Executable code is tiny by comparison. All that data is textures, models, animation, and audio (sound effects, voice, and music). So, no, there's nothing to ponder, really.

Well, sheezh, yo don't have to be an azz abot it.

Hggs and kizzes,
a Yank.

Of course we do a lot about car safety. Are you kidding me? Traffic laws, speed limits, mandatory seatbelts laws, airbags, crumple zones, government mandated safety ratings, harsh DWI penalties, etc. But there's only so much you can reasonably do to protect people while still leaving that mode of transportation viable and cost-effective.

Besides, everyone understands that accidents happen, and can't realistically be 100% avoided or prevented. They're part of life, and while sad and horrible, it's so much more awful when someone deliberately takes away someone else's life. So, I understand what you're saying, but don't think you can really compare auto accidents and terrorism (or disease and terrorism). It's the vicious and deliberate act of terrorism that makes the deaths so much more shocking than an accident or death by illness.

And also, you're perhaps neglecting the "terror" part of terrorism. It's not really about the number of deaths... it's about the psychological impact they have. That's why bringing down a plane is probably more effective (terror-wise) than randomly shooting people in a mall - because people are already afraid of flying to some degree, and the fear of someone deliberately bringing down the plane only heightens that. Granted, the effect would be heightened at a shooting during the Christmas season as you mentioned. Ugh... I can't even bring myself to understand what sort of mindset it would take to do things like that.

They already went after NCSoft, and it appeared the result of that was a settlement / dismissal of the case. The settlement is confidential, so we'll never really know what the real result was. Activision is one of my least-favorite companies, but I hope they tear Worlds.com a new one.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/04/27/worlds-com-vs-ncsoft-lawsuit-settled/

No, actually, Greenpeace can pull numbers out of their ass all day long, and few people challenge them on it, because "it's for a good cause", and "they're just trying to save the planet", etc. The whole "somewhere in the middle" has more relevance when you're talking about arguments with lots of grey areas. We're talking about simple numbers here. Greenpeace made a bunch of guesses on the numbers involved, and they've been called out on their very bad estimates and incorrect assumptions.

Apple has all the number they need for a very accurate reading on power usage. Unless you're going to accuse Apple of out and out falsifying those numbers (it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, as one whistleblower would blow the lid on this), then I'm going to have to side with Apple here as being closer to "the truth".

I think you can only call this a "Streisand Effect" if no one knew about Mass Effect & Dragon Age and their various romantic options. If this were some no-name game that suddenly became well known to the world thanks to this bunch of busybodies, it might be apt. However, millions and millions of people have already played all these games, and this group won't affect that number in any way.

I have a feeling that the new generation of consoles will have the technical ability to lock out used games, but it will be up to the publisher/developer whether or not to actually utilize this feature. It's sort of hard to figure out how this will play out... we see EA certainly moving in this direction, with more functionality available out of the box if new than if used. But an outright block on used titles? I have a feeling customers may push back against something like that. To date, console-based DRM has been fairly unobtrusive. You buy the disc, throw it in, and play. This would be the first time a console-based DRM scheme went toe to toe against a common and expected usage scenario.

I think the only way that could be avoided is if an additional measure of convenience is gained to offset the loss (similar to Steam). For instance, one potential benefit of this system would be that we should no longer be required to put the disc in the drive to play. 100% hard drive installations would be really nice for your few favorite games. Or perhaps they need to start offering more competitive pricing at the lower-end of the spectrum to compete with the crazy deals Steam has.

Hacked? That's a typical euphamism for "my PC is chock full of viruses and keyloggers thanks to the shady sites I visit and random shit I download and install, but I'm going to go ahead and blame Valve for losing my account."

I'm not sure why you mock "then don't buy it posts", and then proceed to tell everyone how it needs to be voted down by the free market? Granted, you included buying competitors products, but I'm under the assumption that people who post in this thread are actually interested in games and purchase them in some regular fashion...

That being said, yeah, totally agree with you. And btw, they don't give a shit about places like Slashdot - it's not really a gaming site... more a site for tech fans that also covers a few gaming stories that happen to coincide with Slashdot interests (i.e. anything DRM-related is ALWAYS picked up). They'd only start to care if the general gaming media and public started to vocally complain about it and also stopped buying their products.

Uh... what? I have nothing against Javascript (and tend to agree it's a decent choice as a learning language), but since when is Java a superset of all other languages? And "there's just nothing you can't do easily with it"? No language can claim that. None.

Sorry to be contrary, but when people start claiming that there's one do-all-be-all language, I'm going to have to disagree. I'm a game developer, so of course we use C/C++ for our game where maximum performance is absolutely critical. However, we also write a lot of supporting code: we use C# for tools, Python for scripting and tool customization, Lua for our build server, and even a lightweight custom scripting language that's used by the game directly. Oh, yeah, and of course our web developers use a lot of Javascript.

Each of these languages has strengths and weaknesses, so we use what we feel is the most appropriate language for the task at hand. Picking a single language and sticking with it come hell or high water seems as foolish to me as a carpenter who refuses to use anything but his one favorite tool for all his tasks.