I think what he was trying to say is that games like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft no longer require CDs to be in the drive to play. They removed the CD check some time in the last couple of years, so now it's just install and go.

In my experience of playing Warcraft 3 over B.Net and LAN, the way it works is, if you want to play a LAN game, no CD-key check is done. Therefore you can take 1 set of WC3 discs to a LAN party and everyone can play.

However, when playing online, a hash of your CD key is sent upon connection. If someone with that CD key is already connected, it will not let you connect. I believe the way Blizzard detects shared or widely leaked CD keys is when you have connections using 1 CD key from MANY different IP addresses ( not just 2-3. I've played WC3 from 2-3 different IP addresses (dorm room, friends place, college campus WiFi ) for over 2 years and never had so much as a warning.

In my -personal- experience, and what I hear from people I know personally whose stories I can verify, Blizzard ( NOT Activision-Blizzard ) has been very reasonable, and does not issue bans unless there are extreme circumstances. For this reason I continue to look forward to their products. Perhaps post-merger they will do things differently, but there is no data on which to base this theory.

Awesome. The post above parent says

and then I read

I was 10 Mb into the Ubuntu iso download before I read the whole post and realized what he was talking about.

Most of my favourite apps are either free or open-source, and there are ( fairly good ) Linux alternatives for all of them. Yet, although I've tried switching over to Linux FOUR times ( to a different distro on every occasion ), I've always come back to Windows. The reasons for this, I shall enumerate now.

1) Almost everywhere on the Internet, I hear people asking me ( a fairly staunch Windows supporter ) to switch over to "Linux". "Use Linux, it's better than Windows", "You should try Linux, you can do everything you do on Windows for free", and so on ad infinitum. The one point they seem to skip over is that if I ask them to hand me a CD with "Linux" written on it so that I can install "Linux", I'll be told to install one of approximately 90872394872908102312387192873981723 distros. For all their claims about the superiority of Linux, or how OSS is good for the developer community, they cannot decide on which fucking distro I should use. If, in reply to this post, you start recommending a distro, and it happens to be Slackware, Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Debian, or the bootable Knoppix, then I will snap my installation CD\DVD of the mentioned distro, and use the pieces to slit your throat.

Don't get me wrong on this. I think OSS is a great idea, and Linux too, but read on...

2) To date, no Linux install has supported my network hardware properly. My DSL modem does not distribute drivers for Linux, so I can't blame Linux for that, but that still doesn't solve my internet access problem. When I got a laptop with a wireless card, I downloaded Fedora Core and installed it, only to find that the card ( a Broadcom ) wasn't supported out of the box, but I could get experimental drivers and follow roughly 10 steps, download four different files, and somehow get it to work. I do all the downloading and step-following, only to find that I need the 2.6 kernel. That's when I went back to XP again. I'll try again in about a year. See you then.

3) As mentioned here, please don't bash Windows to get me to switch to Linux. I like it a lot, I program in the Win32 API, and I find that Apache/PHP, which is my web-dev language of choice, works just fine. Everytime somebody says that Linux is superior, I look back on my short few minutes with fresh Linux installs, and only find lots and lots of configuration and text-file searching and editing to get some fairly basic things to work. Now, I'm willing to take some pains to work with a decent OS, but seriously, it gets tiring after a while.

Make it easier to switch over, and it'll help "Linux" a lot.

Thank you for reading.