1) Good luck chums, worst case Google et al form shell companies to own the servers in china
2) Congress would better use their time investigating the human rights abuses commited by this Adminitration instead of pointing fingers.
Or how about (random chineese search startup) starts building up because the big boys (Google, Yahoo and al) aren't allowed in China. 15-20 years later, this little startup is big, huge, and starts moving outside China slowly eating away the big western companies' marketshare until it dominates the world for search engines. China is a gigantic potential market for the future. If western companies are not allowed inside, a chineese startup (or existing company) will get very big by grabbing the chineese market.
The entire month of January was a joke in Montreal. We usually get about 20+ days at -20 Celsius, not this year. We had torrential rain, about 6 Celsius above average temperatures for this time of the year. Last summer was also the hottest in the century. I could get used to weak winters like this!
Unfortunately, the current versions of Windows are too exploitable
I beg to differ about Windows being too easy to exploit. Run Linux with root access and you are just as vulnerable. Windows, since Win2K has a very good security framework. The problem is not Windows itself, but the shoddy practices of Microsoft by letting everyone and their dogs run as root (hopefully Vista will change this).
I haven't had an Anti-Virus nor Anti-Spyware installed, ever. I only install one for shits and giggles to see if anything got through. Guess what? Nothing got through. You have to do few basic security steps and your Windows installation is pretty rock solid security wise, most importantly: DO NOT run Windows with root security and use as much as possible open source applications for your needs. Create yourself a non root account. Oh and ditch IE. Common sense will make any Windows installation secure.
For Joe User, nothing will change unless Joe User is educated about security. You can give him the best firewall with Star Trek like AI built into it, if he decides to execute an email attachement that flushes his own files or massemails crap to people on his address list, nothing is there to stop him.
Yup! We live in the fast food version of the music world. The majority of people are happy listening to bands who play 1-2 riffs per song, use same song template over and over and lyrical content is either teenage girl's daydream or teenage angst. It's something the music industry saw and is now over producing.
Where are the Pink Floyds of our days? Playing in small clubs of 900ish capacity because the major labels make 10 times as much money with regurgitated repetitive crap like Linkin Park.
The Danish Mohammed cartoon will is going to be the root cause of World War 3. Discuss.
I seriously doubt it would happen. The western world is FAR too powerful militarily for any muslim nation to pose a threat. China has issues with radical islamists, India too, Russia ditto, and so does Europe and the US. There won't be a rift between powerful nations to ignite another world war.
But, I think a much more serious event will happen in the future if islamic extremists keep this jihad going. There is going to be a lot hatred built up in the west, more and more until one state elects some far right governement and does something radical like a genocide. Unfortunately since the rest of the world will be also in apathy vs the muslim world, they might simply ignore it. Bosnia or Rwanda on a larger scale.
Well I would assume that the monthly fee in WoW is a reason why the "other" games' budget is down for many people.
IMO, that maybe has a very little impact but I think mostly because succesful MMOGs are gigantic, there is always "stuff" to do, replay value is huge. I remember logging into WoW/EQ and always have something to do: raids, quests, dungeons, PvP, gaining new factions, crafting, whatnot. And every "stuff" to do resulted in power gain for my avatar. These games are centered around making your avatar more and more powerful with levels, alternate advancement, raid items, quest items, gold, etc. My reasons for not wanting to play were simple: why invest X hours into a single player game when during this time I can play online with friends AND my avatar will be more powerful as a bonus!
When I was playing Evercrak and WoW, I pretty much stopped buying other videogames, there was no motivation to play other games. I only bought KotOR and Galactic Civilizations over a long period of time (3+ years). I suspect the 5.5 million WoW customers might no longer be buying, or buying significantly less, single player titles.
however, calling the big bang a theory is actually correct
Yes and no. Yes Big Bang is just a theory, like every single scientific "law" or "fact". There is not absolute truth in science. The problem is not calling Big Bang a theory, the problem is that theory, for the common mortal is nothing more than a "hunch" a "wild idea".
Scientists need to come up with a different term for theory. Or they need to push a major PR campaign explaining what a theory is for science, that a theory for science isn't just a hunch but something that is backed up by empyrical evidence. They have to stop giving fundamentalists a way to attack science by calling everything that goes through the scientific method "just a theory".
