Small, cramped, hot, ugly.

With the iPhone (and likely iPad), you'll know what to expect from the device soon enough. With the netbook, I can never quite shake the "This isn't quite a computer, even if its pretending to be one" feeling and get used to the keys being 10% smaller.

Yes, I fucking do think it'll suck less.

How does this statement hold up against YAWS?

You need to research Eclipse Phase, the RPG.

Scratch that, your ignorance is startling.

Scratch that, your ignorance is startling."

How so? Because you don't agree with me and the only thing you can attempt to do to silence me is to call me ignorant?

DRM did not exist during the Napster days. This is a fact. Piracy was rampant during this time. The industry didn't make the right decision by trying to sue everyone that shared a song, but people have no right to complain when companies smarten up and start adding more and more protection.

you have given me one example of one game that may or may not even add anything to our discussion.

Think of it this way: Do you actually think game companies want to add more protection to their games? It adds more complications, costs more money, and many times increases development time.

I don't believe that piracy is stealing. It's counterfeiting, which is much worse than theft. If Toshiba starts getting televisions stolen, their product value isn't really effected by that one product that is stolen (they can always sell more at the original price and people won't expect it to pay less). However, if a company's product is shared on the Internet, It can eventually destroy the product line. Not only that, if it has a virus or the crack doesn't work properly it can and will make the original developers look bad. Also, people start to expect that the software will be free in the future.

Everything digital is only worth what people are willing to pay. If most people can do a simple Google search and find your product for $0, less people will be willing to actually pay for it, devaluing your product over time. It's funny how so many people say piracy has no direct relation to sales yet when I disable a crack that I found for any app I am selling, my sales increases by 15-20% (and sales decrease over time when more and more cracks are available). I have heard this from other software developers.

Depends. DRM allows companies to do things like region-coding (i.e. market segregation) and also to do things like make a product obsolete, forcing the user to buy an upgrade to continue to use the product (i.e. combat 'abandonware' or 'emulator' movements that try to keep old games around; b/c then you can sell back the same product to people multiple times).

Criminals can get guns illegally. Would you say that because it's so difficult for the average, law-abiding citizen to get a gun, that we should remove all the restrictions?

Yes, it affects paying customers, but it's a result of the actions of the pirates. It's a vicious cycle that's not going to stop until:

1) The pirates stop sharing and cracking illegal software 2) The company finds a way to completely protect their software

AC2 is on the right track. They are releasing it as a service/app hybrid. Eventually, all games will be this way.

They seed their own torrent for the PDF.

They still sell well at $50 dollars, when the average cost of a RPG book is 20-40."

Eclipse Phase is a pen and paper RPG. Although they do torrent the PDF, I would think that using a PDF is tedious for most people, which is why they sell the hard copy for $59.99. I'm the same way with computer books. I would rather have a hard copy.

How can you even compare this to an actual game, which would not be able to sell a book?

I also see a comment where you said they are making money. How do you know? The books say "sold out". But this doesn't actually tell us how much money this company made from these books.

Hey this is fun! Now you do one again.

Edit: Seriously, guys, I'm trying to be as civil as possible here. What's with the downvotes?

At the risk of seeming "PC" to oversensitive folks, using social identities as pejoratives is inherently insulting; you're associating their racial/sexual/etc. identity with something undesirable, even if you don't think of it as a slur. "Gay" to mean stupid or annoying is of a piece with terms like "gyp", "indian-giver", or "nigger-rig".

Jesus.

Humor is encouraged on Hacker News, but only when it is actually funny. Your joke wasn't funny.

So here's my solution:

  def state?(zip)
    zip_code_list = File.open('zips.txt')
    suggested_list = zip_code_list.grep(/(.*"#{zip}\d+".*)/)
  end