If ubisoft and EA have shown us anything over the last few years its that always on never works. Interruption at home? Yep you lose all your unsaved game. Interruption with your ISP, major node some where, at the data center, or maybe a server failure, slight down time (anywhere) and you get to replay everything again.

I'm also going to assume that this activation code that will be required to be used will not give me the ability to download the game if the disk is lost or destroyed, or if I lose my game I will not be able to get a discounted price for the physical disk? Oh and I'm just guessing here but if I did buy a new copy my old save games wouldn't work with the different "game" will they?

Its like they WANT people to pirate games and software. Why go though all this when I can simply download/burn the game and play it for free? Sounds much easier.

Am I the only person who generates easy to remember yet difficult to read / crack passwords based on things like movie / cartoon / book quotes or music lyrics? I don't think I have ever make a totally random password for myself and instead create easy to remember passwords from all sorts of phrases. The only problem with this is when sites disallow long passwords (so many limit passwords under 10,12,20 characters).

Take for example (random things off the top of my head) the sun will come up to morrow, to morrow. Tswcu2m2m. Or Dance your cares away Worrys for another day DycaWfad. Throw in a few !! or $$ at the beginning or ending and you're set.

I'd say I hate HP more because I have at some point in the past used a Ebay/Paypal service.

Or music videos. Or playlists not following album releases.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge vinyl collector and would never pay for a digital download (as I enjoy the entire album experience) but once you give in you basically throw out your entire excuse and invalidate everything you have previously said.

" How far do we have to go to ensure we are diverse?""

By not ensuring it and let it happen organically? Doing it any other way defeats the purpose of trying to be diverse.

Ubisoft has been trying to use DRM in their games for years and has failed at every attempt at a functional DRM that dosen't limit the person who "purchased" the game.

I recently bought Heroes of Might and Magic VI not realizing it was owned by Ubisoft. I was unable to play the game right after I downloaded it (their Authentication system was down to login to). After waiting several hours I was finally able to login and play. After about 2 hours of play I was disconnected again because the connection to their DRM server was lost. This meant I couldn't continue my game (and all saved data was lost too). After waiting a day it was finally back up. And on weekends you deal with the same problem.

Plenty of other games, systems, etc have been able to do very simple and very easy DRM on games. Look at battle.net and all of blizzards games. Their DRM management is so effective you don't even realize your dealing with any type of DRM or license authentication.

Gamers are willing to deal with DRM if it allows them to play their damn games they bought (forever) and have to deal with very little when dealing with the DRM. Ubisoft hasn't realize this and it will (and should be) the death of the company.

The problem is that no one wants to spend an extra $500 - $1000 for a 3D tv while most tv manufactures are trying to cover all their losses over the last 4 years from the mistake of trying to push this silly technology.

Once the focus is back to standard TV's with increasingly better displays at a reasonable price then people will start buying again instead off holding onto their all ready "good enough" LED / LCD tv's.

I take it you have never had to deal with identity theft before?

If your credit card / account was used in a different country or obviously not possible to be you making the transactions then you are damn lucky. In most cases though you are dealing with identify theft in your general area like a city or state. In these situations you have to prove that you are Innocent which is damn near impossible. In fact the credit card companies try to make it as difficult as possible for you to prove your Innocent.

So during Christmas time and banks dealing with thousands (tens of thousands?) of extra malice credit card transactions on top of what they normally would at this time of year I can't imagine the banks trying to make it easier for their customers. It will be in fact the most difficult time of the year for the customers to deal with this.

I've stood behind many of the things Anonymous has done in the past but this just seems stupid.

The only thing this will do is cost charities millions in audits, time, etc and make many lose services they use to collect donations. You know what will happen if a charity receives illicit funds through paypal? Their bank account gets frozen and paypal will in most cases never allow them to use their service again.

If they want to be dicks they should use these attacks through online services that the music/movie industries run / make money from, or big evil online retails like walmart and bestbuy or make payments to other banks customers mortgages / dept.

Did a quick re-read and it turns out they are going to offer it for free to developers in hopes of forcing customers to click on a button to get charged for better network speeds.

Somehow if their network is too saturated this client api will speed up their network they are saying. Oh, no it wont, they will simply throttle other paying customers while charging you an additional fee for a service you are all ready paying for.

Oh and a great quote from the article :

  "And just because you request a high quality of service doesn't mean you're gonna get it."

So now software developers will have to pay a fee to get "good" data speeds?

And to top that off now developers will need to design 2 versions of their application for every type of version phone / OS and everyone else. Way to go guys.

It could be that the hardware isn't worse for androids, its that it is more difficult to replace or file a claim with Apple then it is with android phones.

I had a blackberry for several years and have had an android phone for 2 and have never had any problem.

I do on the other hand know several people who have had several iphones die and were un-replaceable because of whatever excuse Apple could come up with.

That and people are far more likely to "upgrade" their iphones the moment a new version comes out instead of using their existing phone until it stops functioning.

"Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things"

Am I the only person who sees this as one of the biggest problems with PERL? Don't get me wrong, I love choice and having options. But when you're learning a language you do not want 10 different styles of writing a function, statement, loop, whatever. Because when you are working with 10+ people you now have 1 language, 10 different ways to write in (and now 10 different ways you need to read).

When I first started learning PERL and reading books, websites and downloading examples all the different styles of writing in PERL was the biggest problem. You can't just simply learn how to do an IF statement, you have to learn the 20+ different ways you COULD write an IF statement, since every example you will find online will be totally different.

This guy is spot on with pretty much everything he discussed. I have never understood why Google does the things it does. They create some fantastic products, but they their products never overlap; meaning you do not get access to many other applications within other applications.

Look at reCaptcha. Quite easily one of the best, if not the best captcha system around. Google bought it like 2 years ago; and yet they do not use it within any of their sites. They use their horrible, out-dated and unreadable captcha system.

Also look at dodgeball. It was a fantastic service that google killed off like 3 years ago. And now facebook has this exact feature that is insanely popular.

Their user account system is just awful too. Yes at least you can link your webmaster, analyst, gmail, home page, etc together, but its just done so poorly that this is very little reason to have 1 single account. Its about as continent as having several accounts.

Google was onto something with gears and with gadgets but with gears gone and gadgets basically having zero development done in 5+ years they have pretty much killed off any really cool way to share, use or access cool or useful tools.

Hopefully this changes because I would hate to see facebook continue to get bigger.

The concept of banning "hacking tools" is just silly. What would these people consider a hacking tool? SSH terminals since they allow people to connect to compromised systems or to connect to machines with "hacker tools"? Or what about IRC servers since many bot networks have used them or offer the ability to let people talk about hacking?

Even some of the biggest "hacker tools" are used for real network and server analysis like winshark and the like.

This is simply the wrong approach to fix a problem. This is in fact the worst way to approach the problem. The real solution is to charge software companies for making insecure software. Don't fine the hackers for finding the exploits, fine the developers for not finding them. The software developers are the ones making money off the software, if they cause people to lose data or have their systems compromised they should be the ones that should be held responsible, not the person who found it.

Instead of trying to remove the ability to make "hacker tools" why not remove the ability or need of these tools by making more secure software. I guess that would be too easy though.