Deutsch called Big Bang a theory to imply it's not good science and that there is a good alternative in God/Creation. He clearly aimed to discredit the scientific work done on Big Bang to advance his radical and/or fundamentalist and/or religious view.
It's 10k players at once. So if true that there is only 10k max at once, that's probably 50-100k players total.
I'd wager around 50k. EQ in it's prime had about 100k players online with about 550k total accounts. Still, for SWG these numbers are pathetic. SOE was given one of the biggest sci-fi franchises and didn't manage to capitalize on it.
There are many games without a franchise that are fairly popular: City of Heroes/Villains, DAoC, Second Life. I just don't understand how SOE and Lucas Arts could have messed up SWG so badly.
First, it is not "the muslim world" it is particular individuals. Second, christians are not currently the subject of what must seem to them (and many objective observers) as a crusade where their countries are invaded by foreigners from another continent with another religion who kill them,
Indeed. Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, U.K., France, Canada (protests this weekend coming up) are all being invaded and the people are killed there regulary by people with another religion. Oh wait... FFS, shiites and sunnies are in a never ending religious war. Both groups are muslims, yet they keep killing eachother. One day a grenade blows up in a shiite mosque in Pakistan. Another day a sunni blows himself up in a shiite mosque in Iraq and so on. The lebanese muslims can't tolerate other non muslim lebanese citizens, especially christians whom a few were killed in this week's and last week's protests. The southern thai province (forgot the name) is on a jihad vs buddhist monks. FFS, Buddhist monks!. Aceh province in Indonesia wants their own radical state. Again, the muslims need to police themselves before looking outside their own backyard.
The main problem with islam is that the moderates, the non fanatics do not intervene. Why does it take over a week of riots, violence and protests for one single moderate islamic group to say that extremists are wrong. As soon as some nutcase christian calls for the assasination of Hugo Chavez every other moderate christian is outraged and they immediately voice their opinions. Why can't the moderate muslims learn to tell the extremists to STFU? Why does it take the death of 190+ people in Madrid for the spanish Imams and big cheeses to say that extremist islamists are wrong? Why can't the british imams come out against the protester who hold signs like: KILL EVERY COUNTRY THAT OFFENDS ISLAM...
Second, these images of Muhammad are as offensive to muslims as it would be to christians to depict the Virgin Mary getting fucked by a pig with the caption "Technically, she's still a virgin."
Do you watch South Park? Do we have christians around the world up in arms, threatening to boycot, kidnap and kill every day despite christianity being ridiculed completely on South Park?
For starters, if you watch South Park: Most of the catholic church is made up by child abusers. Jesus has a tv show, he occasionally does a boxing match with Satan. Satan is gay, but in reality not evil at all. Hell is far more nicer place than heaven. God is one ugly animal who sometimes uses vulgar language. Only mormons can get into heaven. The head of the catholic church is a giant spider queen. Ugh... I am sure there are other things South Park ridicules from the church. Then there was the bloody mary or whatever episode fiasco and who knows what else. Saddam is in heaven building WMDs while God is way too incompetent to realize it. I could go on for ages!
Not to mention you got many Black Metal bands pretty much singing about Mary being a whore, Jesus being a moron and who knows what else. Pick up some Cradle of Filth, Deicide or Gorgoroth!
I won't even get into the "lighter" side of church ridicule from the Simpsons and other comedy shows. However, we don't have christians all around the world calling for boycot and revenge and murder over this do we? I am sure some/many christians are offended by those cartoons, bands, whatnot, but hey, they are smart enough to realize it's a free society with free speech. They enjoy freedom of religion, while we enjoy free speech! Fair deal no?
IMO, the whole muslim world is WAYYYYY too sensitive about this issue. I find it ironic when they insult the jewish and christian religions in their cartoons it's all good, but when someone else does something similar it's the end of the world!
(burn karma burn) The muslim world needs to police itself before trying to comment/police the non muslim world. (/burn carma burn)
but the market will have provided users with the proper way to fight it
In a few years the market will have legitimized spyware (Gator^H^H^H^H Claria is already semi "legit") so that way it will look as spyware is reduced when infact it's no longer spyware but "useful programs that are funded by advertising" PR bullshit that scumware companies like Claria and 180 crap spew.
But, I think that in the future, if spyware will decline, it will not be attributed to the market giving people tools (those already exist), but I see the computer users being a little bit more savy and most importantly Windows Vista and beyond pushing non administrator accounts for newly installed PCs and more and more people are adopting Firefox.
