The majority of the times I ever considered skipping school was because I was being woken up at 7 in the morning and would have prefered another 2 hours of sleep when I would have been far more accepting of the idea.

I went through a period of roughly 2 months in my senior year where I went to sleep at 6PM and woke at around 2AM, now the absurdity of that aside, one benefit of doing so was I didn't miss a single day, wasn't late for a class, and my grades improved significantly. I believe these effects were a direct result of me being well rested, and with the ability to get an extra hours worth of sleep if I felt like it with time to spare.

Because that's a reasonable concern. Seriously, how many girls actually get knocked up at 12 that have a stable family situation? I don't think the majority of students should suffer starting school at 8 AM (at least where I'm at), to allay they concerns of a few parents who should be doing their job better. If your 12 year old is the kind of person who is going to get knocked up, I doubt starting school earlier is really going to change that.

I saw an interview with him on The Daily Show and he made mention of the parallel with Seldon.

As of march 2nd, the update notes for the steam client claim "Really fixed offline mode not always working". This would seem to indicate that valve is in no way trying to prevent people from playing in offline mode and technical issues will arise. Steam is of all the DRM models one of the least restrictive and in my opinion, other then having no DRM at all, preferred even over a simple disk check.

Conclusions should never be drawn from anecdotal observation, conclusions drawn from research which is instigated by anecdotal observations. Case in point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death anecdotes are rife with observation and sampling biases and are not reflective of a total sum of truth. Also your analogy between drunk driving and vaccines causing autism is not really parallel, drunk driving research has not been unsubstantiated.

Any activity where one must obtain permission before taking part in said activity is not a right, but in fact a privilege. This includes, driving, concealing a firearm, or owning a business. You can call it what ever you want, but the fact of what will happen if you do any of these things with out said permission precludes them being labeled as "rights".

As a side note, simply saying "WRONG", in all caps no less, does not a strong argument make. As far as I'm aware there is no legal precedent which supports your assertion, and if you would be willing to provide that support I will happily redact my statement.

Please, that's a complete oversimplification of what is a "mature" game. To make an analogy, would you say R rated movies are "just crap that try and shock and entertain children with some adult themes (violence & sex)"? Sure there are some movies(and games) which use that formula to generate hype and sales, but lets take a look at games which, may have violence as part of the game, and in fact might have some sex in there, but which also have a richly developed story and plot, which requires a deep understanding of adult "themes". Case in point, there are no Mass Effects for the Wii.

What are you talking about? StatCounter has information an russia and china.

Sure, if your limiting it to 1 per second, but they can get into the hundreds of millions of passwords per second with GPU setups.

Assuming people have the balls to actually cancel their pre-order and not buy the game. There are a lot of people who bitch and moan about game companies decision's concerning their games, but very rarely do these people seem to do the most effective thing to tell the game company that they don't like it, which is to NOT BUY THE GAME. Its like the people who complain about securROM yet who still buy the game and just send a letter(or so they claim) to the company. They don't give a shit about any of that letter crap, once they have your money they could care less, and if you continue to buy their games you're just perpetuating the problem. Vote with your wallets people.