Wow, Doogie, you were quite the student. What high school did you go to? I'd like to send my kids there.

What if they decide to charge you some insane sum of money for something you did not agree to?

Then I flag it as a fraudulent transaction and let my credit card company handle it? There is nothing a company like Netflix can do to me (and actually manage to pull off) that would be worth my time and money dragging them into court for. This is pretty much true of any company that one has month-to-month dealings with at dollars or tens of dollars per month. Once again, we're not talking about a situation where I sign a contract and the company I'm dealing with can move the goal posts after the fact and tell me to suck it - that's a situation where lawsuits are pretty much the only option.

Yeah, I don't get this at all. If Netflix starts pulling shenanigans I cancel my account and I'm out the $20 for the month, that's it. Why would I even think about bothering to sue them? This isn't like a cell phone situation where you're locked into a contract for two years and if they don't provide the service you think they promised you can't just cancel, so you have to sue them for redress.

Pre-iTunes: CDs for $20-$30 for a dozen songs. That you would still need to rip

Where the hell did you buy your CDs? Most of the music on iTunes is the kind that tends to be sold at discounts at places like Wal Mart or Best Buy, so it's more like $12-15 for a CD. Even when somewhere like Barnes & Noble sells it at full price it's $18 or so.

I also get years of use out of a car vs. 20 hours for a video game. In fact dollar for dollar a car is probably a better value.

Yeah, I misquoted. Sorry about that. And I was telling Barbie that the mistake IS considering secret and obscure to be the same, but they're not.

It's a very accepted term, but you're not using the accepted definition. You're equating "obscure" with "secret". If I look at a security algorithm and by doing so enables me to break into whatever it's protecting, that's security through obscurity. If I look at one but still something like keys or passwords, that is NOT security through obscurity. Yes the keys or passwords are "obscure" but they _have_ to be, and that's not what people mean when they use that word.

Ever worked a trade show in a place like Chicago or Las Vegas? No? You have absolutely no idea what the hell you're talking about.

Part of the reason CES left Chicago is the smaller vendors wouldn't/couldn't afford to pay a union electrician the exorbitant minimum fee to do something as simple as plug a device into a power outlet. I kid you not - if you were (for example) a boutique loudspeaker vendor with one product and all you had to do was plug in the power amp/preamp/CD player running the speakers you're demoing and you did it yourself, you better have someone sleeping in your booth or room overnight because the next morning there was a chance something would be damaged, and all anyone could do is shrug. The damage would never happen to the vendors that paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for what amounted to an hour or less of actual electrical work.

Was able to get into the Winter CES in Chicago back in the early 90s just because I was a register drone at Babbage's (computer software and video game store for you youngn's.) I think they had me down as "buyer" even though I had nothing to do with what the company stocked. Hell a buddy of mine who built PCs in his basement got in with a "technician" badge. As long as you didn't show up with children in tow and could ask reasonably coherent questions they were mostly happy to deal with people that were a half step above "Joe Q. Public."

I didn't mean to suggest anything specific to Apple or Android devices. The point I was trying to make was control of information - in regulated environments we're not going to allow something to connect to the corporate network that is then going to get taken home and synced with a personal computer, I don't care how secure the device itself can be made to be - the instant it touches anything that doesn't have a corporate identity it can no longer be vouched for.

This is like the fifth article this year talking about how users bringing their own devices into a corporate network are inevitable, yadda yadda, and here are some flashy new programs and services to keep it all under control that we happen to have developed and want to sell to you!

Well you know what wins, pundits? PCI and/or HIPPA.

We're PCI compliant at my job, and we're damn sure going to stay that way. That means that yes, you can bring in your iWhatever, and oh look, an open guest wireless network! But you know where that guest network goes? The internet. That's it. You can check your corporate E-mail through the public web interface if you'd like. Don't ask us to help you connect it to the corporate network, because we're going to tell you to go pound sand. And you know what? We're perfectly OK with you being pissed off at us because _you're not the one who's ass is in a sling if credit card information leaks out._ We provide you with all the tools you need to get your job done. You get a nice shiny corporate laptop that you can take anywhere with you (because it will help you VPN in and run your virtual desktop back at the office) and you get a rather impressive smartphone so your E-mail and contacts are never out of reach. You can't sit here and tell me you need MORE than that to do your job effectively.

Even when it was Babbage's we opened the display copy of a given console game, and when we'd sell that copy (which was rare unless we were trying to sell through a discontinued item) we'd seal it in shrink wrap and tell the customer, but still treat it as new. (Babbage's didn't deal in used games until after I left in '94 or so, so we really didn't have a provision for discounting like that). The other copies of the game were in their full boxes behind the counter. Customers were generally OK with that, because it's not like the carts were being heavily pounded on before they were sold, and 95 times out of 100 if you were buying a game it was the brand new copy anyway, at least if you were buying a game for a current system.

If we wanted to try a game we had to use the copy that was already opened, and we had to be on the ball about not saving anything to the carts, not that that was generally a problem (this was back in the days where you generally typed in a code to get back to a given point in the game.)

For PC games, we could take them home for demo and re-shrink them to our hearts' content, with two exceptions: 1) if the box had a security seal, or 2) if the disks came in a sealed envelope inside the box. Then it was hands off. Returned games were re-shrinked and sold as new, unless they had one of the aforementioned security seals (or the materials had visible wear or something was missing), then it was returned to the manufacturer. Babbage's had such a liberal return policy at the time this was pretty much the only real way they wouldn't completely lose their shirt on returns - you could buy a $50 game, wait a few months, bring it back with the receipt, and get the $50 back, even though by then it was $15 or $10 and we were putting it back on the shelf at that price.

Yes, I know that Ion Storm blew it with the next two in the series, so while it's possible, few developers do it any more.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution doesn't come out until the end of the month. Do you know something we don't? I've been hearing nothing but good things about it, especially from the PC gaming press.

To be fair a LOT of that was hardware cartridge costs because the game was so big. A good double digit percentage of classic game costs was the cart itself.