This is likely the nail in the coffin. After the PS2 and Xbox were released, PC games were almost released as an afterthought, and a great many games were "ported" over to the PC, usually lame translations. I used to thank the day M$ became the giant in the playground so I didn't have to bemoan the fact that a fun-looking game was released for Amiga or Atari, and not for my platform. Nowadays I really want PC gaming to return with a vengeance, as most PS games bore me (the ones I've played can't keep my attention long enough to justify even a rental) and PC is still my platform of choice for games. Yeah, just try and mod Morrowind on an Xbox! This slump in sales, I fear, will be the catalyst for making even fewer PC games than we do already, and most of the developer dollars will be thrown towards a console that I do not own or intend to own.

Well, that assumes that the judicial system works. That also assumes that the RIAA played fair instead of fast and loose with the facts. Time has shown that one of these two statements is sometimes true, but bothe of these statements are never true. The RIAA has 1) Consistently misrepresented facts as to lost sales 2) Consistently overvalued their losses as pertains to a single defendant 3) Consistently asked for secrecy to cover up their lies above, citing trade secrets. A lawsuit won by those means should not be rewarded -- it should instead be punished

Actually, in my experience prices don't lower, they raise if you wait too many years. I had my eye on Wizardry 8, and when it finally dropped to $20 USD I thought seriously of purchasing it. Imagine my surprise when I finally went to buy it (not too long after I saw the price drop), and people were selling it for $100! The PC game Arcanum went the same way, and all of a sudden the asking price was around $80 USD and the demos available for download were all corrupt -- and they were asking a grip of money for a game sight unseen. I'm sure Baldur's Gate II and Morrowind will head the same way. Maybe it's different for EA games that need a server in order to activate the game. In the case of the games I've mentioned, these are games you can sit down and play on your computer long after their publishers are dust -- as long as your rig supports the technology. That being said, I got a crop of more modern games for $20 or less each. Some of them I would have been happy to pay full price for. Others, well, let's just say that the dust has a new place to settle.

I don't care if it was positively stone-age. It was the fastest thing I'd used in forever. All of those other systems you mentioned ran slowly or not at all on my rigs. If I paid a pittance I could download scads of stuff, with no waiting. It didn't matter what my router was set to, how many seeds or peers there were, or whether I was sharing, or even what client I was using. Unlike the darknets (like DirectConnect) there was no idiot moderator who banned you if he didn't like you or didn't understand what he saw in your files. It's not the tech that's important here -- something can be the coolest thing in the world, but if it doesn't work it is useless to me. Rapidshare, Megaupload, etc work, and work well.

Um...yes! When I first got my son's computer, he couldn't play DVDs on his DVD player. WinXP didn't recognize it. I DL'd VIDEOLAN a few minutes later, but it was still annoying.

More redneck than anything else, I'd say. The United States was built on people objecting to laws on moral grounds, and flagrantly violating them. Generally the laws that originally governed this country when it was a colony were wholly unfair. They are unfair again, and I see little benefit to bowing to the whims of the filthy rich.

A lot of the "crap" and "freeloaders" that got "flushed out" are good friends of mine. Quite a few of the people I work with are Katrina refugees, and they are some of the coolest, hardest working people I know.

Ironically, I can suggest good filtering software. There was one I found for Firefox, called Glubble. While it is a pain in the patootie, it does allow me total control of the content, administration is password-protected, and attempting to close it out without the proper admin authorization shuts down the browser entirely. it makes my son happy, because I can enable things like Ninja Turtles and Chaotic, and he can watch episodes online.

It also comes with links to age-appropriate stuff, like Clifford for my five-year old. This is customizable based on age.

I even have some games-for-kids sites on there, just for kicks. He likes driving games. A warning -- you will need it installed on his browser and yours (if they're separate -- my child has his own desktop (inherited when I upgraded). You just disable it on your browser when your not administrating and you can surf normally.

Of course, eventually he'll graduate to full Net use, but it's idea for what he wants to do right now, and it seems to protect him from Porn pop-ups and malware traps.

And did you leave skid marks?

Avast rocks. Catches stuff on web pages and web *searches.* (favicons infected with trojans). I've never had a botched install routine, updates itself every day (sometimes more than once), and I've used it for years. Never had a virus slip past it. I even use free net virus scanners (like McAfee) as a bench test.

Doesn't slow down any of my computers, either. Not my XP desktop (1.33 GHz with 512 MB RAM) nor my dual-core laptop with 4 GB RAM. As with anything, YMMV.

Is that an Irish Catholic baby Jesus or a Protestant one?

Easy. Package it with some unobtrusive DRM -- DRM that includes levels, monsters, critical files that make the game work. Maybe include a code that, when it hits the servers, downloads those critical files. Now, what if those critical files were maybe hooked to the unique IP address of the person registering the game, so that they won't work on someone else's machine when they download it as a torrent?

This can be done. I know it can be done. The how is up to the developer.

Additionally, make the manual available for purchase. Then, have random questions about the third word in the second paragraph of Section V, Subsection XXIV or some such. Piracy as "prevented" in the 80s.

And send a takedown note along to Replacementdocs.com so that they don't have a PDF version of your manual for download.

There's a not well-known game called Two Worlds, which I actually liked better than Oblivion, truth be told. They have an online activation thing, like Vista, but it's a one-time deal, and they have promised to release a patch killing the activation if for whatever reason they stop support for the game.

Every company that uses Dumb Restrictions on Media should do this, and stick to it.

The Incredibles, was, in a word, incredible.

Better by far than alot of the superhero fare nowadays. Enjoyed it more than Dark Knight, both Fantastic Four movies (which seem to care more about Jessica Alba half-naked), and Spider-Man 3.

That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed Watchmen, though. It was fairly faithful to the comic, and that's mainly what I wanted.

The purpose of the Second Amendment is very simple. Once the American Revolution was underway, King George's generals were confiscating weapons from the Colonials. The right to bear arms is expressly for a well-organized militia to repel the British. Anything else is window dressing.

Any gun nut who says a polite society is an armed society has never been shot over a disagreement. What?

The Second Amendment was very clear on the reason why. It's just that the first part of that sentence is always ignored.