I used to work at Babbage's, which would later become GameStop. Policy allowed employees to "check-out" software, take it home and then come back and seal it. This was all sold as new software (Babbage's didn't sell used software or games). This gave the employees an opportunity to use the software (or games) gaining experience with it, and thus better able to work with customers. For example, knowing whether a customer would like game X or knowing if some software would be more useful than another. The last time I was in a GameStop you could hardly find the section with PC software, so I'm not really sure why this is an issue. I bought Portal 2 from them and they had to retrieve it from a back room (was not out on the shelf).

So it wouldn't surprise me if GameStop still allows their employees to check-out software and re-seal it. In this day with pervasive DRM, I'd just avoid them all together.

I have 18Mbps down, so I think I could reach my cap in fewer days. I do plan on lowering my cap down to 6 or 3, to ensure I don't rip through the bandwidth. So, less money to ATT.

I used to work at Babbage's, which is the heritage of Gamestop. This was back around 1989-1992. We were allowed to check out software, return it and then shrink wrap it back up. They were still sold as new. At the time, I looked at it as a benefit of employment, and it also gave me an opportunity to gain some knowledge about what it was that we were selling. If a game was good, I could recommend it to a customer. If a game was bad, I might even dissuade a customer who was on the fence.

Not sure why this is +5.

You had an outage, but you consider that good service? I've had no outages in over a year, I consider that good service. You had to call them 6 times. I haven't had to call ATT/SBC in over a year, probably two. Several years ago when I had Comcast, all my phone calls were directed to Canada. I spent 6 months trying to troubleshoot a problem with packet loss, that 5 or 6 techs visiting my house couldn't fix. I had one tech call me before he came out, asked if I was "up" (just because you have packet loss, doesn't mean you're not "up"). So I said I was, but still having problems. He went on to say that he wouldn't come out then, since I was "up", and became belligerent on the phone. At the time, Comcast was my only option. Fortunately, DSL became available, and I've been happy ever since. I will never go back to Comcast.

Subversion has the same (poor) merging capabilities as CVS.

FYI, I use Subversion but merging in Subversion and CVS is not nearly as simple as with Perforce or Arch. I subscribe to the subversion dev mailing list and I think it's probably at least another 1-2 years before Subversion has merging capabiliies on par with Perforce, Arch, ....

If you're interested in doing lots of merging with Subversion then you'll want to look at svnmerge (http://www.dellroad.org/svnmerge/index). I haven't used it but it gets good marks from the svn users mailing list.