What is a 'change management process'? I may have heard of it under a different name, but those three words in that order make no sense to me.

Ozone layer depletion was never "going to freeze the earth", it was going to give us skin cancer. We stopped damaging it, now it's getting better.

Ubisoft are not the first company to do this. My previous employers, Jagex, launched a games portal about two years ago where all the games required a continuous internet connection... including the single player games.

I'm not going to compare and contrast the technical details, as I don't know Ubisoft's secrets and I'm still bound by a confidentiality clause from Jagex. The social effects, however, are discoverable from publicly available information from multiple online game providers, not just Jagex, and are therefore not something I have to keep silent about :)

• If you game to kill time while travelling, this product is a couple of years ahead of it's time (Free WiFi is rare in the UK, mobile broadband is spotty and can be expensive).
• Online saved games are good, provided they are not destroyed if your client crashes (happened to a friend with Braid).
• Free demos that ask you to create a free account in order to save your progress are a bad idea (my girlfriend saw this and assumed they wanted money, so went to a different game site).
• Cheating and hacking is still implementation specific, so piracy is probably still possible (I've seen YouTube videos of someone cheating so insanely that their score wrapped around the 2^31 mark and almost made it back to zero).

I can believe it. My dad has an anecdote from a friend (yes, it's that tenuous, I don't know any Americans :)) who was given a free ride in a helicopter in the US. He kept hearing this irregular 'ping', and commented that it was a strange noise for a navigation system, only to be told that was the sound of bullets ricocheting off the bottom of the helicopter. Now, I don't know when this was, so I can readily believe it's been stopped for all the technical reasons you just gave.

Lots of people are using jaywalking as an example non-crime in these comments. Just so you all know, jaywalking is not generally against UK law; the only places you can't do it are motorways (where anyone going less than 50mph will cause problems), railway crossings while the barrier is down, and small patches of road next to lit pedestrian crossings. Everywhere else, it's your judgement.

Now, for the technology itself, I think it will help catch a lot of minor criminals, rural fly-tippers, and an unexpectedly large number of farm-animal-fancying zoophiles, but it will have very little effect on organised crime. Why? Dazzle from small lasers. What's the cost of a CD/DVD burner?

I don't like perfect surveillance - this country has too many laws for any one person to know, so I have no idea if I'm breaking any or not.

One person taking charge? Sounds like management to me. Which came first, the gang or the manager?

You don't need to compete with a AAA to be successful. I know this because I am a one-person game developer, and my best estimate of my income is somewhere around $85k.

Oops, I didn't mean to post that anonymously... brief summary: all big games companies seem to have this problem, even those that try very hard to avoid it. I blame the middle managers. I left Jagex because of a middle manager being extremely unpleasant, despite the considerable efforts of the senior management to make the company an awesome one to work in.

What makes a contractor any better or worse at managing information than the government itself?

In principle? The bottom line of government is the best interest of the nation, the bottom line of bussinesss is profit. In practice, of course, a democratic (small 'd') government cares about being popular, so it has to keep taxes low and employment high (i.e. buy from the lowest bidder based in their own country).

Unfortunately, 95% delivery failure does not mean 95% spam. Some spam gets delivered to my inbox, and I'm certain that some legitimate email gets blocked. Unfortunately, the businesmen who like to use "email marketing" have no idea how much of a problem it is, and the technical people doing the filtering refuse to bounce (instead of black hole) suspected spam as doing so would work as a DoS amplifier.

It's not a question of cryptography, it's a question of accounting. Consider:

1. Alice creates a character in "Second World of Runes Online".
2. Alice starts of with 10 gold pieces.
3. Alice has a memory poking tool, and uses it to change that 10gp into (1<<31)gp.

If the game is written badly, it will let Alice get away with this. If the game is written properly, the server isn't listening to her client, and will only let her spend 10gp no matter what her client claims to have. For reasons of supply and demand, I am sure that every MMOG that has ever suffered from gold farmers is written properly in this regard.

While I'm glad to see someone finally NOT assuming 100% of pirates are potential customers, I don't see any justification for the 10% estimate they give here. Anyone have any sources? (Yes, I did RTFA!)

It could be that pirates have significantly more apps installed than anyone else - not an unreasonable possibility, as they won't be wondering if they *really* want to spend their money on, for example, fifteen almost identical clones of the same miniclip game.

I have seen similar things from India, claiming we have already made contact with extra-terrestrial aliens and have a fully working hyperdrive. I have no idea if they are serious-but-wrong like our news often is, or just parody like The Onion.

Given they have a trademark on Mickey Mouse (which is $-renewed eternal), I've never understood is why they care so much about the copyright on Steamboat Willie. Seriously, does anyone still watch the old black and white 'toons? Can they really make more money from republishing 70-year-old works than they spend on lobbying for yet another copyright extension?