Christ, what would you do with extra servers? Howitzer practice?

Oh. Always bet on Duke?

Note to any sleeper cell insurgents that may be following Slashdot: rocket jumping works perfectly in real life, and gives a definite edge over those pesky infidels.

(security (job))

Hey, Samah. Quick. What's that behind you?

We played dodgeball with bricks. You get good, fast.

For me, it's the total difference in attitude. Back then, I was a kid with no disposable income to spare. Your parents rented you some games from the video store for the weekend and you played the hell out of them. Very seldom did you get the exact games of your choice, so you learned to just deal with what you got. It didn't matter of they were clunky or poorly designed, or if the music was no better than 8-bit blips composed by someone totally tone-deaf who figured the NES's "noise" channel was a substitute for any instrumentation; you were on a holy mission to beat the game(s) within the rental period. Eventually, you even acquired a taste for some of the crappier ones that would later manifest as nostalgia. You'd give anything, any genre a chance. The information just wasn't available the way it is today. If Nintendo Power said it was awesome, you prayed to the greater gaming deities that it would show up in the ma and pa store that had a game rental shelf. If some kid on the playground said "Sega does what Nintendon't", you bashed his head in with a rock. It's just how it was.

Now I just find myself cherry-picking for the AAA titles, going for the well-reviewed games, or even following the PR hype train. Games with glitches like "all enemies inevitably randomly lose the will to live and walk into a wall before arbitrarily phasing out of existence" no longer have the chance to penetrate the market, or our nerd hearts.

In an effort to "one-up" Microsoft, Apple promises to replace their own memcpy() with one that not only does not require a size for the destination buffer, but does not require a destination buffer at all. While Apple programmers call the move "totally pointless" and "absolute proof of functional retardation", Steve Jobs has simply responded, sagely, that the future of Apple development is through so-called "intuitive APIs". It just works.

Telnet's here, boys. What say you now?

You call this a zombie apocalypse? This ain't nothing compared to the zombie attack of 57.

Your post rubs me as starkly disingenuous.

The Steam hate might have held some ground in 2002/03 while angry Counter-Strike players still clung to WON.net, but times have changed. Unless you're regularly blowing all of your monthly bandwidth on torrenting "linux isos", you can stomach a Steam game download or two with even the most draconian ISP.

Steam doesn't persistently store your credit card information. I'd be weary of any digital delivery service that did.

Okay, okay, let's just say your pal doesn't want to waste the bandwidth or time on downloading; that's fine. So, I don't know - as difficult as opening Steam up, navigating to "Backup games", burning it to a disc and walking it over? Personally, I can't imagine a mortal among us to tackle this Herculean errand.

Gone are the days of juggling CDs and game installations to ensure you have 100MB of space left in order to pay tribute to the Windows 95 swap deity. If you're using an even remotely modern HDD of an even half-acceptable size (heck, even grandma's new HP for checking chain e-mails and visiting smileycentral comes with a 300GB drive these days), yeah, if you don't have enough space to install something from Steam? Not only are your computing practices more than likely idiotic to begin with, but you can most certainly deal with uninstalling some junk. Or hell, you've just proven you need it - so go buy a second HDD.

But you know what? The fact is, Gabe Newell, Valve co-founder, has gone on record mocking conventional DRM and stated, paraphrasing, that the mission of Steam is to make buying games, storing games, and accessing games easier and more convenient for the customer. Their content servers are widespread, well-maintained, and frankly - your aside about the "Butt Zappers server being slammed" is moot. Even the dreaded Slashdot phenomenon is a drop in the pond to Steam's full throughput. The recent roll out of of Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 content packs have proven testament to this.

The only real complaint of yours that stands is with respect to re-selling your games - but really, tough shit. It's probably the only real remaining trade-off of digital delivery, so just consider that you're trading resale value for a few dollars in publishing costs the next time you buy a Steam game a bit cheaper than the brick and mortar box cost.

As a final note to answer any forthcoming "but, but, but, what-if!?" conjecturing, Valve has stated repeatedly that in the event they close up shop, a means for us customers to retain our purchases will be provided. If you have to crusade against digital delivery, don't go after Steam.

In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie?

The letter itself is highly suspect. No corporate legal department worth its salt would produce such an inarticulate and convoluted message. Frankly, I wouldn't expect wording of this "quality" from even a third rate law student. Bear in mind that if this is simply a hoax, on part of the team, to kill the project without having to show anything for it (and do keep in mind that such ambitious projects, more often than not, amount to nothing more than wishful thinking, some tinkering with a ROM editing utility, and a forum of deluded fanboys) - well, then those "confirming" the legitimacy of the legal threat would also be those who stand to benefit from its "verification".

Juvenile wording, suspect formatting, and directly referencing "Temporal Flux", a ROM hacking utility used to create these projects - this from a corporate legal team? It just doesn't add up. I'm trying to avoid coming across as too much of a pessimist or troll, but if it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit -- then why exactly is it garnering such a game media following?

Be sure to regularly douse your drives with flame retardant chemicals - then take a blowtorch to the platters just to be sure you did it right!

I find it decidedly strange that I've never experienced the dreaded Firefox memory leak on Windows. Maybe I live in a parallel bizarro world or something - I always suspected.