I was talking about pirates, not myself. :P

Remember: Time is money, pirating costs time, buying costs money. And you got it exactly right 17 year olds are more likely to not be able to afford a high end computer, so will have more antiquated computers.

I still play a lot of Quake III, so I bump into more 30 and 40 year olds there actually. :)

Also quick disclaimer: I've never played, downloaded, pirated or know anyone who plays Crysis 2.

So I'm looking at "Have fun playing on your antiquated hardware with a bunch of 17 year olds." and thinking, what? You need a little more of a meaty comment to chew on there.

But how many people kept it on their computers for over a week?

I'd bet a good chunk of those are from "Will my computer run Crysis 2?" or "Is this game worth buying or is it garbage?" throw in a few hoarders (You know, those ones who pirate everything, but never play a thing) on top of poor college students who are surviving on ramen noodles.

Also, since beta leaked before the actual final version, I'd bet many folks who bought it pirated it before hand, just to see if it would be worth their money.

You don't need a terrorist organization, we have what's needed to do this already.

Anybody with a vendetta against a website can basically shut it down with a bit of effort, pretending to be an organization.

Good old fashioned internet trolls will cause mass chaos if this actually goes into effect as written.

By the way: Raid finder is only for the current tier raid (Deathwing) not older raids, you have it backwards. Big thing is it's on an "easy" difficulty only, so you don't get the "best" gear from it. This will probably change, most people are wanting to do normal and even heroic content with raid finder raids.

We'll probably see raid locks go away eventually, there's a hardcore mentality that things have to stay "hard" in terms of needing lots of time invested, instead of "hard" as a form of challenge. They serve an important purpose allowing people to take more time to finish raids, which tend to be giant instances taking hours and hours of time. If it takes you 6 hours to kill all the bosses, having your time investment go away after you leave is bad. Most guilds spread these across 2~3 days in smaller chunks. Many guilds even invest just an hour a night in raiding, making it their main focus.

As far as rez sickness, as well as the waiting time, they're an integral part of world pvp. Without them you end up in situations where new players are camped for hours on end.

It's more than just parents, it is a factor, but it isn't a big thing.

What would help more than anything would be simply to hire more teachers. Classes are overcrowded, and you have ratios of 50~70 students to one teacher.

In the past, students who fell behind could be caught and individually helped by teachers, right now, there's just too many students per teacher to be able to catch up, so students who don't get help at home don't have a chance. Add onto that kids today having to pick up more than their parents did, and you end up with even willing parents who can't help.

Money spent on building classrooms and hiring more teachers would go worlds beyond investing in laptops and other things. The ideal ratio is about 1 teacher for every 7 students, that isn't practical, but if we could get it to where it was 20 years ago (1 teacher for every 30 students) it would be an improvement.

There's an easier alibi, which is being completely honest:

I was really curious where the fedex truck would end up, so just for kicks, I fedexed my phone to myself.

I wanted to see why they were taking so damned long to get my packages to me.

They're using two types of controllers: The wii controllers and the new one. Most games will probably end up using the wii motion plus types of controllers.

It's not even a huge leap in innovation, they're bringing the same "gimmick" that turned out to be a giant success with the DS to a console.

It's also enough of a nod that Sony is listing their new PSP as being workable as a controller with PS3, and selling it as such.

Radio has completely replaced television news for me. I live in Minnesota, so our local public radio (Minnesota Public Radio) has very solid news. Commercial news outlets (other radio stations, television) have totally devolved to the point of not really having any actual news to me. Nothing on reporting the local legislature and goverment, nothing on local happenings aside from "people stories" and an increased take on always pushing whatever big crisis is going on.

What's sad is, most of the broadcasters are the same, and over the years I've seen worse and worse stories pushed on them, and you can see a sinking feeling on their end as things change up. They have gotten a little better lately, which is good, but they still obviously have awful stuff pushed on them by their parent company (which is sadly... Fox News)

Yes, Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm will also be on separate ladders as well.

As someone who's worked for years as a web developer: Knowing what browser people are using is 100% needed.

Mostly, you use it as a priority list as far as what browser bugs you're fixing, it's not as serious now, but I know there's many web developers waiting for IE6 usage to drop below .1% so they can safely ignore it.

Now, using content headers to "guess" which version of a page to serve up is wrong (you can easily use mobile stylesheets for that) but we're nowhere near that kind of real world application.

New music isn't the problem, it's that they're sitting on, basically, all music from the past century. Recording (compared to say, literature) is a new industry, and we don't have that much public domain to draw on.

We have roughly 75 years of public domain (mid 1850~1925 roughly) for recorded music. Before that everything is based more around performance art, as in you make your own, instead of you going out, and listening to a specific person perform, mainly the original artist. As a result, the RIAA sits on about half of the medium. This will become less significant over time of course, but we still have a long way before their chunk isn't "significant". Assuming they keep extending copyright, which has now been set solidly at "whenever steamboat willy came out".

Writing, by contrast, has thousands of years of public domain. And while we have some written music, even that doesn't go back as far, since we only have roughly 400 years worth of music. Offering little variety in comparison to ancient history and myth. Even considering it that way, the recording industry has a strangle hold on a quarter of the music we have in human collective memory, as far as spans of time.

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.