You had me at "beer."

So long as Nintendo's updates focus completely on piracy, instead of adding new features to the Wii, I'm going to continue pirating their games. I'm not ashamed to say it. Same goes for my DS. I may be part of the problem, but it doesn't seem like there's any way to be part of the solution. How many of the last major updates for the Wii have been focused primarily on preventing homebrew? All but one? The only one I can think of is the 4.0 update, which did try and stop homebrew, but also added the SD card channel support.

Way to go, Nintendo. We all must be criminals. Then again, I'm pretty bitter...

That said, I've never really had any major problems with PSN. At least, no more than I've had with Live. The games don't even cost more, only the console. I actually don't mind paying more for the console, considering Blu-ray and free online play. After the price of a 360 and a couple years of Live, you've hit the price of the PS3 (and not the cheapest one, either). But this comment is all opinion. So carry on.

Since when is this not an issue? Enabling backups on the Wii is almost trivial, these days. And modchip installation is only getting easier.

Don't forget requiring gamers to buy each campaign separately.

I'd be much more willing to get into reverse engineering, actually.

Er, why is this news? This exact item has been on sale at ThinkGeek for a couple years, now. Self-destruct capabilities and everything.

Windows 7 upgrade, $50, $200 if you have firefox installed? ..

You must not have a Wii, because it's quite a bit more complicated than that. For the sake of the community, allow me to explain:

There are ways to run homebrew on a Wii without leaving (much) trace. The problem is that this is really inconvenient to do, so most users opt to install the Homebrew Channel. This is where Nintendo believes their justification comes in. The install method includes using a hacked save file for Twilight Princess. The horse's name in the game has been changed to induce a stack smash, enabling some shell code to run that launches the Homebrew Channel installer.

This of course poses certain risks, but to date I don't think anyone has had any problems since Nintendo has been taking measures to prevent the Homebrew Channel from being installed. So basically, it either works fine, or not at all. I have yet to see the HBC pose any real risk or hear of it causing problems.

And that's just scratching the surface. There are custom IOS modifications that can allow you to run backups, play actual DVDs, change your system menu themes, and a plethora of other things that could potentially cause problems if not used with caution.

Preloader (I mentioned it in an above comment) works by renaming the system menu and installing itself in its place. When SM4.0 was released, there were some problems that would cause your Wii to report that it was bricked. This has since been fixed, and I don't think the Wii homebrew communtiy worried about it too much because the problem was a known issue and has since been fixed.

And don't get me started on pirate WAD installations that let you install virtual console and WiiWare titles for free. What I'm getting at is that it's painfully obvious when a Wii has been modified. The current IOS is v60, and a lot of IOS mods install to IOS v249 or 247. One look at your Wii's NAND will tell the tale.

Even if Nintendo did start charging for hacked Wiis, it doesn't matter. Any reasonably experienced Wii hacker/hack user will have Preloader installed, which will allow you to recover from a brick without having to bother with Nintendo (maybe just a partial brick, but it's better than nothing).

I was a little nervous, it being my first time an all. But Linux was respectful, gentle, and understanding. We had dinner and a few drinks, then headed to the bedroom. We took it slow at first, but then things really heated up.

Then I smelled smoke and realized the old, old Quantex machine I was running was about to catch fire.

Where we're going we don't need roads.

They need to hurry up with those flying cars. And now .

Believe it or not, back in the dial up days we had unlimited for $20/mo., and the number was local so that cost nothing extra. I was fairly young, so there might have been a usage cap without me knowing, but we never once couldn't connect. Go Concentric!

I sure am glad they didn't try this in central Florida, they would have had some huge bandwidth usage on their hands in protest. It's strange hearing about stuff like this in other states, because down here, Time Warner is pretty generous. We called and told them about a couple small outages, and they bumped up our internet speed for free. That said, their upstream offerings suck for basic plans (max ~70kb/s), but we were bumped to about 100kb/s upload max. Not too shabby for free.

So, you know, I can use 44 gigs by Wednesday and save myself some time. Thanks, Time Warner!