So I pay a monthly fee and then I get what?..
-map packs: EA will have to sell map packs as a separate DLC as well. They'd be losing a ton of money if they didn't. Not everyone will subscribe.
-Analysis Tools: Big woop, maybe some pro players care about that.
-???? : HAS to be weapon mods of some kind. How else will this subscription make any sense? Take it, it'll piss off people who don't subscribe of course. And if you don't think EA would do something so dumb, just recall the battlefield 2 special forces expansion, which added weapons for only the expansion players in the original maps.

The other option is that the service offers so little difference that only a small minority of pro players buy it....what do you think is more likely?

Even T-mobile affiliates like iWireless (in Iowa) don't offer the G1 or myTouch. Google needs to stop relying on T-mobile and get Android phones as offerings from all national carriers. I'd love to get an android phone to replace my current sub-par MS 6.1 based HTC smartphone. Time to start flexing some muscle google!

For online purchases one-use card numbers already are available.

Bank of America has them, it's called 'Shopsafe' and it's a free feature if you have a card with them. I've used it for every web purchase now for years and it works great. You set your limit & expiration date, generate a number and your set. Easy and it limits your exposure.

(MBNA developed shopsafe and then Bank of America got it when they bought them out. Probably other companies have something similar)

If you use Vista as a Media Center it works great. That's the best feature of Vista over XP as far as I'm concerned.

yes, I'm well aware of all the Linux alternates. I wanted to use one of them but, I couldn't be confident in the hardware support for the various HD motherboards and tuner cards I was looking at. I looked through tons of guides and they were mostly for older SD stuff.

I'm no MS fan boy by any means but, Vista MCE really is nice and is easy to use. HD recording, radio(some free or online XM), free TV guide (unlike what I'm currently paying tivo for), photos, couple games you can play with your remote, weather(plugin) and all the normal DVR stuff of course. You can rip your CD's & DVD's and also, burn off recordings to a DVD(although very slowly). One neat feature that my tivo doesn't do is that it'll show you the movies coming up(sorted various ways) and download the movie DVD cover so it's like you're browsing Blockbuster. I thought it was neat at least. Blu-Ray drives are $120-$150, as soon as they come down a bit I'll add that in too.

I'm not saying various Linux MCE programs don't have the same or similar features. I just know that for $550 (including OS,remote & HTPC case ), I built a kick ass whisper quiet 1080i HD DVR with 1 install of Vista and a quick run through the setup guide.

The one feature missing is clear QAM decoding..which didn't matter since this was for my folks and they use an antenna. I have XP or Ubuntu running on all my PC's so I'm not saying Vista is the best but, it does have at least one compelling feature that's worth checking out.