If you think it's reasonable for them to use the legal system to enforce you to pay then you should also understand that identifying pirates and serving them with legal notices is not free. So wouldn't it also be reasonable for them to pass this cost onto the pirates?

Of course since nobody knows what the actual cost of these "parking tickets" will be it's too early to know whether they'll be reasonable with the fines or if they'll use RIAA "math."

I'm still not sure how I feel about this. I think most of us have an aversion to using the legal system in this way due to the tactics employed by the MPAA/RIAA over the past decade so pretty much by default I don't like this idea. But at the same time the company is going to be releasing the game DRM free which is something the community has been asking for for a long time, and it's not unreasonable for them to expect players to pay for their product. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

I'll definitely be buying the game, my big decision will be whether to go with steam (the majority of my current games are there) or to use gog (to support the DRM free movement).

Sorry but that's just not true. Did you miss the recent uproar about the new iPhone SDK agreement? The new agreement bans any applications that were not natively written in C/C++/Objective C. This updated agreement was released only weeks before Adobe CS5 was to debut with advanced tools that would allow the porting of flash apps to the iPhone. If flash itself was the problem then such a clause would not have been added.

Sorry but I have to take issue with this. I agree that poker is a game of skill and that it is a very intellectual game, but that doesn't change the fact that it is gambling. From Merriam Webster: gambling: to bet on a uncertain outcome

I know that poker proponents have tried to differentiate poker from other "true" gambling games like blackjack and roullette in attempts to legalize it and I understand why. But it's disingenuous to claim that poker isn't gambling. You could be the most mathematically sound poker player in the world and still lose money in the long term if you had a bad enough run of luck.

But I also agree that poker is very different from other casino games. Whereas with slots, craps, blackjack, etc you're betting against the house (and losing money with every bet, statistically speaking) in poker you're betting against the other players. If you can make better decisions and plays than your opponents then you can expect to win money over the long term, as long as the house cut isn't too unreasonable.

Sorry for the derail, and for the record my poker skills are so bad that I have a better chance of making money in the long term by playing craps!! ;)

Anandtech put up a good review of the new chip and included some benchmarks against some i5s and i7s. Here's a link to the review on a single page.

It was outdone by the i7 860 almost universally. The 860 has 4 cores and can be found for $200 if you live near a Microcenter. It also draws less power, generates less heat, and the superior intel turbo boost technology means it runs single-threaded applications faster.

I like AMD too but other than the mid/low range market they really just aren't competitive these days. I think the new chips are a step in the right direction and I'd love to see them get back to their Athlon glory days.

Agreed. I just built a new computer and reinstalling my steam games was a breeze.

My biggest complaint with steam, which is really with some of the publishers who use it rather than Steam itself, is that some games have extra DRM in addition to Steam such as Games For Windows Live (GFWL). I've only bought one game through Steam that uses GFWL, Red Faction: Guerrilla. I don't recall the Steam purchase page mentioning that I'd need to create a separate account and be signed into it as well in order to play the game but I can't say for sure it wasn't there. What I can say for sure is that it took hours of googling and messing with settings to even get the game to play and when it did run it was buggy and would occasionally crash or randomly pop up the GFWL login screen. After that experience I'll never again buy a game that uses GFWL.

Unfortunately Bioshock 2 is one such game (Steam + Securom + GFWL) and while I had been looking forward to playing it I'm voting with my wallet and staying away from it (while also neither pirating it nor buying a PS3 version).

Overall my experiences with Steam have been positive but like others there's always the concern in the back of my mind that Valve could go under and all my games rendered inaccessible.

Runes of Magic actually attempted to do something like this, although a year ago when I was playing it wasn't very successful. There was basically a good/evil (blue/red) scale where you'd become more evil for killing neutral/good players and become more good by killing evil players. The evil players would get bonuses to their damage but would have an increased chance to drop equipment when killed. The good players would get more defensive bonuses and possibly a reduced chance to drop equipment, can't remember exactly.

However the implementation was very flawed. For one, the good/evil bonuses weren't implemented while I was playing, and for all I know they may still not be. The bigger problem was once you reached a certain level of "evil" you were effectively banished from all towns and teleporters because guards would instakill you. This meant that trying to start an evil life as a low level character almost entirely restricted you from being able to do any quests. Not to mention the fact that there were probably 50 blues for every red, and the blues would gang up on the reds and kill them repeatedly trying to farm for blue rep.

I think it's an interesting idea that if done right could make for a very fun game.