Yes, because people only steal games from big companies. How about the little video game shop that is just trying to get by, particularly the one trying to get by without having to sell out to one of the video game giants.

Then we have the Japanese Anime industry here in the US, which has been collapsing for some time under the weight of theft. Several large companies have already folded, companies that almost certainly could have kept going strong if people had actually paid for stuff instead of just downloading it. The industry has never publicized horribly inaccurate numbers like the MAFIAA has, but it has become apparent that downloading is hitting them very hard

What kind of approach would that be? Every single thing that any company has done to try and reduce the number of copies of their product that has been stolen has been vilified as evil DRM that is oppressing the masses. I dislike disk checks as much as anyone, and often use cracks for games I legally own on my laptop for convenience sake. I can understand why they do it though. It at least stops a small portion of the population from just making copies of the disk and giving it to all their friends/classmates/random people on the street.

If they didn't have that check, what is to stop you from just going and renting every game you want to play, put it on your hard drive, and return the disk. Repeat until you have gone through the 360 section of the nearby rental place.

The person in question had a malignant tumor on their breast, it was just caught before it started to spread uncontrollably. How in the heck is removing a breast to get rid of malignant cancer cells preventative care?

Wait....what? Are you serious? So developers are no longer allowed to recoup the millions of $ they are spending developing games? Either the company that made it, the company that published it, or the company that sold it are going to make no money if you try and sell the game for that cheap, or at least not enough to justify it.

Using modern materials in a extremely complicated setup that made it ineffective as any kind of weapon, only in ideal conditions. Yes, they so "proved" it.

And that right there is the main problem for most users. 90% of computer users don't want to have to do "a little jigging" to get every single thing they want to do to work, let alone know how to do it.

As an IT person who has moved to the "boonies", married to someone who has lived here her entire life, I think you guys have a bit of an outdated idea of what life is like out in the country.

Perhaps it is different in the bible belt, but here in Iowa pretty much every girl in a small town goes on birth control as soon as she enters high school. Girls who are already on birth control bring any of their friends who they find out isn't to a place like planned parenthood so they can get it. They are also not as stupid about STDs as you people seem to think.

WO showed no signs that it was ever going to be ready. It had gone way over budget and way past the deadline that Mythic itself set...then past the new deadline...then past the new deadline. EA Louse even admitted that they kept slipping. So EA should keep shoveling money into a project that showed extremely bad mis-management and was just becoming a huge money sink?

It was time to cut their losses and just get something out the door to try and recoup what little they could out of the cluster-**** that the project had become

I don't read slashdot as regularly as I used to, so I have no clue what article you are talking about. I just know that one month my keys racked up $30 in data charges for me.

The main times I've had "bill shock" is times when I had my phone in my pocket, it got unlocked somehow or another, and the button to open up the web browser got accidentally pressed. Then I start racking up data charges without knowing.

So if I get hold of your bank information it is alright if I drain your accounts, right? After all, I'm not depriving you of physical property, so it isn't theft.

This is exactly the point I wanted to make.

Unfortunately the inability to play games you have paid for from backups is a casualty of the war against video game theft(I refuse to call it piracy, because it is outright theft in this case). Of course, being able to make backups of your own games has been a capability that has never existed on consoles.

If someone is able to come up with a way that would somehow allow legitimate customers to play backups of legally purchased games but not allow people to download games without paying for them, great. I'm all for that, as long as it isn't too intrusive. Until then, backups are a casualty of the war to prevent video game theft.

As in "homebrew" pirated games, yes? Do you honestly think more than 10% of the people who "jailbreak" a ps3 are doing it so they can run Linux or play homebrew games on it? Of course not, they are doing it so they can download games and not pay for them. Given the fact that one of the first things that seemed to be released with the new "jailbreak" were ways to play "backups", I think it is pretty obvious what people really want it for. Stop pretending otherwise. Sony is well within their rights to stop people from stealing games. If you are mad at Sony for taking away your ability to play Linux or whatever on it, maybe you should get mad at the "pirates" who feel they are entitled to play games they haven't paid for, because they are the reason Sony has to take away the capabilities.