.. waiting for them to overturn this ruling. the bottom line is that blizzard has all the resources they need to fluff this case up as some kind of crime against humanity and the loss of freedom for every man woman and child in america when the bottom line is they are fighting to poison themselves for the long haul. I must say that as a consumer I HATE when any company wants me to pay for something I wont own. my first thought is always "if you dont want me to own your products, I wont buy them." They will learn this lesson eventually along with the "if we dont make things work easily, the pirates will" lesson after billions wasted and a soured market turns around and bites them in the ass.

With film its previews and trailers, with music its promotional tracks and samples, with books its the synopsis or just reading the first page or so before you buy it, with TV its promos and commercials, hell with newspapers its headlines. The point being that EVERY major entertainment medium for at least a hundred years uses this model of giving a little bit away for free to create interest and to promote themselves. The problem with EA and now Crytek is they are looking at peoples interest in game demos not as curiosity as to if they will purchase but rather a lead in to a definite purchase and hope to sell the same product twice much the same way that companies are toying with selling downloadable content already in game and then "unlocking" it. I think they will find very quickly that it just doesn't work that way. the sad thing is that they still scream bloody murder about piracy because they are losing sales and never consider for a moment that they're aggressive and offensive sales model and draconian protection schemes may be a factor.

...but there really should be a minimum security standard for infrastructure items like any city's power grid (or voting machines, or traffic systems, or water supplies, or any number of things you dont want folks monkeying with). Its really insane to hear about this considering how power stations and utilities are tightly regulated. It doesnt matter that the system is only open on the far end of the line because eventually someone will mess with it and show just why its a bad idea. Either make the system secure or dont make them so accessable.

This *IS* EA... the company that plans to start selling game demo's calling them "Pre-Downloadable Content" couldn't it be malicious stupidity? maybe stupid malice? Dont forget the rest of that quote you are using " Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice." The PR arm of a mega-corperation can often be perfectly happy being both mean and dumb in equal parts.

..its likely a planned statement. The guy is supposed to be a "mouthpeice" for the company. I highly doubt he would just up and "go rogue" on EA since its a really good way to lose his job in the long run. More than likely the intent is a bit more subtle. Perhaps to throw the (slow selling) game under the bus for awhile only to result in either a patch after the story is run awhile to ramp up news reaction to the break. Giving them quite a bit of press for having to "listened to the fans" or just allow them to retain cred by trashing a game thats not going anywhere anyway cutting thier losses and putting a good spin on a bad move "hey, it sucks, but we admitted it sucks. So, we're cool and can keep the money you paid us right?" or something along those lines.

The way that most modern fingerprint scanners work is by using matching algorithms. They scan your fingerprint and translate that into a numeric value and then store that. Not a copy of your fingerprint itself. This numeric value cannot be used to recreate your fingerprint but it can however be used to match the output that only your fingerprint will produce when scanned. To be perfectly candid its far easier to steal your fingerprints by stealing something you own than it is to take them from a fingerprint security/tracking system.