I use it as a Credit Card broker only.

Each interaction with Paypal goes straight to my mastercard, after which I immediately delete my credit card information from Paypal.

DRM is working fairly well for Steam.
IIRC, when connecting to a game server with full Steam integration the Client first requests an authentication packet, based on a pub key from their client ID. The server then requests an authorization key from Valve, if that's provided, the user may begin connecting. On the client end, this dance is played directly with the Valve auth servers to even launch the game.
Yes, both avenues have been hacked, but in doing so you're left with either:
1. Playing only with other people who have hacked the client and server, without any match making support for finding such servers
2. Playing alone

No.

It's because they cost hundreds of dollars.

I want an open source phone, I really do, but I can't justify spending 500 on little more than a PDA + phone. I already had a PDA once, hardly used it, and phones that just work as phones are less than a hundred these days. Make an open source phone that's a reasonable price and I'll buy it.

"lock down" was meant to imply "crash", sorry for that misunderstanding.

Probably just an incompatibility with my KVM.

P4V and Cisco VPN commonly steal focus when disconnected. Many, many other apps steal focus for other reasons. Not commonly first-party, but still frustrating as hell coming from XFCE wherein I can block it almost entirely.

Cisco VPN _works_. I never meant to imply that it does not. It's just _frustrating_. It'll steal focus, but then P4V will do the same. If I'm happening to use multiple workspaces then the alert window for Cisco VPN can get buried on another page. Clicking the icon does not recover the VPN dialog, instead seeming to do /nothing at all/. I end up having to page through workspaces and perform a manual search for it.

Ooh, polished.

For a good example of apps which can lock down a modern OSX system look no farther than Screensavers. Should one of those fail (like, say, Electric Sheep) then short of rebooting there doesn't seem to be a good way to recover. Incidentally, it's why my Mac doesn't have the screensaver enabled anymore.

It's brittle as in the software doesn't stand up to pressure. The hardware, meh. The mushed in corners you mentioned tend to not occur on machines which are not made of malleable metals. Just about every other Mac owner I know has suffered a terminally clicking DVD drive and prematurelly failed hard disc. Anecdotal, sure, but enough to keep me from buying one again.

Anyhow, stating that the likes of VPN & SCM clients not being developer... Really? Really?! C'mon.

I've done that. Appears to have no permanent effect.

Ugh. Macs.

Disclaimer: I've been a Linux user since 1994.

For my recent position I decided to try full-time development on a Macbook Pro. Things have been... Less than pleasant.

I'm not used to a single application taking down the entire system, or frequent and unpredictable focus-switching. Those irritants came quickly, in the first few weeks. Common dev apps like the Cisco VPN, P4V, et al, behave very poorly in a Mac environment. Not an indictment of apple, for certain, but still a real irritant you end up having to cope with.

The hardware has been shaky as hell, too. My partition table got nuked after a standard update recently. The display frequently refuses to change brightness. Hell, I can't even use the damn thing as a laptop because when running a VM and a few idle applications the CPU cranks up and the heat hits 70C.

Not to mention the highly variant battery life. Sometimes it lasts unbelievably long, other times it fails to properly enter standby and it drains away without warning.

Now, trying to plug in peripherals has been a pain. The Microsoft Ergo keyboard I have ends up with a bizarre Command key mapping, and there's no clear way to define a per-device mapping. Now that I've remapped it the OS absolutely /refuses/ to revert the mapping. So now Alt and Command seem permanently swapped on the Macbook's integrated keyboard.

Sounds like I got a nightmare Macbook, eh?

Well, I had a Ti Powerbook a ways back too, ended up giving it away due to similar ongoing nuisances.

At least MacPorts brings some sanity to the package management...

Macs are beautiful. Hardened beauty like a finely cut diamond, and just as brittle too.

It varies. Usually between $0.06 and $0.08 per kw/h.

The city is also the local utility, acting as a broker of sorts for the provincial utility BC Hydro. Here's the related bylaw:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:lXaNBxkSEuMJ:www.newwestcity.ca/cityhall/Leg_Info/Electronic_Packages/2009/0420_Apr20/CW/Reports/cw13.pdf+new+westminster+electrical+rates+kw/h&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a