessarily run on their own servers on Xbox Live, but they have more access to the data on those servers than they would have under the original Xbox Live system. Originally there was speculation that EA might want to have additional charges to use their multiplayer, but there was a pretty massive backlash against that. They also saw a lot of pressure by not having online play on the Xbox, since it allowed Sega and MS themselves to compete very well on the platform vs. Madden for a year or two. In the end, they seem to have come to an agreement with MS that was somewhere between what the two had originally wanted for themselves, in part because the Xbox and 360 online services would have suffered without an NFL licensed online game.

It's definitely not a code issue in general, though it can be for specific games. Most of the games that promised 360/Windows play can be played together on those platforms. If FF11 users on the 360 can't play with PC and PS2 users, why exactly are they playing? It's not exactly massive if the only users are the ones on the 360. One could argue there were more challenges in getting the PS2 to play nice, since it had to have 2 optional hardware components (one of which is not available for the more recent versions of the console) and is a completely different architecture, rather than the 360, which is basically a PC running a different OS from the same developers as the PC OS on which the game runs. Strangely the PS2 was able to play nice all this time.

Not really. They had extra costs involved in building their own private little network that runs on top of the existing computer network we're using to access this site. They could have done it all without locking out other platforms at a lower cost, possibly even leveraging existing software to do so, such as Steam or any of a number of other matchmaking and digital download systems.

They invested the extra money to create their own system so they could control it, and then invested even more money so they could keep it to themselves. Microsoft goes one further and makes people pay for the system that keeps them from interacting with other platforms, while offering PC users access to the same network for free (because PC users already have access to so many other networks for free that they wouldn't pay for it).

There are a lot of cheaper alternatives than a 360 and an Xbox Live subscription for streaming Netflix to your television.

The term is already a summarization of an abstract that is only really defined by whatever a court allows to occur. It's not a real law in the sense that it's written into a book in clear and definite terms, and this case is just one of many that help to define it better under certain circumstances.

That being said, your guess would more than likely be as accurate as anyone's summary could be. You go looking for something else with a legal right to search and instead find something you weren't looking for, but really weren't likely to have missed being a normal person with the normal senses. You don't go looking for a gun with a warrant and step over a dead body in the hallway as if it didn't exist because your warrant didn't specify that you were looking for corpses.

You can still run a query against an Excel file, it just takes a little more work than scrolling through the cells of data.

How they ended up with a spreadsheet with 100 or so names on it is the real question, since most people would keep the results in a database and it would include all of the results, not just a selection of people that tested positive.

Of course, in most of the databases I work with, the names of people are stored separately from most of the other data related to those people, so if I wanted information about a specific person, I would first query their ID number to use in the where clause of the rest of my queries, and would never see anyone else's data.

Except that wasting their time and my money investigating MLB hasn't stopped them from screwing up anything, since they've been doing both for years now.

The physical analogy everyone seems to be missing is if they went to the drug testing lab and asked for the person's records in question, then followed the records keeper to a room full of filing cabinets, watched him open a drawer labelled something along the lines of 'Baseball players that failed their drug test', and then forcefully took every folder in the cabinet, rather than waiting for him to find the one for which they were given a warrant.

The thing is that if they had formed the query on the database properly, it never would have shown them the other records, but instead they went on ahead and grabbed everything they could get their hands on once someone gave them access to the database.

I think most people are already decided on open source before they hear/read anything Stallman has to say. By that point, they have a bigger decision to make, and most of them just ignore it, and him, and go on with their lives using GPL software anyway.

and change type/colors every couple of years for a small fee, too.

That's an even worse argument than the one the previous poster was countering. Microsoft released a patch for older versions of Office programs to be able to read the newer file formats, and the newer versions of Office programs can be set to save in the older versions of the formats by default. Not to mention that the newer formats are loosely XML based.

Even going back to the 90s (the last time they made a major change to the Office format), there was such an uproar over the change in file formats that they had no choice but to patch the older versions to be able to read the newer format.

Despite what people would like others to believe, it's not normal for businesses to upgrade their software just because a new version came out. Most companies might have a commitment to stay within 3 versions of the current software, and most want to keep everything under a support contract, but they don't upgrade just because something new is out there, even if the file formats change (or perhaps especially if the file formats change, since some businesses are required to use certain file formats when dealing with other companies and government). Businesses will set an arbitrary upgrade cycle on the hardware based primarily on the support contracts they're willing to buy with that hardware, and upgrade the software according to what's available (and covered by their current licensing), but the software upgrades generally only come with the hardware upgrades, unless there's a major reason to switch (ie the company I work for is getting rid of Lotus Notes so we're all switching email clients eventually).

A couple of different games have already tried swordfights, and done a pretty miserable job of it. Maybe the motion will help, but I wonder if anyone else is going to bother.