I’ve been in the U.S. Army Infantry for a number of years and during my last deployment to Iraq a few of my buddies and I picked up Dawn of War II at one of the bigger COBs with the intent of setting up a LAN in our tent to unwind from the daily suck. We were furious when we discovered that our install disk only contained the Steam client and that you actually had to register and download the software from their servers. A broadband connection to download a game we purchased three copies of retail? While we were wishing we might as well have been wished for a floor or an air conditioner that worked. We were happy to have electricity... in our tent.

We were forced to abandon Steam and their digital fascism in favor of older games that didn’t discriminate against people who don’t readily have access to broadband. For a lot of guys in my unit and other units I’ve been in, mini-LAN parties are our primary source of entertainment anytime we can secure a reliable power source. These increasingly Orwellian systems of combating piracy aren’t just an inconvenience for us, they are a showstopper. We simply can't do anything about it. Try as we might, we can’t squeeze Wi-Fi out of a rock.