Having worked at several startups with large environments where development routinely was leaned upon to jump into production I firmly believe that ideally developers should not install their software (or even touch it) once it is released. Allowing them to do so leads to band-aids, hacks, lack of documentation, short-cuts, and all other manners of badness.

Strictly maintaining that division between development and IT/end users helps ensure that development maintains a complete package. Incumbent in that is that the appropriate feedback loops into development must be established, implemented, and acted upon. Bug reporting, issue tracking, customer feedback, and the like are critical bits of information that cannot be ignored by development.

I'm sorry, but the lions share of the tax money (at least in CA) is not going to major corporations in the form of incentives. Most of it goes to state employees' salaries and benefits, the latter of which is grossly out of whack in this state.

I'm all for keeping a close eye on corporate/government activity, but saying that taxes are high because of it is just incorrect.

Having owned (and legally bought) D1, D2, the D2LoD, Starcraft, and Starcraft 2 I can honestly say that Blizzard packs enough value into their games (and supports them long after they need) that they've built up a reservoir of trust with their fans that I doubt they'll want to jeopardize. The fact that you can still plan D2 online 12 years after it was released is pretty amazing. Given the near ubiquitous access to broadband by gamers I don't fear need to be required to be online.

"Sorry your honor, I used a very long password made up of computer-generated, random characters: one that I could not possibly remember. I had it written on a scrap of paper on my desk and would only need to type it in on the infrequent chance that I had to reboot my computer. .... You should ask the detectives to re-search through the evidence they collected as the scrap of paper is likely in what they took."

You are correct.

Perhaps I'm just making things up but didn't Apple demand that the iPhone come with unlimited data?