Actually, I'm pretty sure its SecuROM that makes new terrorists. They're all just angry about their copies of Spore, the Sims 2, and Fallout 3 not working.

Just wandering, (if you've seen any) what do you think of Canadian comedy and TV? As one of the very few people in Southern Ontario who actually knows what the term "Americanization" means, I'd like to hear the opinion of say Corner Gas of someone with taste living in the middle of the Televised hellhole. Its bad enough that a good 95% of what I get up here is Americanized, I'd like to know if what little distinction remains is actually good or if I'm just holding on to the last bit of non mainstream American TV here and convincing myself its good.

Console game downloading services, giving hackers holes to load homebrew through since 1981

I used to use the online multi-scanners, but the DSL Slam in my area can only handle 800kb/s up so large batches of files took FOREVER, with the exception of Kaspersky, which is on a seperate box and used to scan network SMB/SAMBA shares, they're all run locally on my XP install. As long as you make sure you only have one resident scanning at a time there's no conflict. The doenside is that it can get tiring manually scanning once with each utility, but it helps to kill false-positives and catches those few that slip through one or 2 of them.

If you know what you're doing you're safe. Just never run anything that hasn't gotten good response from the community, doesn't show up as malicious by at least 5 Antimalware systems (I use Kaspersky, Avast!, ClamAV, Spybot: S&D, and Ad-Aware), and you haven't already tested in an isolated Virtual Machine. Besides, I only use my XP install for games so if it gets killed, no big deal.

Exactly! Most of the music/DVDs/software/games I buy physical copies of never leave their packaging, as soon as I own them I fire up BitTorrent/Gnutella/Warez forums and download myself a copy. I'm not exactly sure about the legality in the states under the DMCA but here in Canada it's 100% legal under the Private Copying section of the Copyright Act and the Computer Programs section if you want a rock-solid defense for backing up Software/Games to get "copies" by any methods you like as long as you actually own it. Also, even if the House of Commons or the Supreme Court makes it illegal up here, I really don't care. For me morality is more important than legality when it comes to stupid laws, if I've purchased a copy I'll be damned if anyone is going to tell me that I can't grab myself a DRM-free version (besides, the RCMP hasn't and isn't going to be putting any effort into cracking down on piracy, and the ISPs up here don't seem to be doing anything beyond throttling). The day I give in to DRM is the day Microsoft goes open-source.

Too true. Of course, the biggest difference is that the open shit doesn't try to sue you.

You've worked for Microsoft?