That's the whole ball of wax. EA or Ubi? Next.

So what you're saying is, TSA screenings are unreliable as well as intrusive and carcinogenic?

Steam shows this as well under game details. Anno's says:

"3rd-party DRM: Solidshield Tages SAS, 3 machine activation limit"

This came up back the first time we saw a story about the activation limit... which I think was SPORE, and then people freaked out when they realized it was going to apply to Mass Effect also, and I think the activation limit was removed.

There's a lot about this here: http://steamdrm.flibitijibibo.com/the-big-drm-list/

Guru3D subsequently discovered that Ubisoft was less than helpful: 'Sorry to disappoint you — the game is indeed restricted to 3 hardware changes and there simply is no way to bypass that.' I, and many with me, will never buy games with such a draconian DRM scheme, as it's very likely that I'll swap out enough components to run into this issue.

UPDATE: We have been contacted by bluebyte over the weekend, the company that developed the Anno series. Our key has been pretty much unlocked allowing us to properly work on this article. To be continued ....

Hilarious. Ubisoft and EA are both on my "verify exactly how the DRM works before spending the money".

The bill of rights is an acknowledgement, not a permission slip. Rights can't be taken away, then can only be oppressed by force.

It's not particularly that scientists should make all the decisions, but rather, than we need an informed population and a very informed government in order to deal with modern problems.

In congress:

three physicists, one chemist, six engineers including a biomedical engineer, and
one microbiologist;

[...]

17 Representatives and four Senators had a doctoral (PhD) degree, and 197 members of the House and 60 Senators had a law degree. Five members
of the House and one Senator had a medical degree.

And quite a few are career politicians who moved up from state legislatures/etc.

In short, we're a nation run by lawyers and politicians, and have a tiny representation by engineers and scientists - people who have a demonstrated interest and capacity in how things actually work.

This is problematic because there simply isn't enough knowledge in congress to go around. Quite a few Americans, likewise, are voting from a position of complete ignorance and, instead of selecting a candidate who is very knowledgeable on the assumption that that candidate will make better decisions, quite a few Americans vehemently "vote their ignorance"; that is, they're looking specifically for a candidate who reflects their own biases and uninformed viewpoints.

As Isaac Asimov said:

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

Politics now seems to be almost entirely about money and religion, which is a shame, since while those things are important, they probably have very little impact on how we live our lives in the long run.

As soon as you actually USE the machine, though, bandwidth and IO charges will drive that up to $25+ quite easily, however. I sometimes experiment with Amazon boxes, but I just spin them up using a popular aws perl toolkit, use them, spin them down. It's really easy to create them and interact with them via script, but I wouldn't want to use them regularly.

I'm a fan of Virtacore. They're offering VMs on VMware vCloud Director, which means a full gui console, and pricing is basically cheap. (Cheaper than Amazon when you factor in even modest bandwidth and IO charges.)

It's too bad PHP doesn't scale.

Crystal Singer was definitely my favorite of her works. The 2nd one in particular I think was incredible.