Uhm, yes they are. Call of Duty: Black Ops (released a few days ago) is sold in stores as a DVD that installs steam and then installs the game as if purchased online via steam. This has been true for many titles before this one.

Basically, since users now has steam installed (and a steam account created) the barrier for further purchases over Steam has been lowered significantly.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but I guess that's what they mean.

You can actually delete your account permanently. I've done it, but I have to admit it took some googling to find the form.

Log in to your Facebook account and visit this page:

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

It'll deactivate your account and - provided you do not login for two weeks - it'll actually be deleted.

I never said it was devoid of costs, I said it was free (almost) for the patient.

The point is that even though is subsidized almost entirely by the state (oh no, commies!) it's STILL cheaper than the US medicare/medicaid per capita. The point was that the american system probably would spend less tax dollars by socializing it all.

In Sweden (and most of Scandinavia), health care is free (for you, except for maybe a $15 flat fee for non-emergencies). We also pay a lot less per capita than you do in the US.

So while it might not be free, it's certainly a lot cheaper.

Voddler released the full compilable source code when moving to the flash based platform. It's available right there on their site, but I guess it was to hard to find for you. Link to download link

That's already fixed. Doesn't run as root and you now have the option of turning the P2P stuff off and on as you wish.

Voddler on Mac

And it is. The world has announced sternly how much the USA loathing rised during the Bush presidency.

Greetings from Sweden, the land of Nobel.

What your are talking about doesn't really sound like card processing, it seems you are using Direct Payment where you can pay using your bank account and some form of authentication (differs from bank to bank, but usually the same two or three factor auth you use for you online banking.

Now, at least my bank uses 3D Secure as well. The implementation differs between banks in Sweden. Some use only a text challenge/response while others use a two factor system where you need your cardreader as well. Works extremely well!

Even if that was true (which it is not), it's not the reason I switched to Google. My problem was that altavista snuck ads into the search results. Like adwords, but it would appear as search result #1. That - combined with the fact that Googles result were better and updated more often - didn't really make the choice all that difficult.

So I don't know why they bother.

Spotify: So, we can release the source, right?
Music Industry: Nope. That would reveal our ROT13 DRM.
Spotify: But they'll figure that out eventually, why can't we j...
Music Industry: Do you want to license our music or not?

On the other hand, my eyes head for the ceiling when the guy who has been there two weeks starts explaining the half dozen major changes we should make to the business. Spend six months learning how to do it my way you greenie! When you're fully trained on the job, I'll be interested in your opinions on how to improve it

A business guy who was involved with starting up Metro told me that when it comes to making good changes in organisations you have two weeks to learn the business, two weeks to come up with the changes and two weeks to implement them. Wait too long and you'll just end up being normalized to the same thinking as everyone else and nothing will be improved.

Not saying this can be said for everything, but your line of thinking represents a big problem when it actually comes to changing things.

The difference now is that the music industry could decide what you would watch on MTV. Ads only work if you are forced to watch them, so the popular music video X could be shown as long as the videos for new bands Y and Z were also shown while people were "waiting" for X.