The main reasons for spyware today are IE + everyone and their dogs running Windows with root accounts. Eliminate those 2 problems and the spyware plague will be severely crippled.
Iraq war had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda nor WMDs. It was all about oil (for long term goals) and geo-political manipulation for short term (infuse democracy and al in the region). I am willing to bet that if there was no oil in Iraq, Saddam would be still alive and in power. The US, so hopelessly addicted to oil, needed to make sure that the vast iraqi oil fields don't fall into the hands of their second addiction: China.
It will be very ironic to see when the US is going to go begging to other nations to help them invade Iran, because that's the next war. Unfortunately, when that comes, we are going to have WMDs and lot of western countries who supported the US will probably refuse this time around.
If you had to choose between having a virus that both destroys your personal files and compromises your system or a virus that only destroys your personal files, which would you pick? He's making light of a very significant thing for most home users--a full wipe and reinstall of the operating system and applications. That's a day's work for your typical user, more if you have a bunch of programs you need to go hunting for.
That has nothing to do with Windows vs Unix. Windows offers the same facilties to secure your OS. Juste use a non administrator user and you are pretty much set. On my PCs I always use a non administrator user once system is installed. To patch, log on root, patch, log off. A virus can only erase my files only, just as if I were using unix.
The problem is, that MS (and many software producers) encourage people to use an administrator accounts. And that's the big part of the problem. The other part is that on Windows you have a plethora of useless services on by default. It's gotten better with XP SP2 but still, many useless services (and some dangerous like Remote Registry) are on by default.
Don't blame Windows for lack of security, blame the people who use it and to an extent Microsoft.
Never underestimate the stupidity of large groups (the employers) of people
So a company, who has it's infrastructure on Windows, should use a development environment not designed for it? Or worse, scrap Windows and install Linux? You know in a utopic world this would be a good thing to do. But not all companies are filthy rich that can afford the costs migration to the "cool *nix tech du jour". Some companies, especially the small and medium ones that are strapped for cash can't afford migration that means: training people, replacing most software and whatnot.
I hate Microsoft like the next guy, but.NET, especially the 2.0 framework is nice. The IDEs are finally catching up with the likes of Eclipse and Slick Edit (although Slick Edit still owns all), The code generated is fast and you can develop very fast on it.
Need a http server? About 10 lines of code of C#. Need a windows service? About 6 lines of code C#.
Don't bash.NET just because you don't like Microsoft. C# and.NET are a good platform to develop on, especially in the Windows monoculture.
I should be able to give a positive, neutral, or negative rating to anyone who has been in my group for more than thirty minutes
Hypothetical situation. I form a group, recruit people who want to do (insert dungeon here). Halfway through the run I realize one of the member is incompetent. I remove him and flag him "incompetent". Out of spite he returns the favor and flags me something negative. Yet I've only done what was best for the success of the run, I wasn't using abusive language, I didn't do anything wrong.
Another problem is when there are games where you can reach max level fast. Blacklist the assholes all you want, they will remake as different characters. UO murderer system is perfect example where griefers would level throwaway characters and PK until they got caught. Rinse, repeat.
Another problem is with raid guilds. From experience, raid guilds will recruit the biggest assholes on the server under two condition: They obey the raid leaders and have insanely high play time. Raid guilds don't care if you are an asshole. They care only if you can contribute to their success.
Also dont forget encryption, If you can encrypt your stream then your ISP has no real clue what it is. I can foresee encryption becoming a major hurdle for this scheme.
I was wondering about this. How can deep packet inspection see inside SSH or SSL for instance to know what kind of traffic are you doing.
Ooops, my post wasn't clear enough. I was giving an example to show that restrictive game accounts like MMOG accounts change hands easy. Nothing will stop a player from selling Duke Nukem Forever 3 after he is done with it, all the buyer needs is the account and password. So putting internet activation/download/verification on games only reduces piracy, it won't stop used game business.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a vague description for a MMOG.
1) Good luck chums, worst case Google et al form shell companies to own the servers in china
2) Congress would better use their time investigating the human rights abuses commited by this Adminitration instead of pointing fingers.
