Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a multiplayer game - as far as I know the cracked game will NOT let you play in multiplayer mode... so the majority of the people that downloaded the game probably purchased legal keys or stuck to playing the single player mode or playing with friends in LAN.

Basically, the download acts as DEMO, incentive to buy the access to the multiplayer mode, and it definitely does not mean that a download equals a lost sale.

As for Crysis 2, I'm not sure how many of those downloads were just to "benchmark" their video cards...

Even so, even if a large part of the downloads were pirates, it doesn't mean lost money... it just means they don't make as much money as they wanted. I know in my own case I'm currently taking advantage of every Steam sale to buy games I pirated and enjoyed in the past - I couldn't afford spending 40 euro on a game but now I have no problems paying 5-10 euro for each of the STALKER games, for example.

I currently have over 200 games bought, in the Steam account.

VPS won't be good enough for your needs - most VPSes share the disk space (a raid 5 is shared between 8-16 vps machines so they can't give you lots of space).

Talk to various companies advertising budget servers on Web Hosting Talk forums.

You should be able to rent an Atom based server or an older generation server they wouldn't otherwise be able to rent for about 40-50$ a month and some of the companies will even accept to physically mail them a hard drive and install it in your server for a few extra dollars a month.

Techdirt has a great article about this: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111110/10135116708/glimpse-future-under-sopa-warner-bros-admits-it-filed-many-false-takedown-notices.shtml

It makes some interesting parallels to SOPA and E-Parasites bills and why the laws shouldn't be passed.

With Gillette blades, you only have to change one when it starts to bother you. For some it's once every two weeks or so, for me it's once every 2-3 months. And it's basically a few meters walk to where you store them.

With this camera, it's not like you're going to carry 20 packs of paper in your backpack every day... the purpose of the camera's gimmick, the integrated printer, is no longer there.

If you do plan on actually carrying photo paper, you'd have to get extra batteries because as they say it can only do 25 prints. In this case, you might as well carry a light photo printer with you then. Hell, as long as you still carry a backpack, you might get a cheap 50-100 watt inverter and a motorbike battery and be done with everything.

Unfortunately, at 20$ for 30 sheets of the special photo paper it needs, I don't see it being successful.

I guess they're probably trying to use the classic inkjet printer selling scheme, where the printer is cheap but the cartridges are expensive... though their camera is 300$.

It can also print just 25 photos with its battery which is not clear if it's removable or not - strange number considering the paper is sold in packs of 30.

And in other news, for a one time fee of about 13$, I can get 256 kbps/ 64kbps for free, for as long as I want, without bandwidth limits. It's not high speed but enough to access mail and various websites - pretty much anything except watching videos.

Or I could pay 5$ a month for 10/2 mbps. Or about 13$ a month for 120/6.... see http://www.upc.ro/internet/ divide prices by 3 to get the price in dollars.

Comcast (and the Internet prices in US) is a joke.

It's not always the fault of the controllers, it can also be the way they're connected to the system.

These onboard controllers are connected to the system using PCI Express x1 - it's literally just like plugging them into a x1 slot only they're directly on the motherboard. The problem is there are two versions of PCI Express - the older PCI Express 1.0 provides 250 MB/s in each direction, while PCI Express 2.0 provides 500 MB/s in each direction.

AMD motherboards only had PCI Express 2.0 lanes but Intel had a mix of 2.0 lanes and 1.0 lanes - the most common was 32 x 2.0 lanes (for 2 x x16 lanes for graphics cards) and about 6 x 1.0 lanes coming from the southbridge. So motherboards manufacturers had to either use 1 lane from southbridge and get only 250 MB/s in each direction or resort to using some multiplexing chips that take 2 or more lanes and create a x4 path for the controller. More recently, motherboards detect if there is a card on the second pci express x16 and if there's nothing there, they "borrow" a few of those unused lanes to improve the performance of the various controllers integrated on the motherboard.

See this Anandtech article, it explains better than I can explain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2973/6gbps-sata-performance-amd-890gx-vs-intel-x58-p55/2

But the point is even if the pci express 2.0 is used, there's only 500 MB/s in each direction, SATA 6 gbps means that a maximum of 750 MB/s should be reachable - very few motherboards connect the controllers to more than one 1x lane so even if the controller could reach 750 MB/s, you won't get it.

This is nothing new - remember the gigabit network cards on PCI? The whole PCI system on your computer can do 133 MB/s and a gigabit link can do about 110 MB/s - would you sue anyone if you plug 4 pci cards in your system and can't reach a throughput higher than 133 MB/s ?

Yeah, I noticed it... I only have 3 email accounts and get batches of 15-20 emails every 5-10 minutes with the Win32/Kryptik.RAM trojan virus (ups notifications and invoices) ... they go straight to spam

Unless they will change the connector, it will be a mess. The current cables can not possibly deliver 100 watts of power, they're too thin... at best they probably an do about 30 watts.

People will use cheap cables with thin wires to power a printer that needs 40-60 watts of power and will find themselves with burnt cables or even worse, usb ports on the motherboards dead (the individual fuses blown up)

Also, power supplies at this time use separate circuits to deliver up to 3A to the USB ports even when the system is down - this is useful to have wake on key/mouse/modem capability and also to charge devices through USB ports. It's done this way for efficiency.

I don't know how they plan to keep this with the new standard - having ports that can't do high wattage and ports that can do on the back side of the computer would only confuse people.

And last, it's not unusual to have 6-8 USB 2.0 ports on the back of a motherboard - I just can't see how the metal traces on the motherboard could possibly support 100 watts of power to EACH connector... not to mention the metal traces and the whole area will warm up even more due to the high current flowing there, and there's already the cpu voltage regulation system there.

Anyone reading this should also read how Cisco lied and got him arrested in Canada ... there's a link right below the description but I'm posting it again here as well:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110722/02351315202/how-cisco-justice-department-conspired-to-try-to-destroy-one-mans-life-daring-to-sue-cisco.shtml

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/a-pound-of-flesh-how-ciscos-unmitigated-gall-derailed-one-mans-life.ars/1