He may be in the minoriy, but I think it is a significant minority... I can make the same caim as Kaitiff.

Instead of Diablo III, I bought Torchight (and then bought it again for the linux version when it appeared on the humbebundle.) While I have not seen an exact replacement for Starcraft, there are a ton of different RTS games to fill the void.

As for sales, the industry is growing because the market is expanding everywhere (phones, tablets, consoles, social networks, and even app stores for web browsers). In addition, compared to 10-20 years gaming is now an acceptable form of entertainment. Its is no longer symbolized by a geek sitting in front of a computer for days on end... now anyone and everyone can game casually... and do it everywhere (thanks mostly to smartphones.) Also, while huge applications are still expensive, with app stores and indie sites, there has been a virtual explosion of games for $5 and under.

So, increasing sales is not a valid counterpoint against the idea of a growing number of gamers revolting against DRM. We may be a minority, but we are vocal, and we are significant.

As for EA, you used to be a good company... back in the 8-bit days. Now, the last game I bought from you was Command & Conquer 3. I was in the Beta Test for Red Alert 3, but avoided it due to DRM. I will NEVER buy anything else from you until DRM is gone... completely gone. That includes PopCap (which I liked until you bought them), android games, and even back titles through GOG.com. Even though some things may not have DRM,(e.g. GOG titles) I don't like the idea of EA making a profit when the company doesn't give a damn about their customers. Selling games is about making them good, not forcing people to upgrade by deactivating old titles, or suppressing honest opinions.

One simple reason: It takes money to make money. If you are making minimum wage or any amount slightly above the poverty line, all your money is going to living expenses. You do not have money to invest.

If you have a large nest egg investing is easier... If you have bills to pay, you may be forced to remove money from the market at an inopportune time. There used to be a saying on wall street... "To turn 10 thousand dollars into 20 thousand dollars requires skill; to turn 10 million dollars into 20 million dollars requires only patience."

In addition one of the better investments is education. In general the more education you have the more you will make in the long term. However, when it is hard even for the middle class to send their kids to college, a good education is not always possible. And scholarships only take care of a small minority. Even with a full scholarship, a person may not afford college because they still need living expenses.

If you already have money, you can make smart long term investments to make your future even brighter and generate even more wealth. If you have very little, it is a struggle to keep afloat from day to day, let alone invest for the future.

We realize this and it happens every day. While the wealthiest people generally are the business owners and investors, they pay employees less every year compared to inflation. Wages have stagnated, yet inflation still increases. And the travesty is that most business owners credit themselves as the only reason why their business succeeds; yet in many cases, yet the customers are more likely to deal with the low-end wage slave.

And yes, wage slave is appropriate... The wealthiest always say that if you don't like the pay to find another job; but it is hard to say no to even a bad offer when there is a lot of unemployment especially when you have children that have only had mac and cheese for the last 3 months. And when you have a job, there is not a lot of time available to actually find a new job if you are not happy.

No, if someone can barely afford food and shelter, they should not pay.

And let me add this... Why is it that investment income is capped at 15% for capital gains (now 20% as of 1/1 for people over $400,000) A rate that is much lower than taxes on the middle class who work. The people who are sitting on their asses pay less in taxes (as a percentage.) Hard work should be rewarded, not sitting on investments. The rich cry foul saying that low taxes motivate them... believe me, they would be a lot more motivated if there was a real threat to the value of their wealth diminishing if they did not invest it.

To paraphrase, driving drunk is wrong. owning a gun is not wrong (at least not morally, laws may differ depending on where you live and if you have a criminal record.)

I agree with the above. But, you are comparing apples to oranges...

If you want a better comparison... Owning a car is legal and not wrong. Drinking (depending on age) is also legal. But if you are impaired (through drugs or alcohol) shooting a gun is just as wrong as driving a car. (at least morally, if not legally.)

If you are a responsible adult, owning dangerous items should not be an issue. Drinking alcohol is also fine, even if you want to get drunk to the point of passing out... However, you are acting irresponsibly and should be held accountable when you use dangerous items while impaired regardless of the item.

Being drunk (or high) is not an excuse, you made a conscious decision to drink. If you can not adequately plan other arrangements, or if you know you will completely ignore your plans to let your sober friend drive, you should not be allowing yourself to drink in the first place. It is called responsibility. In the same way, gun owners need to be as responsible as car owners.

There is not a difference, when I was in college, a few of my fraternity brothers got drunk and used bb guns to shoot out the windows of a neighboring house. Shooting while drunk really is just as dangerous. It was obvious (based on trajectory of the bb's in the walls) that it came from our fraternity house and they were forced to learn an expensive lesson. But I guarantee that they would not have been as fortunate had it not been another fraternity house that was empty during a renovation... Think of the consequences had they actually hit someone.

You are assuming that she is spending less than $100,000 a year. If she has expensive tastes, she can still be costing money in spite of the 6 figure salary.

Go and grab "Torchlight." It is a Diablo Clone by the people that wrote the original Diablo. (i.e. before Blizzard was infested with the evil known as Activision.)

Torchlight is a good, hi-res knock-off of Diablo and it is available through GOG. (It also made its way into the Humble Bundle.) If you like Diablo, you will like Torchlight.

They also recently release Torchlight 2 with online options that compete with Diablo III. With Torchlight, you contribute your cash to a small Indie company instead of corporate fat cats.