Or how about (random chineese search startup) starts building up because the big boys (Google, Yahoo and al) aren't allowed in China. 15-20 years later, this little startup is big, huge, and starts moving outside China slowly eating away the big western companies' marketshare until it dominates the world for search engines. China is a gigantic potential market for the future. If western companies are not allowed inside, a chineese startup (or existing company) will get very big by grabbing the chineese market.
What were the human industries in 800AD that contributed to global warming then?
Easy. Catholic fundies burning witches. A lot of them.
The entire month of January was a joke in Montreal. We usually get about 20+ days at -20 Celsius, not this year. We had torrential rain, about 6 Celsius above average temperatures for this time of the year. Last summer was also the hottest in the century. I could get used to weak winters like this!
You're semi-free.
You're quasi-free.
You're the margarine of free.
You're the Diet Coke of free.
Just one calorie, not free enough!
Unfortunately, the current versions of Windows are too exploitable
I beg to differ about Windows being too easy to exploit. Run Linux with root access and you are just as vulnerable. Windows, since Win2K has a very good security framework. The problem is not Windows itself, but the shoddy practices of Microsoft by letting everyone and their dogs run as root (hopefully Vista will change this).
I haven't had an Anti-Virus nor Anti-Spyware installed, ever. I only install one for shits and giggles to see if anything got through. Guess what? Nothing got through. You have to do few basic security steps and your Windows installation is pretty rock solid security wise, most importantly: DO NOT run Windows with root security and use as much as possible open source applications for your needs. Create yourself a non root account. Oh and ditch IE. Common sense will make any Windows installation secure.
For Joe User, nothing will change unless Joe User is educated about security. You can give him the best firewall with Star Trek like AI built into it, if he decides to execute an email attachement that flushes his own files or massemails crap to people on his address list, nothing is there to stop him.
Yup! We live in the fast food version of the music world. The majority of people are happy listening to bands who play 1-2 riffs per song, use same song template over and over and lyrical content is either teenage girl's daydream or teenage angst. It's something the music industry saw and is now over producing.
Where are the Pink Floyds of our days? Playing in small clubs of 900ish capacity because the major labels make 10 times as much money with regurgitated repetitive crap like Linkin Park.
The Danish Mohammed cartoon will is going to be the root cause of World War 3. Discuss.
I seriously doubt it would happen. The western world is FAR too powerful militarily for any muslim nation to pose a threat. China has issues with radical islamists, India too, Russia ditto, and so does Europe and the US. There won't be a rift between powerful nations to ignite another world war.
But, I think a much more serious event will happen in the future if islamic extremists keep this jihad going. There is going to be a lot hatred built up in the west, more and more until one state elects some far right governement and does something radical like a genocide. Unfortunately since the rest of the world will be also in apathy vs the muslim world, they might simply ignore it. Bosnia or Rwanda on a larger scale.
Well I would assume that the monthly fee in WoW is a reason why the "other" games' budget is down for many people.
IMO, that maybe has a very little impact but I think mostly because succesful MMOGs are gigantic, there is always "stuff" to do, replay value is huge. I remember logging into WoW/EQ and always have something to do: raids, quests, dungeons, PvP, gaining new factions, crafting, whatnot. And every "stuff" to do resulted in power gain for my avatar. These games are centered around making your avatar more and more powerful with levels, alternate advancement, raid items, quest items, gold, etc. My reasons for not wanting to play were simple: why invest X hours into a single player game when during this time I can play online with friends AND my avatar will be more powerful as a bonus!
When I was playing Evercrak and WoW, I pretty much stopped buying other videogames, there was no motivation to play other games. I only bought KotOR and Galactic Civilizations over a long period of time (3+ years). I suspect the 5.5 million WoW customers might no longer be buying, or buying significantly less, single player titles.
Correction.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster begs to differ...
however, calling the big bang a theory is actually correct
Yes and no. Yes Big Bang is just a theory, like every single scientific "law" or "fact". There is not absolute truth in science. The problem is not calling Big Bang a theory, the problem is that theory, for the common mortal is nothing more than a "hunch" a "wild idea".
Scientists need to come up with a different term for theory. Or they need to push a major PR campaign explaining what a theory is for science, that a theory for science isn't just a hunch but something that is backed up by empyrical evidence. They have to stop giving fundamentalists a way to attack science by calling everything that goes through the scientific method "just a theory".
