I occasionally get a scam SMS, but those seem to be sent by a robot as usually I have heard of it even before I get it.

But, yeah, I'm probably lucky ;-)

In my investigations, I found such a feature, burried somewhere in the options. I never had the need. My number is public too, well, it's pretty much a Google away. Never get any SMS spam.

"Gaming" means: "Fast, overpriced and we don't care about reliability".

Yes, most countries make it hard and expensive to get a license. It gets expensive quick if you flunk a few times, and since there is a theoretical part and a practical part you can flunk on both... Most people I know have flunked either one at least once. I know, I did...

I didn't say we're superior. I said "in Europe every one can drive stick". That is fact, not superiority or anything. You interpret it that way. That says more about you than about me.

Only in the Northern America and apparently Australia. In Europe, you can bet that everyone can drive sticks. Technically, you can do your driving license on a automatic, but it usually reserved for the physically disabled and you only are allowed to drive automatics with such a license.

True. That processor is, alas, a bit blind to syntax errors and prone to semantic errors... Apart from that, yes, you are totally right.

Edsger W. Dijkstra was stupid?

You can do computer science just with paper and pen. That is entirely feasible and totally common in any computer science curriculum at any halfway decent university. Oh, you thought that computer science = programming. Well, yeah, no... it isn't and technically you can program without a computer too. You just can't run your programs.

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".

Why would you think that? I use it here for internal web apps, I don't care about their youporn visits and I don't want that on my network. So, if they're at home, let them connect to the VPN, access the internal apps and do their work and wank on the side using their own Internet connection.

Yeah, as long as you ignore "NVidia Optimus". I have a AMD-A6 based desktop, it works fine with the occasional glitches, but the only thing that is truly stable and works for everything is called "Intel". There simply is no contest.