I did one of these for my last call center job. It wasn't the only factor in the hiring process, but was a precursor to getting a face to face interview. Many jobs have an enormous number of applicants. Determining which ones actually have enough of the required skills to move forward is an excellent way to save time.

And this right here is what it really boils down to. It's not so much about piracy of the game itself as maintaining the artificial scarcity of in game items. If you can just clone the awesome sword, you certainly won't be buying it for real world cash and Blizzard won't be getting their cut.

Welcome to the enrichment center. Since making test participation mandatory for all employees, the quality of our test subjects has risen dramatically. Employee retention, however, has not. As a result, you may have heard we're gonna phase out human testing. There's still a few things left to wrap up though - first up, conversion gel. Now, the beancounters told me we literally could not afford to buy $7 worth of moon rocks, much less 70 million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground them up, mixed them into a gel, and guess what: ground-up moon rocks are pure poison.

No he's just posting from Enternet Ixplorer.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/08/01/diablo-3-will-have-always-online-drm-microt/1

This site references an interview Blizzard gave PC Gamer. Starcraft 2 has a timeout for single player without internet. I didn't know that until I was on a ship for a month and it stopped letting me play.

More news to come out is their decision to mirror Ubisoft with an always online requirement. Players will require a Battle.net connection even to play single player. I certainly won't be purchasing it, and it seems that most of my friends won't either. Too much DRM and no LAN play make it a poor investment.

There are a number of people who will not buy into the Apple ecosystem. The turning point for me came when I had an iPhone 3G and had to keep worrying about updates breaking my unlock. I refuse to again purchase hardware that they refuse to let me use as I see fit. Android tablets don't seem to be there yet, but if they keep innovating like manufacturers have on the phone side I'll be satisfied within the year and actually own my device.

Whoever modded this insightful needs their head examined. Listen to yourself. Let's apply the same logic to another situation. Leaving your house isn't a right. They aren't saying "submit to a search". They're saying "submit to a search or you can't leave your house." The Supreme Court has recognized freedom of movement as a right established under the United States Constitution. While an airline would be within their rights to establish prerequisites to flying as a private organization the government has no right to do so.

Losing 20$ cash value is more palatable to me than dealing with the aftermath of fraud on my credit card, protections or no.

Yeah I've followed a weird arc. When I was younger I downloaded any game I could find just to try them out. I didn't have any money for games so I certainly wasn't a lost sale. Then after I got more settled and hit my mid 20s I started buying all my games. I had the money to spend at that point and I figured it only made sense to support developers who made the kind of stuff I like so there would be more to come. But now I'm swinging back the other way. I bought a retail copy of Bioshock even though I'd heard about the DRM problems with it. Bioshock 2 I was going to buy on Steam as that's how I purchase most games these days but after seeing the install limits and securom stuff I've just decided to pirate it. If I'm going to be treated like a criminal I may as well act like one.

Normally wouldn't reply to ACs but what the hell. NOONE has the right to restrict you from reading without their permission. Copyright imposes certain limits on the dirstribution of a work, not on it's consumption. Do you seriously believe it's illegal to read a book if the writer says you can't? While I can agree with you about the sense of entitlement that seems increasingly prevalent I would argue that getting a copy made of something that the rights holders either refuse to sell to you, or charge an inordinately higher price for no reason, is morally acceptable even if illegal.

Coming from a merchant seaman: Fuck You. There's no way in hell you'd be so glib if you had to deal with the threat of armed attackers at YOUR job. The fact that you've been wronged by someone is no justification at all to wrong someone else. Attacking cargo ships 600 miles off your coast can in no way be construed as a defensive action. In short these people, however desperate, have become nothing more than criminals. Hell outside of MSC contracted ships most US flagged vessels aren't even permitted to be armed. Your only defense against explosives and machine guns is to use fire hoses to prevent boarding. Good luck with that. As far as I'm concerned the sooner they take these bastards out the better.

I think this will have nasty applications for web email providers. GMail and I'm guessing the other major ones filter out executable attachments to prevent spread of email worms. If this can beat their filters there are surely plenty of people still unwary enough to run programs emailed to them.

Which is kind of odd considering how much money we save by not paying for entertainment...