I wouldn't be surprised considering 10 corporations own practically all of the common consumer brands.

Thanks for the car analogy. I had this long-winded post written up about the "entitlement" of receiving the authenticator with the game, but I think your post responds in a much better manner. :)

If you really want to be correct, income can be either net or gross. Gross income is revenue. Net income is profit. Because he didn't state what kind of income, he's technically still correct. </pedantic>

You don't need a phone to run the mobile app. The fact that you can run android apps on a SDK on the computer has been known for a while now. See: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/713865-How-to-get-Battle-net-Mobile-Authenticator-COMPLETELY-free

Hacked accounts are a loss for Blizzard. Not only do they have to staff GMs to handles these requests, they have to restore items and more often than not they can't remove the stolen items. I firmly believe the $6.50 pays for the keyfob and the postage, and that's it. If they can break even, its a net gain for them since they can reduce the GM ticket queue and free up these expenses and time for other things. Remember how they laid off 600 employees in April? (http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/04/27/the-lawbringer-autonomous-systems-deal-with-customer-service-pr/) That was a reduction in operating costs for supporting these types of requests.

Right, because the keyfobs and shipping are free to Blizzard.
How does this guy know that Blizz made $26 mil from them? Does he have access to the sales reports? Remember, "the complaint accuses Blizzard of making $26 million in Authenticator sales." Accusing someone of making money and them -actually- making that much money is two completely different things.

They introduced a "restore" feature a while back that allows you to migrate devices without removing two-factor authentication. Basically, you enter the restoration code into the new phone/device and both devices will continue to generate the same seeded code. This can also be used to extend the authenticator to multiple devices like having a smartphone and a tablet both generate the same code. This is just an ease-of-use feature, especially when sometimes you can't find one of the devices you installed your authenticator on.

Not only does the $6.50 help cover postage and pay for the dongle, its completely optional and Blizzard makes the app available to as many platforms as they can. You can even install the authenticator on a Android simulator on a computer.

I'm in shock as to how entitled this person is. I honestly just can't fathom how he can claim that Blizzard "makes money" off these authenticators.

I would love it if, after connecting the cable, it detects the stolen MSIN, takes the phone, and notifies the police.

I suspect its more because the electrical & computer engineering (ECE) department pretty much only operates *nix clusters. I'm not sure on the specifics but I'm sure its out of practicality more than anything. They don't offer some of these super expensive software packages as downloadable software, but rather only have them installed on the clusters, and using X windows through SSH tunnels may have been more practical than Windows terminal services. (Most cluster computers are accessible directly - CMU owns a lot of IP addresses)

As an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, I'm going to assume this is no big deal, but possibly at least confirms what people think. CMU has several Unix clusters, as well as Mac clusters. All of the downloadable software is supported on as many platforms as the software is created with. In fact, several classes (especially the digital IC design with CADENCE) are operated only in *nix environments.
VPN access to on-campus resources are also provided in all operating environments, and having used both the PC and *nix ones, I can say documentation is quite complete. This is a relatively recent development, however, as the documentation and support has greatly improved since I started at CMU.
It greatly helps when the professors are experts in the software they're teaching and help debug problems with the IT department. (The Hadoop cluster was especially fun to debug, especially with the broken JAR file passing in 0.20.1).

I think the letter he wrote in reply to the non-final rejection was the most representative of this person's delusion. I reuploaded it at scribd for easy access: http://www.scribd.com/doc/57372518/USPTO-05-27-2008-Miscellaneous-Incoming-Letter

As I read it, all I could think of is if you're god why do you need the patent office to enforce the sue of your abilities?

Yeah, sorry. I misread the letter. It says I must send it back if I decide not to continue participating in this program.

Agreed. I'm participating in this and I've had my router since around November.
Also they're not "giving them away" per se. The routers have custom firmware on them and they come with a letter saying when we're done we want the routers back otherwise we're sending you a bill (as agreed on when you signed up for the program).