Gamers and engineers and other hardcore users comprised a larger % of the PC market. These users tend to upgrade often to run the latest Doom at max 640x480 resolution with all options on.

Speaking as a gamer who was on the 1-2 year upgrade cycle 10+ years ago, even my PCs last a lot longer now too. My last 2 PCs have been play able to play the latest games at good settings for upwards of 4 years. This longer lifetime change coincided with my budget for building PCs increasing significantly (thank you, computer science degree). I'm unsure how much of an effect that has had, so take this with a grain of salt.

Granted, you maybe shit canned over it

You're looking at it all wrong. This is a weapon to get your least favorite office mate shit canned over it.

Bulk mail does not get returned to the sender. The post office will just throw it away.

I would argue this is helpful nonetheless as it increases the post office's costs related to bulk mail. I may adopt this practice myself. Here's an amusing thought: I pay for my trash service, a government agency is delivering some trash - can I write some portion of my trash service off my taxes? I understand typically you need to determine what proportion of the service is used for the purpose being written off. In the case of trash would that per unit of mass, per unit of volume, per discarded article?

Slight related, if only we had a similar solution to all the "free newspapers", advertisement fliers and other litter that gets tossed onto my driveway or hung on my mailbox once a week. I fail to see why *I* should be forced to deliver *their* garbage to my trashcan every week. After several attempts I was finally able to get one local free newspaper to stop delivering... mostly. No such luck with the advertisements.

Slashdot allows you to choose to turn off ads by paying.

There is (was?) also an option to turn off ads for 'positive contributors' whatever that means. I'm having trouble finding it in the UI right now, maybe pissing off the Blizzard fanbois a couple weeks ago cost me that option. :)

Anyway, this positive contribution concept could certainly be extended to almost any bulletin board like system and perhaps generalized into something like the captchas that are used as a way to digitize books. Find some minuscule task that somebody is willing to pay for being done on a large scale and you've got a business model. Imagine a future where Amazon's cloud service becomes a P2P network made up of the computers of people offering up their electricity and idle cycles as a ticket to free internet content for example.

You are not buying things from Blizzard

You're fooling yourself. Blizzard is a publicly traded company. It is under no obligation to provide you with any more of a game experience beyond what is necessary to increase its share holders bottom line.

Until you can tie an item back to a players name (not character name - Blizzard holds the keys to that too) there is zero accountability. Bits in a database are cheap for Blizzard to flip.

Low risk, high reward, and really simple math.

1. Abraham lincoln, neither vampire hunter nor martial arts expert

[citation needed]

Same situation here. I'm a hardcore gamer, she is not. In PC terms I have had success with Orcs Must Die 2 and Portal 2. I also tried Magicka but that didn't seem to be her to tastes. All are available on Steam. Portal 2's level editor provides a lot of replayability and we're currently working our way through Nightmare difficulty on Orcs Must Die 2. I got her to try these when we started doing "His/Hers nights" where each of us has 1 weeknight to totally dictate what activities we do that night (with the intent that whatever we do will be together). OMD2 has been so successful we've played it on a few of her nights or nights that or not either of ours.

On the Wii the Lego series of games has been a huge hit, especially since she's a Harry Potter fan. Replayability is limited after you 100% each of them (number of hours varies, typically 20-40).

All of these games are specifically 2 player coop.

You don't like PvP? Don't participate.

In past Diablo games is that that choice was not left up to you, it was left up to the other players in the same game as you. I once heard someone lament there should be a force PvE option similar to the force PvP button because "if the griefers can force me to play their game I should be able to force them to play mine."

No company pays a penny of their own in taxes, they just collect it from customers and pass it on.

Not true. My company pays all of my taxes because I pass on the expense in the form of my salary.

Presumably the police who investigate these things need special dispensation to even collect evidence.

Even more interesting case - the people who police search engines and sites like 4chan. They get notified that someone has marked something inappropriate, so they can't even claim they downloaded it accidentally.

