Games do not by definition, have a winning state and conversely a losing state. Many do, to be sure. You might want to read up on the philosophy of games a bit. I can recommend Huizing's Homo Ludens as a good starting point. Even of the definitions listed on Wikipedia's entry for Game, many of the definitions do not mention a winning state.

When it comes to handling ice, it's all about the tires, not the drive train. If you mean snow or wet, then yes, the drive train makes a big difference.

Next time take a day off once you have the game, it's installed, and the servers are not on their knees. It might be a few days later but you'll get your day's worth.

You generalize about NYT employees' but deride generalization in general.

So you are saying the people that pay back the cost of their eduction did not work for it, but the ones that were given money they didn't have to repay worked for it. Both groups worked for it.

Unless things have changed very recently, the US government allowed you to file a form informing them of the taxes you paid to your resident country and deduct that amount from your US taxes. If you lived in most of the civilised world, that meant you paid more than the US rate anyhow and had a US tax liability of $0.

Power steering is completely useless at speeds over 30 km/h and power breaks will get you a good two more firm applications of the breaks before they lack the power to assist. I recommend more driving experience before you abuse others with your faulty theoretical knowledge.

I would say no, putting sensitive data on a machine that's shared with others is a bad practice no matter how you do it.

Yes, of course, but that would be a pretty bad design. If some third-party is storing my credentials, I'd rather have to re-authenticate when they plan maintenance than have them store sensitive data unencrypted on disk.

It wouldn't be all that secure in-memory, but an SQL injection attack won't reveal it. It's marginally more secure. I was merely answering the question about what a potential key to that field in the database would be.

If the user is passing a clear-text password, you could use that as the key for their other passwords. Use your stored hash to validate their password, use their password as the key for their third-party data.

If the user-agent is passing a hashed password, use a different hash as the key for third-party data. Send both hashes to the server, which uses one for authentication and the other for decryption of the third-party data.

The only problem with this not effecting you is that it very well might. Those stores that you go to six months after release to get a game for $20 are unlikely to survive very long when their biggest revenue producer (i.e. used-game sales) vanishes.

Evil is a social construct that's pretty fluid between time and space. Not sure that just because greed is one of the seven deadly sins, it automatically becomes evil in the here and now. Not even sure that sinners are automatically evil, or that every sin is an evil act.

I like the joke, but honestly if you don't inch forward every opportunity you get, often you can coast in first or second and shift neutral to gear a lot less often. At least in a car which has enough torque that in first it won't stall without any gas, but creep forward.

Keeping one's hand on the shifter when not shifting puts unnecessary stress on the fork which leads to premature mechanical failure.