It's probably because iD don't have the rights to the game. They have, after all, released the source for most of their other games.

There have been tourist trips to Chernobyl for over a decade already. I was there this summer.

Pripyat is already wrecked, since there have been a lot of looters going through the area. Our guide told us that the apartment buildings are completely stripped by now, even the toilet seats are gone.

We visited an abandoned school as well. The old swimming pool area had obviously been used by kids who went there to drink Vodka and smash the place.

LTE is primarily targeted at computers and similar devices, not mobile phones (yes, that is one target market as well, but not the prime market).

I have seen presentations from more than one operator that wants to try and convert people away from fixed broadband to HSPA/LTE even for home use, altough I do not know what Verizon is planning. But in my mind, LTE on a smart-phone is overkill, at least for the foreseeable future, unless you use it as a modem.

I'm sure you're just joking, but a lot of people have this misconception that space is cold.

The few particles floating around out there (background radiation included) is very cold yes, only a few degrees K. However, these particles are few and far between, and the actual vacuum of space has no temperature at all (although I'm not sure how to factor in virtual particles into this).

I believe that I read somewhere that floating unshielded through space, you are more likely to die from overheating, since you can only lose excess heat through black body radiation.

Currently means a theoretical top speed of 150Mbps in the downlink, actual field speed here in Stockholm have been measured at ~60Mbps (but I think 30Mbps is more common, always depends on radio conditions and cell usage). Currently work is ongoing to reach 1Gpbs theoretical top speed.

The big thing I think is the reduced latency. For HSPA type technologies you typically end up with 80 - 120 ms latency added from the packets trip trough the Radio Access Network (RAN) and Packet Core networks. For LTE, the specification states that the combined latency of the RAN and PC should be around 5ms.

That being said, having LTE on a phone isn't really that necessary, at least for the immediate future (unless you want to use your phone as a modem). LTE was developed with mobile data in mind, and primary target consumers are laptop users and IPTV consumers (no that there are very many yet). Yes, you can use it on your smartphone, but the advantages will be very slim over 3G.

Me and a friend used LaTeX/SVN for all of our collaborative theses during our university time, and it worked great.

Indeed, I did just that while in the US on a work trip. I got comments like "huh, passports a funny" and the like quite often. I also tried to use my Swedish ID card (which is printed in both Swedish and English, with a big "Date of Birth" in the middle); that resulted in a confused look, and the the question "uh, how old are you?". But hey, at least it worked.

I was actually quite amazed at the fact that there were places (Target for instance) where you could use a credit card without entering a PIN or showing ID, signature only. Over here you pretty much have to have one or the other.

Here in Sweden national ID cards are quite common, so it's no problem to get around on that.

Adult here, with a well paid job. I live in a city, and I have never felt like I needed to own a car. In fact, do not even have a drivers license.

I really need to get a new battery, this one has been threatening to die on me for some time now.

The Sun is throwing photons at us, which is how both light and heat get's here.

And that is the problem. Yes, things in space will cool down, however, the only way this occurs is through what is called "black body radiation", that is, the emission of photons. Cooling down this way is slower than being cooled by air, water or some other substance.

You would be surprised. Starcraft sold 1.5 million copies in the first year after it was released, but has over the following decade sold a total of ~11 million copies, and are still selling today. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starcraft#Reception)

I think the cause is more likely that they understand that this CD check really doesn't affect the number of sold copies in any substantial way, so why not give the players the option to play without the disc if they want?

Indeed. One of those mythical notebooks that are permanently deprived of an internet connection.

And be up again, this is something you do ONCE. Ever.

I won't pretend this isn't a problem, it has been problematic since the time of Half-Life, and probably before. My guess is that the company will replace such a copy however.

Seeing how this works for the games Blizzard has out today, I doubt this will be the case. I have entered my BW serial key into my battle.net account, and have since used their torrent-based installer to install the game on several computers.

They might. Blizzards history however indicates that this activation requirement will be dropped after some years.

But all that wasn't my point of my original post. The point was that you can't go around saying you don't have restrictive DRM and then implement restrictive DRM, but just less so than someone else.

For your definition of restrictive. Nothing in the currently spec:ed DRM restricts me from doing anything that I would want to do. It might restrict some of the things YOU want to do, but please keep your generalizations for yourself.

What exactly are you talking about?

It's a single online activation. It would not surprise me if they release a patch sometime in the future to remove even that, especially if they take down the auth server. Blizzard has done similar things in the past, although on a small scale. You are not, since 1.15, required to have a CD in your CD drive to play Starcraft or Broodwars.

I don't mind that they are trying to protect the single player part of the game from casual copying. That multipalyer is forced to be on battle.net only is slightly annoying, but I had not intended to play anywhere else anyways.