M$? You mean MS - Microsoft?
Wait, oh, I get it -- it's because they like money?
I also like money, I wonder if I can get my /. name changed to regu£ar_gonza£ez.

And let's not forget about Bill and Hillary, who have their own legacy of corruption they left behind.

In other words, all national level politicians are bought and owned, else they wouldn't be able to make it on a nation-wide stage.

They would have to block the sales of the game, or face legal penalties. There is a workaround, however, that is used in every sizeable gaming community where Game A is not available in Region B for whatever reason -- a friend who *is* in Region A can buy the game as a gift, and then gift it to the person in Region B (whereupon B paypals money to A). Inconvenient? Definitely. But not insurmountable, if you're a regular on a gaming forum like Shacknews.

Oh, I agree, and I'm learning guitar right now. But comparing a video game to real life is missing the point. Spending 15 hours in Guitar Hero, I can have fun rocking out to classic songs. After 15 hours on a real guitar, I could play Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.

I've seen people play Crysis. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that there are some kind of weapons and enemies displayed on a monitor and you try to use the weapons to shoot them. Allow me to suggest an alternative. Buy a real gun and go to the shooting range. Buy a selection of guns, and practice until you're good. When you feel good and up to it, consider joining the Army so you can shoot real life people in the middle east. I've seen people play Forza. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that you take a plastic controller and maneuver a car around a racetrack displayed on a monitor, avoiding other vehicles at the same time. Allow me to suggest an alternative. Buy a sports car and go to your local track. Practice driving a lot, trying to avoid accidents. When you feel good and up to it, consider joining organized races at the racetrack. Wait, that sounds stupid.

Age of Conan does this -- if you gank people more then (iirc) 8 levels lower, you get murder points. The lower their level, the more murder points. If you have any murder points, all city guards will kill you on sight, vendors won't trade with you, etc. You have to work them off via questing. I can count on one hand how many times I've been killed by someone more then 8 levels above my own, due largely to this system.

Would you give, say, me permission to install a rootkit on your machine and monitor everything that you do on it? Yeah, that's how I feel about letting someone else - an individual or company - install a rootkit on *my* machine.

A word of warning - Aion uses GameGuard which for all intents and purposes, is a rootkit. The article is a bit outdated w/ regards to incompatibility issues with other apps, as the Steam incompatibility was fixed a month or two ago iirc. Either way, it's a terrible and invasive bit of software that I won't allow anywhere near my PC.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the one I assumed was the well-known, the negative world in Super Mario Bros. It wasn't exactly fun and it was a one-way trip so you had to restart your game if you got tired of playing the same level over and over again, but it was a novelty and something I doubt was meant to be found by the average gamer.

Can you imagine any possible news story where you would not find it relevant to bring up Bush? Let it go already, it's over.

I'm sure most here have played that online 20 questions game, which used user input to create an impressive database that would guess your item every time. What about using that kind of information as a captcha? Tell the user to do the answering for a predetermined item randomly chosen, and the user will navigate to the correct item via the answers. For instance, the captcha program says "Think of a %s ('bee', for this example) and answer the following questions:

CAPTCHA: Is it alive?
User: Yes
CAPTCHA: Is it bigger than a shoebox?
User: No
CAPTCHA: Does it fly
User: Yes
etc.

Sure, it would take a bit of time on the user's part, but it's fairly entertaining, easy for the end user, time-intensive on a large scale for scammers, and difficult for a computer to answer.

This has long since been discredited, and it's simple to disprove with basic logic. What's to prevent you from mailing an unsealed envelope to yourself? The date will be on it, and then five years later you can stuff it with the details of GE's new holographic television (or whatever), seal it, and voila! You "invented" it five years previous.

That's odd you can't tell the difference. While I speak French on a very rudimentary level, the difference in accents among various French speakers is fairly distinct to me. A couple years back, I saw the Godard film "Out of Breath" and knew within the first few minutes that the woman's French was odd just based on the sound of it (it's mentioned a bit later in the film that she is American).

I'm sure I'd miss out on more subtle varients akin to English as spoken by Texans vs. Alabamans, but gross differences are pretty obvious in my experience.

That's a bit odd. In my time in Paris, about a week also, I'd say it was 50/50. One thing I did notice was that an attempt to speak in French (rudimentary though mine may be - 4 years of high school french 15 years ago) was met with surprised pleasure and a much increased willingness to help, either via French, English, or gesturing and pidgin.