"Osama?! We've got a demand letter from some Washington lawyers. They want us to pay $20,000 for using that picture of burned-out Washington you got from the net. Either that or they'll sue us."

Actually the postwar Japan class sounds fascinating. One of the more interesting classes I took in school was on the culture of post-WWI Germany until Hitler.

An examination of a nation that had a strong militaristic culture, threaded through with racial and cultural superiority complexes and then got beat like a mule is always interesting. Surely the loss in WWII had more than a passing influence on the evolution of all aspects of Japanese culture, including games.

Umm no. You bought it. It is yours to do with how you wish. Smash it with a hammer or sell it. It is yours. The claptrap about "used sales" == "piracy" is an IP owner's wet dream. Why on earth should video games be different from LPs, CDs, DVDs, books or any other media?

Hot Shots Golf is a hoot though. It is a generally well-done game, though I have a hard time telling if the weather is actually affecting the game play beyond the ball drive distance.

Very cool little hack. Wonder what it would sound and look like on an Amiga.

It is pretty amusing to look at old Computer Gaming World ads and see what prices for game software were like back when there was competition...

Boondocks is so full of Deep Thoughts, it makes me all warm and fuzzy whenever I happen to see it. Like Garfield.

Regarding the second part: Nobody is forcing the "low end" of our society to buy a current gen video game system or any other gen video game system. Nobody disputes that this is a terrible deal, made all the more so by the "lease" part of it, which on the surface locks the customer into the whole 12 months, vs. the usual absurd rent-to-own payments where at least part of the payment amount is buying the customer the right to walk away from the arrangement without paying the full price (or getting the merchandise). This is like a gas station which habitually charges 5-10 cents more per gallon than the station across the street. The beauty of capitalism is that the customer can choose to go to the cheap station or to this one, depending on the customer's perceived needs. If there aren't enough customers who see themselves as needing to pay the extra cost... too bad for the seller. Arguments that the "lower end" need to be protected from free choice are inevitably based on the perception that the proponent of the argument knows better what's good for someone else and generally lead to all sorts of undesirable effects.

Please, please be so kind as to share where I can pick up a PS3 for "around" $205 (205.01? 205.10? dare I dream, 204.94? Heck, I'll SPLURGE and bite even at 205.51!).

I own both formats. I'd be pleasantly surprised if either format lasts longer than laserdisc before being dumped in favor of downloadable rentals. Meanwhile I am enjoying very very nice looking and sounding films in both formats.

At $129 MSRP, and $20 a month for netflix this is a cheap way to dip one's toes into HD. Especially since the drive also works on PCs and macs (though afaik OSX still doesn't do HD-DVD playback).

Thanks for making my point. By the way, the last books I saw that did the same things that turn-based RPGs did were "Choose Your Own Adventure". And those books weren't quite the same as Fallout.