I agree; maybe I was unclear. What I want is the ability to play an unlimited number of single-player-only characters and store the save data on my own, local machine.

There's no reason for Blizzard not to provide this option, except as DRM and maybe to encourage real-money exchanges. The only official explanation I've seen is some limp-wristed story about how they don't want players to spend a lot of time building up a locally-stored character, then decide they want to use it to Battle.net, and get upset when they find out they can't. Just sounds like an excuse though.

The real evil here, where players will suffer even if they don't mind jumping through the hoops, is the limit of 10 characters per game copy, even if they are only used for single player. That pisses me off. I've been told you don't "need" more than that many, because there are only five classes times two sexes, and apparently no exclusive character choices such that you would need alts for game-mechanics reasons. But you're SOL if you want to enjoy the game experience from level 1 forward and don't want to delete any of your old characters.

But... I went and picked up my collector's edition this morning anyway. I already play all-online games such as World of Warcraft with similar limitations. I can reluctantly live with with paying for Diablo III as long as I think of it that way: as a limited Internet service and not a game you can really, you know, have. It would be a better product if it were the latter, but oh well. Hopefully it will at least be fun.

The GP's post made sense to me.

Unequal sets. :)

The only way this would be "security through obscurity," in the sense that cryptography experts typically use that piece of jargon, is if they trying to be obscure about the means of hiding the flu data, in addition to hiding the flu data itself. Hiding the flu data is just plain old secrecy.

Since we are talking about scientifically reproducible data, I guess you might be hinting at an analogy to the mathematics or source code behind a cryptographic system: it's foolish to assume that bad guys wouldn't be able to learn facts about H5N1 anyway, in the same way that you shouldn't assume that crackers won't know how your security software operates. But, in a pragmatic context, some temporary secrecy might work out to be a good if imperfect idea—I don't really know.

What you say is true, but it doesn't really address security through obscurity. Yes, all information security is carried out through some form of literal obscurity, but the phrase "security through obscurity" is a piece of jargon that involves keeping the security system hidden. In other words, some security engineer has Idea A that can be used to protect Secret B, but only if A remains secret as well. That's bad.

Avoiding security through obscurity means drawing a clear box around the information you intend to obscure—that is, the key—and saying with confidence, "Nothing other than this needs to remain secret."

But then, the flu studies are the informational content, not the key nor a system used to keep that content secret, so security through obscurity really has little to nothing to do with this thread.

Indeed. Here is some good reading on the actual purpose of Hungarian notation, although of course it's used wrong far more often than not. I've never used it myself, correctly or otherwise, but I acknowledge that the original intent was at least sensible.

As a geek I'm honor-bound to demand some sort of support for this mathematically interesting statement. Were ebooks really adopted at a rate proportional to the number of ebooks already out there? It's plausible, but sadly I suspect this is just careless hyperbole.

for (;;);

/* We owe him a great deal. I'm glad to have benefited from his work and will honor his memory. */