That would require Gamestop to actually know whether or not the code for it had already been used. While, unlikely there is a possibility that the original owner never used the code for dlc in which case the packaging would be correct. It can't be expect for gamestop to know whether the code had been redeemed or not. This is also why I've seen a lot of used game stores not carry PC games because they have no way of knowing whether a cd key in a used game is still valid.

and now I feel like an idiot. My post links to a page saying that my original article was a fake.

I wonder why you would find suck a law hideously broken. There was a story in montana of an 11 year old girl who shot and killed 2 intruders in her home. She didn't even know it at the time, but one was armed with a handgun and the two had stabbed a guy to death in a previous break-in. The fact that they probably would have killed her has nothing to do with the fact that hadn't threatened her with a weapon and I doubt you'd suggest we put an 11 year old girl in court and executed for murder charges for that.

I'm not normally in the process of defending MS, but in this case MS is leagues ahead of EA. I was able to run a complete version of windows 7 beta for months before it came out without paying a dime.

They have identified our signal, but the problem is that nobody wants meet meat.

As far as I know a DMCA request does not trigger a site takedown if the owner disagrees and files a counter-DMCA notice. The fact that sites have been taken down from it has been more from companies going above and beyond what is required by law, which unfortunately seems to be the standard rather than the exception right now.

I'm not really sure what years you are talking about. Timesplitters and Perfect Dark were both released in 2000 for the PS2 and N64. Gamecube and xbox were released at the end of 2001. Halo I guess would have been the first one released for the xbox, since it was released with the launch. Timesplitters 2 was released in 2002 for the xbox, gamecube, and PS2, had a ton of multiplayer modes, weapons, character stats, bots, and a mapmaker. Tribes Aerial Assault was also released in 2002. I also seem to recall various bond games released over that time period as bond games seem to keep getting made in order to recreate the success of goldeneye. The only way Halo might have been the only unique game of the time with that is if you wanted a good FPS during the first few months the xbox was released and that was the only console you were looking at.

I wouldn't really put super mario galaxy into any kind of a hard category. I had a few friends trading off with me through that, but we still managed to get every star in under a week. Deaths were more from just screwing up and were few and far between.

In response to both you and the GP, there is also a difference, at least in my mind, between the difficulty to beat a game and the difficulty to to achieve some kind of 100% completion. I've felt quite a few games have been easy to complete, but spending hours hunting down some hidden object gets to be both annoying, and frustrating.

Mario Kart took a few hours to get used to using a wiimote, but after that the mirror cups were not that hard to beat. With a gamecube controller the mirror cups were easy, well, unless you count random blue shells 10ft from the finish line as a difficulty. I don't really consider the staff ghosts part of the games difficulty, though they are incredibly hard to beat (and yes I did manage to beat the expert staff ghost on rainbow road).

The New Super Mario Bros is definitely a challenge though. I haven't had the time to make it all the way through that yet though. But that game is enough of a challenge even without needing to collect all of the 3 large coins in every level.

Even games that are usually considered to be hard games have a difference between being hard and having 100% completion. I've managed to beat both Halo and COD4 on their hardest difficulties and enjoyed the challenge. However, spending hours hunting down skulls and intelligence pieces and completing every achievement is not something I would enjoy spending hours doing. Beating a game is one thing. Spending hours hunting down some arbitrary challenge just so your screen says 100% instead of 98% is another entirely. Even though I have spent the time to get that 100% completion on some games, I usually don't factor extra challenges in as the majority of gamers, even hardcore gamers, are often ok without extra random challenges.

I don't really know what the specifics were, but this is the quote from the end of the article (yeah, I guess I never should have expected slashdot users to read the article)

Of course this does all rely on the user being stupid enough to trust the certificate and install the new config file just to get that far.

The other part of the attack deals with the iphone in that it can change the mobileconfig file and allow the attacker to set the HTTP proxy. Then make is so you cannot remove the new config file.

If I remember the articles what you said is correct. There were accounts that were hacked through phishing and bugs in IE6. Actual attacks on google did not succeed and had nothing to do with IE6.

While this is true that it is not meant to be a general-purpose computer device, that is the market that it is competing with. I can easily find netbooks that are similar in size that have all the functionality and then some for a lower or similar price. I understand that I am not in the target market for this device, but I fail to see how this is not in direct competition to netbooks. Does a touchscreen and being locked down somehow take it into its own market? For the price am I somehow missing how this provides any benefit over a cheaper product?

While I do agree with most of what you said and 99.9% of toolbars are nothing but useless spyware, there are a few actual useful ones. Just because so many companies have built useless toolbars doesn't mean that there can't be a legitimately useful one amoung the clutter. The Web Developer toolbar is a favorite I usually have installed in firefox as it has a lot of useful tools/shortcuts. Then again I also usually even disable the bookmarks toolbar as the dropdown menu works quite well and i don't like giving up screen space.

Also, a lot of those users with 4-6 toolbars usually manage to hide at least a few of them in the browser window without uninstalling them. Pulling up add-remove programs while removing something else and seeing a list of toolbars is alway an unwelcome surprise. Especially when they need to be convinced that they really don't need all 6 toolbars...

Troll? I know the parent missed the point of the GP that the operating system should not depend on an html rendering engine of a buggy browser, but is quite far from a troll. He brings up a good point. There are a lot of apps that for right or wrong use the IE rendering engine, including plenty of in house applications.

As far as removing IE goes, iexplorer.exe will get rid of the gui leaving just the engine behind it. However, removing an html rendering engine should not break an operating system. Years ago I mistakenly tried to forcibly remove the rest of the engine from windows xp and ended up with more errors and problems than I could figure out. It breaks windows explorer and if I remember correctly causes internet connection problems since connection properties are configured through IE.

Though I would have to call into question how much any modern OS depends on an HTML renderer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe both KDE and GNOME would be able to operate with only minor lost functionality without an html rendering engine. I know khelp uses an html library (that oddly is not installed in opensuse by default). GTK+ and QT can both use webkit, but are in no way dependent on it.