If they set up Diablo 3 the same way as StarCraft 2...

Install restrictions -- Install on as many computers as you like, just have your account handy. Each install gets three "guest" accounts on the machine, which have no access to online play, and don't record achievements.

Internet connection -- there's a one time authentication, don't have internet connection on the computer you're installing on? There's a offline activation code available from the website. This supposedly has to be re-entered once a year if you don't connect online.

The future -- It's always playable in offline mode, it doesn't need battle.net to run, just for the online aspects. And given you can still actually buy Diablo I in stores, Blizzard keeps supporting most of its games.

The bugs -- They don't use sony style drm. Blizzards philosophy is to control the online space, and not worry about normal piracy. They see the future in online multiplayer and social gaming, thus the removal of lan in sc2, which takes out the legal loophole in South Korea starcraft I had.

They did ban people who were cheating single player mode while online. Those people were using it to get the online achievements and portraits, which are disabled when you use cheats normally, but not when you use a trainer to hack the game.

People who use trainers in offline mode for single player weren't banned, but they don't get achievements either (which is the point)

Their critieria is a bit strict.

Honestly, if someone manages to hijack the password for my slashdot and forums accounts, its not that big a deal. At worst, they can pretend to be me on a forum somewhere.

I keep a few separate passwords for email, all of them secure, I keep a very secure one for banking type activities online that I change on a regular basis (same goes for email).

I keep another password for things I assume are completely insecure, and don't care if people break into it ever. This is for things like game downloads and the like.

For my actual bank... I don't go online, at all, it doesn't exist on my computer, I recieve bank records by mail, and keep them in a filing cabinet. Why? The bank "forgets" records after a few months, and charges a fee to dig through my accounts. So instead, I keep a permanant record so I have a physical court usable record of my finances, and deal with the bank for major issues in person directly. I can't get more secure than that.

As much as people fight against screen scrapers, they're always people who are your visitors trying to get at your content outside of a web browser. There's an exception for robots who are using them as spam sites, but those are more a niche trick.

So what do you do? You have to make ads a bit more flexible than just the fixed image. People want to scrape your site? Great! Make an RSS feed, but sneak a "Sponsored by Product X, The most fantastic thing ever!" into it. You create the same ad presence, and people don't become adverse to your product from intrusive advertising, but still get the catchy saying in their head.

A clean, machine readable, site is at the top of the index in search engines. And that's far more important to driving traffic to your site than making things hard to read for bad spiders. On top of that, you want your site to look good when pulled up on someones cell phone while looking up data, and as more and more of the web goes away from the classic desktop setup, this gets more and more important.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21654883/The-Golden-Book-of-Chemistry-Experiments for a link to the book.

Most of what I learned about chemistry came from an old science kit from my dad as well as a book that he had as a child growing up (with lots of physical experiments as well) I also got a full dissection kit from my grandfather when I was eight.

I was also learning how to cook starting when I was seven, and made an absolutely horrid cake (okay sweetie, you pick the ingredients, and lets see how it works!) amazingly, it was edible...

Talking about removing rulers from science kits seems like a slippery slope to me, my science kit had razors, beakers, a tealight bunsen burner, needles and tweezers.

Put a label on it and say adult supervision required, and trust the adult to keep the kids from whacking eachother over the head with sticks. A bratty kid who pokes another kid bad enough to seriously injure them will find something outside the science kit to do the same thing, taking things out of the science kit wont do a bit of good.

Its an interesting point of view, in recent years, many companies have been pushing the view that products they make are also their intellectual property, in addition to software. Some people see this acceptable, as you do, others think this is a horrible thing, and don't accept it.

For your toaster example, as a customer, you actually do have the right to go to Wal-Mart, take a $20 toaster, and say you only want to pay $10 for it. That's called haggling over the price, which is perfectly legal. Many places still are fine with haggling, especially if its on something they know probably wont sell anytime soon, although they may say no deal as well.

But lets say, you buy an alarm clock for $10, and you can modify it so it becomes a toaster. You're still in your rights to do that as well. The alarm clock maker's company may say what you've created is an abonination, and you voided your warrenty, but that's not stealing, its altering something you own.

Companies are trying to create a new idea, which is everything they make is intellectual property, so they own it, even if they sell the product, since the product is their "idea". This hasn't happened yet though, the laws still side with consumers for the most part on this, but they're trying to push the law in their favour, so that anything companies (or people) make is owned by the person who makes it, not the one who bought it, which is what all of this arguing is about.

Its a movement towards the elimination of personal property, and making everything owned by the companies who produce the goods when carried out to its extreme.

I've seen several great open source projects out there fail. No matter how great your programmers are, you still need direction.

A distinction needs to be drawn , there are programmers out there who make good project leads, and there are programmers out there who have a good aesthetic sense. More often than not, some poor schmo who's godly at code but horrible at project management gets stuck with the job.

The commercial model is out there because it works. You can adapt it for things that don't necessarily turn a profit, but are maintainable over a long period of time. Any project without guidance will fail, open source, closed source, commercial or just for fun. There always has to be someone leading the direction of it.