Deutsch called Big Bang a theory to imply it's not good science and that there is a good alternative in God/Creation. He clearly aimed to discredit the scientific work done on Big Bang to advance his radical and/or fundamentalist and/or religious view.
It's 10k players at once. So if true that there is only 10k max at once, that's probably 50-100k players total.
I'd wager around 50k. EQ in it's prime had about 100k players online with about 550k total accounts. Still, for SWG these numbers are pathetic. SOE was given one of the biggest sci-fi franchises and didn't manage to capitalize on it.
There are many games without a franchise that are fairly popular: City of Heroes/Villains, DAoC, Second Life. I just don't understand how SOE and Lucas Arts could have messed up SWG so badly.
What would one person want with ten 60 gig iPods?
eBay?
Kind of makes you wonder why anyone bothers to vote for the GOP anymore.
Because GoP will fight the War on Terror.
First, it is not "the muslim world" it is particular individuals. Second, christians are not currently the subject of what must seem to them (and many objective observers) as a crusade where their countries are invaded by foreigners from another continent with another religion who kill them,
... FFS, shiites and sunnies are in a never ending religious war. Both groups are muslims, yet they keep killing eachother. One day a grenade blows up in a shiite mosque in Pakistan. Another day a sunni blows himself up in a shiite mosque in Iraq and so on. The lebanese muslims can't tolerate other non muslim lebanese citizens, especially christians whom a few were killed in this week's and last week's protests. The southern thai province (forgot the name) is on a jihad vs buddhist monks. FFS, Buddhist monks!. Aceh province in Indonesia wants their own radical state. Again, the muslims need to police themselves before looking outside their own backyard.
...
Indeed. Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, U.K., France, Canada (protests this weekend coming up) are all being invaded and the people are killed there regulary by people with another religion. Oh wait
The main problem with islam is that the moderates, the non fanatics do not intervene. Why does it take over a week of riots, violence and protests for one single moderate islamic group to say that extremists are wrong. As soon as some nutcase christian calls for the assasination of Hugo Chavez every other moderate christian is outraged and they immediately voice their opinions. Why can't the moderate muslims learn to tell the extremists to STFU? Why does it take the death of 190+ people in Madrid for the spanish Imams and big cheeses to say that extremist islamists are wrong? Why can't the british imams come out against the protester who hold signs like: KILL EVERY COUNTRY THAT OFFENDS ISLAM
Second, these images of Muhammad are as offensive to muslims as it would be to christians to depict the Virgin Mary getting fucked by a pig with the caption "Technically, she's still a virgin."
... I am sure there are other things South Park ridicules from the church. Then there was the bloody mary or whatever episode fiasco and who knows what else. Saddam is in heaven building WMDs while God is way too incompetent to realize it. I could go on for ages!
Do you watch South Park? Do we have christians around the world up in arms, threatening to boycot, kidnap and kill every day despite christianity being ridiculed completely on South Park?
For starters, if you watch South Park: Most of the catholic church is made up by child abusers. Jesus has a tv show, he occasionally does a boxing match with Satan. Satan is gay, but in reality not evil at all. Hell is far more nicer place than heaven. God is one ugly animal who sometimes uses vulgar language. Only mormons can get into heaven. The head of the catholic church is a giant spider queen. Ugh
Not to mention you got many Black Metal bands pretty much singing about Mary being a whore, Jesus being a moron and who knows what else. Pick up some Cradle of Filth, Deicide or Gorgoroth!
I won't even get into the "lighter" side of church ridicule from the Simpsons and other comedy shows. However, we don't have christians all around the world calling for boycot and revenge and murder over this do we? I am sure some/many christians are offended by those cartoons, bands, whatnot, but hey, they are smart enough to realize it's a free society with free speech. They enjoy freedom of religion, while we enjoy free speech! Fair deal no?
IMO, the whole muslim world is WAYYYYY too sensitive about this issue. I find it ironic when they insult the jewish and christian religions in their cartoons it's all good, but when someone else does something similar it's the end of the world!
(burn karma burn)
The muslim world needs to police itself before trying to comment/police the non muslim world.
(/burn carma burn)
but the market will have provided users with the proper way to fight it
In a few years the market will have legitimized spyware (Gator^H^H^H^H Claria is already semi "legit") so that way it will look as spyware is reduced when infact it's no longer spyware but "useful programs that are funded by advertising" PR bullshit that scumware companies like Claria and 180 crap spew.
