One of the dead tree science mags did an article about this a month or two ago as well (I think it was American Scientist).

Nope, that was unrelated. Penny Arcade did a comic series on Minecraft, and the resulting traffic buckled Notch's homegrown registration/payment/account management system. He moved it to the Amazon Cloud over the weekend and has been optimizing the minecraft.net site since then.

We didn't throw people in jail for smoking weed 100 years ago. We also executed people much more often.

How big would a volume be? My ebook reader starts chugging once the document gets to be over a few MB.

Why would it matter if person B cannot see the app and/or gets pissed off? They can't use the app anyway as they don't meet the requirements.

Nvidia users are supposed to get triple-head gaming with SLI support later in April with the new driverset for Fermi. It will require two or more cards in SLI as they only offer dual output cards. The feature name is 3d Vision Surround, but the triple-head feature is not tied to the 3d vision part.

We have relatively cheap panels as well, but their problem is low efficiency. The current higher efficiency panels usually need exotic materials and manufacturing processes. If this new tech can replace both groups of cells, then it would be a huge boon.

Of course the game was delivered to you, you just had a technical problem with your PC preventing you from actually playing it. This isn't any different than when you buy physical media from a retail store. If you had the same issue with a physical copy of a PC game and tried to take it back to Best Buy, they would have told you to piss off because you had already opened it. There are plenty of legitimate things to criticize about digital distribution in general and Steam in particular, but this isn't really one of them as it applies equally to physical media.

Yes it is.... unless you're Russian. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/12/2818467.htm

If you reverse a charge for goods or services that were actually delivered to you, you are committing fraud and deserve to have your account suspended. Their refund policy is clearly stated, and you agree to it whenever you make a purchase.

You opted in because you left the game on "Always Keep This Game Up-To-Date". Of course, if you re-downloaded the game from scratch I'd imagine you wouldn't have a choice as it would install the newest update. Ultimately, this is the game developer's fault, not Steam. They chose to patch their game with that content and make that the default patch level on Steam. Steam is just the distribution platform, they don't have any creative or content control regarding the games.

My understanding of the article is that Amazon delisted ALL McMillan books, not just ebook versions that were impacted by the pricing change. I don't think Amazon has anything close to a monopoly on distribution of either physical or digital books, so there probably isn't anything illegal about this. It sounds shady as hell, though. It's basically using your large marketshare/leverage in one market to force your will on customers/vendors in another market.