Could two of them carry a coconut?

And the size comparisons, were those for African or European hummingbirds?

Most of Chicago is covered with 3G. I currently use AT&T but have tested devices from other mobile carriers as well. Coverage isn't the biggest issue. It's the fact that when you do have 3G, so do more than 1 million other people. They've oversold and underprovisioned their network in dense population areas, which means that while I've got a full signal, I can't really do anything with it since there's no bandwidth left at the tower. If there's only a T1 going to the cell tower, and 100 people are connected to that cell, coverage doesn't really mean jack.

Covering most of rural America is great, it'll (debateably) make education/communication easier in a lot of places. But for the big cities, network capacity is the bottleneck.

Also, didn't we give AT&T a bunch of government/taxpayer money in the 80's to expand it's network? How'd that work out? They're fleecing everyone to pay for yachts and laughing all the way to the bank.

Important caveat to your argument: if you cannot connect to the Playstation network, many of your current games may not work. This was the case for me during the PS Network outage recently. It opened my eyes to the harsh reality that even though I have no interest in multiplayer functionality or advertizing my trophies, I still am required to connect to the mothership. That sucked, and it's something I should have realized sooner before buying into the PS3 and 10 or so games. Every purchasing decision after that point has been "hmm, do I want to sink more money into this very DRM'd and dysfunctional platform?"

Awhile back when they were making Shrek, there was a rather lengthy printed article/advertisement on why they chose Linux for most of their production. It had a lot of shameless plugs for HP, but also quite a few mentions of the virtues of a free and freely configurable OS.

I'd always thought it'd be a cute commercial to see Shrek walking along having a conversation with the Donkey about Linux. The donkey would ask all of the typical FUD questions, and Shrek would explain them all and throw in a few jokes here and there.

It's a face everyone knows and isn't intimidated by, and a product (the movies) that people enjoyed.

While I agree with you in principle regarding the precedents being a slippery slope, I don't agree with you in the perspective of a player trying to play the game.

When I purchase a game, I purchase an environment. It's a set of rules put forth by game designers, I abide by them and attempt to win given the limitations of the system. Anything else really isn't winning to me. Exploiting a bug to achieve an end by some other way than the designer intended circumvents the fun of it.

There are some games that market to the crowd that wants to customize the environment and make their own game/rules/limitations. That's great, and when I opt into that, I want as much control over the environment as possible.

When I don't want that type of thing, as in the case of a MMORPG, I'd rather that the system was as airtight as possible. I choose to play by the rules and see if I can win the way that the game was designed. By nature of it being multiplayer, I depend on everyone being on a level playing field. I'd expect the game designers to have a way to make sure that playing field stays level, as that's what ensures my continued enjoyment in the game as it was intended.

All is a roundabout way of saying that I like that Blizzard is protecting their game environment from being hacked/modified/manipulated into circumventing the designers' intentions. If you want a hackable game, find another one, there are quite a few on the market.

Again, I don't agree with the legal rammifications, but inside the game as a player who just wants a fair playing field, I like it.

Sorry to add to the tide of "I remember this one time" posts but I had to share this one.

A buddy of mine decided to experiment with a dose of LSD against pretty much everyone who told him he was being an idiot. He dropped it, and awhile later we all went out to grab dinner at a local diner in Chicago. Almost as if on queue, a group of 20 people from a country/western place came in in full costume (poofy dresses, cowboy hats, chaps, etc) and sat at a bunch of tables across from us. One of them had apparently won a cardboard cutout of a life-size Elvis. They'd propped it up against the wall and kept joking to it during their meal.

There was a silent agreement at the table to pretend everything was normal and to not make any mention of this to our LSD-tripping buddy, who spent the entire time checking and rechecking to see if Elvis was really in the building with a bunch of cowboys.