Credit scores are okay but involving credit history is a strange fetish of US banks, never understood why. I remember reading a story about a European that found a US girl and they were looking to buy a place for both of them in the US. He was like I got this much equity, this much income, we should be able to manage a mortgage of this size. The bank said: No credit history (that we can find anyway) whatsoever? No loan. So they went out and got him a credit card, maxed it and paid it off on time. Big credit, perfect payment history and though short he now was eligible for a loan. WTF.

To me, having a credit card history - not home and car loans - means you've not had the money to pay your bills. If you didn't have to take up credit, you've always had the money to pay your bills. Why on earth wouldn't I then be able to pay my bills now? Before I rented an apartment and paid rent. Now I own an apartment and pay on my mortgage. They look stunningly similar in that each month I need to pay up to keep on living where I live. You balance your income and expenses, if you do it with $1000 left on the bank account or $1000 in credit card debt at the end of the month is exactly the same.

The Middle Class didn't.

The Poor got taken to the cleaners.

Thank god my investments in Guillotine and Pitchfork franchises are proving to be fruitful.

All I want is Sims 4 that works standalone, Standalone Complex that works in doll mode, and Second Son: inFamous that works in Grey Hat mode.

If I had written the bill, I would have named it "USA #1 Freedom Bald Eagle Star Spangled Flag Waving Democracy Rah Rah Rah Act"

Property Rights? Trespass to Chattels? No abuse of state powers for private gain? How easily the mask slips when a few cold pounds are involved.

But the people I feel really sorry for are the victims of crime in London, whose cases go unsolved due to precious police resources being wasted on internet nonsense like this.

Until we decide that there is because we vote with our votes. For example the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act regulates how you can provide consumer warranties. If we wanted to ban certain DRM behaviors or even ban it entirely, we could do that. There's a difference between free market capitalism (equal opportunity for companies to provide competing products) and laissez-faire capitalism (companies can do anything and consumers will weed out bad behavior).

Why? It's a temporary promotion that expires 31th July. After that they're most likely going to ask money for it again. Their game, their rules.

The promotion also ends 31st July, from what I read. After that they'll charge money again, I must presume.

Look to play it, you must run Windows, to run Windows means that you almost certainly have malware already. To me that makes it a non issue. Want to game? Have a Windows partition for that specifically and consider it "nukable-from-orbit". Do important stuff on sane platforms. That's how I see it, and as such, SecuROM is no big deal, even with the rather overblown claims of it being malware. It might be, and if it is, it's still no big deal as you isolate it from important things. At least slashdotters should, and normal people have malware regardless.

Yes, I don't get this. They give a game away for free and instead of saying "Fun! Thank you EA" many people are complaining about the DRM. Yes, there is DRM, but you're running Windows to play it, so that really is the least of your problems. I grabbed it. I don't even have Windows in active use, but should I ever have tons of free spare time and want to play a game, I can now install it on a Games-Dedicated-Windows partition.

I say "Thank you EA".

They illegally and unconstitutionally collect it anyway, especially on Americans, and give a copy of the feed illegally and unconstitutionally to the CIA and GCHQ.

Among others.

They don't do space tourism yet, but once they got the Dragon man-rated I don't see why not. The seven people who've been space tourists so far have in total paid $170 million, while SpaceX has quoted $140 million for a crewed Falcon 9 launch so they're at a price at least some is willing to pay. If they can make the rockets reusable it could significantly increase their launch volume even if only a few hundred super rich want to go. It would be real space flight in LEO and make you a genuine astronaut, not just "pop your head in" suborbital flight. Maybe they could even use the cargo room of the Dragon to hold some kind of deployable/inflatable mini-hotel for the stay. 100 mile high club anyone? ;)

By the time you were five, we had been (384 400 kilometers) / (4.2421 light years) = 9.57827017 x 10^-9 = ~0.000001% of the way to the closest star. Eight years later they launched the Voyager 1 which is now about (127.98 Astronomical Units) / (4.2421 light years) = ~0.05% of the way. And it's probably uninhabited. What chance did we miss to go visit aliens? Do you think if we just put enough money in it we'd invent the warp drive? Chemical rockets can't do it, it'd be like trying to ride a horse to the moon. The ban on nukes in space kills fission, we still haven't got a working fusion reactor here on earth and antimatter only exists in extreme lab experiments.

True, we don't care much about developing the propulsion technology but we sure as hell would like the energy generation technology so to pretend we're not working on it is false. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to try building the applied technology before we got the basics working, if we can make a fusion reactor here on earth then maybe we can turn it into a fusion drive. Trying to skip that step earns us nothing, it doesn't bypass any of the problems we already have and creates a whole set of new ones which makes it that much less likely to succeed. The only tech that's pretty much ready to go is fission, but good luck selling a rocket that'll nuke its way through space.

This is probably a bad example because the end result was the invention of Git, and so you'd have a hard time these days convincing people that Tridgdell's actions had a bad outcome.

What are you doing bringing objective facts into a Slashdot debate, I mean SWJdot?