Child rapists and killers don't start out as full fledged predators, they start out by fantasising, then they start collecting child porn because fantasizing is not enough, when even the porn doesn't do it any more they start raping kids or kidnapping and torturing them and very often they then kill them to hide their offence.

I want to drive a Lamborghini. Doesn't mean I'm willing to steal one, but "Greatest Police Chases 142: Exotic Cars" might pique my interest.

What does the above suggest about anyone who consumes your run of the mill hardcore porn? That they're all closet rapists and murderers just waiting for the right time to strike, who just happen not to have an under-18 fetish? Unlikely. What makes some significant portion (all?) of one group the cold blooded animals you speak of and the other Joe Six-pack?

Substitute in some other fetish. Are all the people who enjoy that fetish acting out their fantasies or forcing them upon others? The character Lawrence in the movie Office Space wanted to do "two chicks at the same time". Know anyone like that? Have they had such an encounter yet? If not, have they kidnapped two women yet?

So if I am in possession of a Stinger missile and am nicked for the illegal possession of dangerous weapons that is a ridiculous thing to do? If I am in possession of large quantities of sarin gas It's ridiculous to arrest me and charge me for possession of dangerous chemical weapons?

Your examples are not analogous. The missiles and the sarin gas allow you to cause harm to others at some point in the future. With the porn you're talking about evidence of abuse (ignoring the sexting, etc... cases) that has already occurred. It'd be like arresting someone for having pictures of the results of your stinger missile or sarin gas attack. Not something most of us care to see, but it's not obvious how additional harm is being caused by the pictures.

It's actually kind of ironic if you think of it in the bigger crime context. How much easier would most crimes be to prosecute if pictures of them were readily available, yet here we have a case where possession/dissemination of evidence that a crime was committed is itself illegal. The law basically "If you're going to abuse children keep it quiet."

if making possession of such material illegal gives police leverage then need to force me to tell them who supplied it or even to force my cooperation in stinging the perpetrators?

If the person giving you such material is dumb enough to give you any information that can lead back to him, the police don't need your help. And besides, Obstruction of Justice is a crime itself.

less grindy than other MMORPGs at the time.
Missions that consist entirely of [Go here|Kill some things|Click on something]{pick 1-3} were painfully boring so grinding was the way forward for a lot of us.

It helped that I played a Tanker, which was a horribly unbalanced class at the time. I remember forming a team, and single-handedly holding aggro on an entire instance worth of mobs, herding them into a corner, and letting the blasters let loose all at once. Good times.

I remember that too, it lasted a month then got nerfed, but it was CoH at its best - pulling and killing (no exaggeration) 200 monsters at a time is an epic and awe inspiring experience I have yet to see replicated in any other MMO.
Speaking of nerfing...
The method I used to grind my scrapper to 40 (Underlings or some class of tiny monster) got nerfed.
My Fire/Radiation Controller got nerfed.
Power leveling by forcing the average party to a middle player and using a high level player to kill high level monsters got nerfed.

If there ever was a game that was "You will play our way or not at all" it was CoH. NCSoft did a good job of making my heroes feel less powerful with each successive patch and for me that made the game forgettable. And I only played from [release] to [release + 3 months].

Pregnant women still seek sex.

I heard this explained recently using the example of horses (I think this came from a cracked article, so take it with a grain of salt). If there are multiple males around and a male will kill any offspring perceived not to be his own, then the female will mate with all the available males so that they all perceive the offspring as their own. Obviously this is not perfectly applicable to modern humans, but it doesn't seem far fetched that the biological urge would still be buried in our DNA somewhere.

The logical course of action then is for sex-deprived people to start killing all offspring that isn't theirs so that the opposite sex will put out more for fear of not passing on their genes.

I am a southpaw (AKA lefty) who started using the arrow keys and "" for strafing in the Doom 1 days and haven't found a reason to switch except for the occasional wrist pain when I go on a serious FPS binge. I actually just picked up Orcs Must Die 1 about a week ago when it was on sale and found the transition to WASD surprisingly easy - enough that I am reconsidering my keys.

Back on topic, these games get a thumbs up from me too.