But, I think that in the future, if spyware will decline, it will not be attributed to the market giving people tools (those already exist), but I see the computer users being a little bit more savy and most importantly Windows Vista and beyond pushing non administrator accounts for newly installed PCs and more and more people are adopting Firefox.
The main reasons for spyware today are IE + everyone and their dogs running Windows with root accounts. Eliminate those 2 problems and the spyware plague will be severely crippled.
Iraq war had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda nor WMDs. It was all about oil (for long term goals) and geo-political manipulation for short term (infuse democracy and al in the region). I am willing to bet that if there was no oil in Iraq, Saddam would be still alive and in power. The US, so hopelessly addicted to oil, needed to make sure that the vast iraqi oil fields don't fall into the hands of their second addiction: China.
It will be very ironic to see when the US is going to go begging to other nations to help them invade Iran, because that's the next war. Unfortunately, when that comes, we are going to have WMDs and lot of western countries who supported the US will probably refuse this time around.
If you had to choose between having a virus that both destroys your personal files and compromises your system or a virus that only destroys your personal files, which would you pick? He's making light of a very significant thing for most home users--a full wipe and reinstall of the operating system and applications. That's a day's work for your typical user, more if you have a bunch of programs you need to go hunting for.
That has nothing to do with Windows vs Unix. Windows offers the same facilties to secure your OS. Juste use a non administrator user and you are pretty much set. On my PCs I always use a non administrator user once system is installed. To patch, log on root, patch, log off. A virus can only erase my files only, just as if I were using unix.
The problem is, that MS (and many software producers) encourage people to use an administrator accounts. And that's the big part of the problem. The other part is that on Windows you have a plethora of useless services on by default. It's gotten better with XP SP2 but still, many useless services (and some dangerous like Remote Registry) are on by default.
Don't blame Windows for lack of security, blame the people who use it and to an extent Microsoft.
Canadian army and airforce
Whoa! We got an army? AND airforce?
Eh?
Never underestimate the stupidity of large groups (the employers) of people
.NET, especially the 2.0 framework is nice. The IDEs are finally catching up with the likes of Eclipse and Slick Edit (although Slick Edit still owns all), The code generated is fast and you can develop very fast on it.
.NET just because you don't like Microsoft. C# and .NET are a good platform to develop on, especially in the Windows monoculture.
So a company, who has it's infrastructure on Windows, should use a development environment not designed for it? Or worse, scrap Windows and install Linux? You know in a utopic world this would be a good thing to do. But not all companies are filthy rich that can afford the costs migration to the "cool *nix tech du jour". Some companies, especially the small and medium ones that are strapped for cash can't afford migration that means: training people, replacing most software and whatnot.
I hate Microsoft like the next guy, but
Need a http server? About 10 lines of code of C#.
Need a windows service? About 6 lines of code C#.
Don't bash
I should be able to give a positive, neutral, or negative rating to anyone who has been in my group for more than thirty minutes
Hypothetical situation. I form a group, recruit people who want to do (insert dungeon here). Halfway through the run I realize one of the member is incompetent. I remove him and flag him "incompetent". Out of spite he returns the favor and flags me something negative. Yet I've only done what was best for the success of the run, I wasn't using abusive language, I didn't do anything wrong.
Another problem is when there are games where you can reach max level fast. Blacklist the assholes all you want, they will remake as different characters. UO murderer system is perfect example where griefers would level throwaway characters and PK until they got caught. Rinse, repeat.
Another problem is with raid guilds. From experience, raid guilds will recruit the biggest assholes on the server under two condition: They obey the raid leaders and have insanely high play time. Raid guilds don't care if you are an asshole. They care only if you can contribute to their success.
Also dont forget encryption, If you can encrypt your stream then your ISP has no real clue what it is. I can foresee encryption becoming a major hurdle for this scheme.
I was wondering about this. How can deep packet inspection see inside SSH or SSL for instance to know what kind of traffic are you doing.
Ooops, my post wasn't clear enough. I was giving an example to show that restrictive game accounts like MMOG accounts change hands easy. Nothing will stop a player from selling Duke Nukem Forever 3 after he is done with it, all the buyer needs is the account and password. So putting internet activation/download/verification on games only reduces piracy, it won't stop used game business.