Starcraft 2 - worth buying?

[kandrathe]

Biometric dual key encryption embedded at point of sale.

I went in for a pulmonary function test two weeks ago. For a while, it looked like the test was not going to happen. In their overzealous desire to protect patient information, the SCCA has started to use biometric sensors. I guess they work when they work. For 20 minutes, this one didn't.

Also, what are you going to do when your kids want to play your games and you need to be elsewhere? Leave them your thumb?

I think if entertainment companies are smart, they'll think about "family" licensing.

I think we'd see it on car, or home locks first.

I hope not. Mythbusters did a segment on that. Stealing someone's fingerprint was amazingly easy. Other bio id is either too much of a problem (retina scans) or too variable (skin temperature, resistivity, etc.)

The good stuff isn't easy to replicate. Kicking it in or breaking a window is still easier. But... Malaysia car thieves steal car, owners finger...

It still won't stop Warez pirates from decrypting and distributing in an unencrypted form. But, when the common media players are expecting a particular format (e.g. Blu-ray) then, it becomes awkward to have raw MPEG4.

Right. So, we get to put up with the inefficient crap to stop us from doing what we weren't doing in the first place, and those that need stopping aren't even going to be slowed. Good plan.

Which is the nature of all locks. It's much less of a bother to never have to lock your front door, or remember to carry your keys around with you. But, we lock, and unlock our doors, just to keep out the simplest of thieves. Motivated bandits break down the doors or go through the windows, and the skilled ones don't worry about locks. The direction of the industry is to make the player only accept a media format with embedded encryption. The player will enforce the copyright.

Besides, a properly cracked item works the same as and is easier to use than the original

But, your off the shelf player won't play an unencrypted file, and re-encrypting it will lock it to a single individual again.

The number of times my fingerprints were altered beyond recognition from burns, cuts, scrapes, and leaving them super-glued to a surface is beyond my count. Can I get time off, with pay, if the machine won't let me log on?

You can usually store many fingers of prints (including your bosses), so if you damage them all, a keyboard may not be very usable anyway.