And if we all bought from Pirate Bay, eventually there would no longer be any more quality ebooks.

O'Reilly is a decent publisher. Many of there books are well organized and are worth the money. And unlike the f-ing RIAA/MPAA, their products are DRM-Free. They let you copy it to any device you want; they will even put it directly into your dropbox folder if you would like them to.

Many people who pirate content claim that "if they had the money..." or "if they let me use it on ZZZ device..." Well now is your chance. Everything is on sale, and they do let you use it on any device that can read it Put up or shut up.

For the record, I own about 25 O'Reilly ebooks. I even own a bunch more older titles but I stopped buying printed tech books because I find dropbox and pdfs on my tablet much easier than a broken bookcase and lugging printed material around. (Though I will add the files to my dropbox account manually instead of storing my credentials on their server.)

Actually, I feel the reverse... all of the games I have bought recently have been through the Humble Bundle which are all indie and all work on Linux. The few games that have not been through the Humble Bundle have been through GOG.com and work on wine.

The last big studio release I have bought was C&C 3. After that I just felt that DRM became too restrictive. (A big reason for buying humble bundle and GOG games.)

I did buy one indie game about a year ago that did not work on Linux, and that was Torchlight. (which I recently was released under Linux through the humble bundle.) I actually ran Torchlight in a virtual machine.

As suggested by the article, because I have not been beholden to windows only games, I have not used windows since XP.

Well if you had more than half a brain, you would have voted. It is your only power to prevent the things you do not like in politics.

While I do not see the dictatorship aspect, a two party system is one of our biggest problems... However, you did nothing to stop it, even an AC that replied to you earlier realizes that if a 3rd party gets 5% of the vote, they qualify for federal election funding in the next race. That is the first step to get rid of the two party system.

Yet, in spite of this, you still sit home and do not vote. You do absolutely nothing to help yourself and everyone else. You let the corrupt incumbents stay in office instead of attempting to vote them out. All it takes is for our elected officials to actually fear for their job to get them to listen to the people; right now they only listen to the people who finance their campaigns... If they get voted out, or narrowly squeeze by, they will be more likely to listen to the people the next time.

One thing that the Obama campaign proved this year, is that it is people turning out to vote that will get you elected, not getting more campaign contributions. (Of course, trying to get them to realize that themselves will be difficult at best base on the number of "give me more money" emails they sent out this year.)

In short, by staying home, you are part of the problem. A smart person realizes that the right to vote is valuable and will exercise that right whenever he/she can.

Whether I call myself a developer or software engineer will not affect my income. I'm old school (over 40) and I think that people building systems as long as I have tend not to care about titles. I'm not even sure there was a "software engineer" title when I started programming.

What I can say is that people that are coming out of college today calling themselves either tend to not have a clue what they are doing. (Of course there are exceptions, but the truly good people are hard to find.) And don't forget the recent title of "Software (or Data) Architect..." This idiots conceptualize a system, charge a ton of money, and have others build it. When it fails, they blame the developers and/or run to another job.

Then there are "Front End Developers," which are nothing more than a graphic/web designer that knows how to add some horribly written jQuery to a site and changed their name to developer in order to get paid more.

Essentially this whole debate is really about one huge issue: Large Companies are trying to turn the entire development process into something that can be done like an assembly line. They are chopping it up into little pieces so that anyone can perform the same monotonous task. The smaller your piece is, the more people that can focus on that specific area, the more people that can do it, the less you are worth. The less the companies pay, the happier they become. The more pieces there are, the more titles.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately if you really know what you are doing) the development process is not easy to break down into pieces. While certain pieces can be farmed out, the overall system will work best when one person knows how to build the system as a whole and can take the project from the requirements to a working application. (And companies rarely want to pay for these good people.)

Actually, Amazon fought the requirement to collect the taxes and remit them to the various states. Legally, you were always required to pay them.

Every state requires that you pay sales tax on every out of state purchase. It does not matter if you order it over the phone, mail order, internet, or even drive across the border to buy something in person. Every state has a tax form to claim the amount of taxes owed that should be filed with your annual tax return.

Admittedly, I have never know anyone to actually pay taxes on out of state purchases, but ignorance of the law is not an excuse. Because so few people actually comply with this law, getting large companies like Amazon to collect taxes is easier than trying to get individuals to comply.

I have heard of a few rare cases where states have actually audited people for not paying these taxes, but generally it only happens when the government gets tips from angry neighbors about large purchases. Even then, I have only heard of states that have completely replaced all income tax with sales tax taking this drastic measure.

Removing Bing from Google's index hurts Mircrosoft. After all, Microsoft's average user needs to use google to find bing...

Its not ironic at all if you think about it. Slashdot was original created by geeks for geeks. It became popular and later the original geeks became a minority. The original creator is no longer involved and it is being sold every few months to another company trying to monetize it.... Sounds like a microcosm of the internet itself.

None, after all, no one in congress does any work. (either party)

The most recent of which was only a few days ago, and I actually found out about through ARS, not slashdot...

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/09/slashdot-sourceforge-freecode-sold-to-jobs-site-company/

Makes you wonder if they are starting to regret their role as a sex slave.

You need to talk to an accountant. My company is an S-Corp. I need to keep everything separate, and my accountant files a return for my business and a separate return for my personal finances.