A word many forgot. Value. If there is value in buying a game or service then people will buy it. I didn't buy Batman A.C. until it was $10 bucks. Why? That's what it is worth to me. $60? No game is worth that to me. There isn't any value in it. It's that simple. I played Eve Online and paid $15 a month for it, it was worth it because the service they provided (uptime, patches, content, etc.) was worth it. It had value.

"Why pay for it when you can copy it?" Because it isn't worth my time. I go to Steam, see if there is a deal for something $10 and if there is I buy it. IT's not worth my time running around digging through spyware infested Torrent sites to sit around for 6 hours while I try to download it only to find the last 5% of it is only being seeded by 2 peers. I get patches, content, dlc, multiplayer, etc through steam and what is even better, I don't have to do a damn thing beyond click Install and maybe, maybe once in a while fill in some info.

Gates was right, the future is Software as a Service because people don't want to pay for software but they will pay for service. Much like people eating at a Denny's\Embers: you aren't there for the food. Everything there you could make yourself (copy). Rather, you are there for the service. You want someone else to cook it and hopefully someone competent and cute to bring you said food.

Here let me hit my time machine button for a sec.... yep... just as I thought. Everyone said the same damn thing about Microsoft 15 years ago. The same thing about Oracle 10 years ago. The same thing was said for just about every proprietary system and vendor over the years.

"How dare you disagree with me and not like my way of life. YOU MUST BE SILENCED IN THE NAME OF TOLERANCE!!!!", typical.

Every dumb ass that bought that EA shit stain deserved every second of their queue times. Lets see: Gutted map sizes with Regions 1/4 the size of Sim City 4 (+1 step backwards) plus actual cities smaller then Sim City 1 (+4 steps backwards) along with gutted gameplay (no underground utility design, no subways... +3 steps backwards) along with always online requirement and DRM (+10 steps backwards), pre-order nonsense (imagine paying up front at a restaurant for you food.... +2 steps backwards) in exchange for Curved Roads (-1 step backwards... wait, nm Sim City 4 had mods that added those +0 then) and no modding support (+10 steps backwards).

It's almost like EA was jealous that Monte Cristo made a shittier Sim City game then Societies (Cities XL) and wanted to 1-up Monte Cristo in the fucking horrible Sim Socialist genre so they made this "Sim City" which is more a Cities XL 2 then anything else. It's just missing that magical "No, the state has decreed that only Executives can purchase these homes. Be gone peasant and free market subscriber!"

Try Lexis Nexis and law libraries and actually read the case law and state laws rather then Google. I'll take actual case law and statutes rather then the random opinions of bloggers and journalists who skimmed a few cases for exceptions.

No it's natural selection and adaptation. Evolution requires going from a lower to higher order of life. Some reptiles evolved into birds. Some ancient fish evolved into a whale. A bird getting a different beak is adaptation. When the mosquito gets a new organ, an extra set of legs, then we'll call it evolution. When a cook develops a tolerance to spicy food, he hasn't evolved...

Why? If your mean dog bites an intruder in all 50 states you are liable for assault, and your dog will be put down and you will, not might, be liable for the intruder's injuries. I can't find a single state in the USA, that has ANY protection for home owner's if their pet assaults an intruder. (At least that I could find in 2 hours of searching.)

It isn't AD&D if you aren't rolling THAC0. 2nd Ed FTW!

Gun control advocates love to indicate the 'logic' that less guns correlates to less homicides. But Logic, also requires that negation hold true. More guns = more homicides... right? However when gun sales have surged in the last 10 years, increasing nearly 40% in the last 10 years, homicides, especially gun related homicides, are down. Funny how "a clear correlation between guns and homicides" breaks down when applying basic statistics. .0003% of guns used in homicides... clearly a problem with guns, if and only if you lust after leaving people defenseless and powerless. Of course if less gun = less homicides then more guns = more homicides which... well isn't true.

Wait it isn't linear... wait there are more regressors... wait there are more excuses and attempts to over-fit a model... Did you know that the price of gasoline correlates to the number of homicides committed between the hours of 9 PM CST and 11:41 PM CST. Of course the question is how strong the correlation is. Good lore you would be surprised what you can make correlate to something.

The USA doesn't have a gun problem, it has a gang violence problem. You take out gang related homicides and guess what, were are nearly identical to Canada, England, France, Iceland, Norway, Spain, Germany, and the rest of the top 30 peaceful nations per 100,000. The problem is inner city poverty, broken homes, and poor childhood development which is the American cocktail for gangs.

Keep your head in the sand and keep ignoring the gang violence problem. Yeah ban the last line of defense citizens have against those lawless gangs...

I saw John Carpenter's "The Thing" and we all know how this will end with a half-assed prequel!!

He donated to the wrong party.

The plastics you'd use in a 3D printer aren't going to work all that well compared to the plastics they use for example in Glocks. Not to mention you'd still need to machine the trigger assembly, magazine well, safety assembly, fire select, etc.

Would be nice to be able to make custom grips and stocks but that plastic crap (relatively speaking) the 3D printers use isn't worth it. We tried making a test Glock grip (solid even, no magazine well) and a 4 lb weight. Snapped the grip in half easily. Perhaps with some heat treatment or additional additives in the plastic (baking it perhaps) might make the plastic work better but right now, it's too ... brittle... I guess is the best term. The problem is the way the printer prints, the bond isn't very good between layers base when force is applied perpendicular to the printing plane. Our test grips all break along the plane of the printing. We did another test where we printed out a grip with an approximate magazine well and fitted in a hollow metal slip in there to see if that would shore it up. It just cracks around the metal slip. I think baking it might help with the layers bonding together better but for those of us hoping to get custom grips, stocks, ammo and magazine containers etc are going to have to wait a bit longer. We even tried rotating the print so the plane was rotate 90 degrees and out test pendulum just kept snapping the grip either to the left or right depending on where it hit.

Once someone figures out how to do a fluro polymer type plastic in a 3D printer then we can get some real utility printing done.

I think you have confused profitable with greed again...

He committed acts that clearly fall in the category of espionage including violating the Diplomatic Bag. I'm surprised he's still alive.

MMOs built an industry on Software as a Subscription. Now they move to the F2P model, it still is at a fundamental level Software as a Service\Subscription.