Ubisoft said it was pirate-proof. They were wrong. The DRM was cracked in under 24 hours. That’s not the funny part.

The funny part is that the DRM servers that Ubisoft’s customers need to call in order to play their games have been down all day. If you bought into their fuck-the-customer DRM, you can’t play the single-player game that you paid $60 for, but the folks who stole the game, who didn’t pay one red cent, can.

The moral of the story is: don’t buy Ubisoft games.

On Friday, March 5th at 10 AM, the Senate Appropriations Committee will debate and vote on SB 1108.  The sponsor of SB 1108, Committee Chairman Senator Russell Pearce, has proposed a “strike everything” amendment that replaces SB 1108, in its entirety, with the intended language from SB 1102 (Constitutional Carry).

SB 1102, which was headed for a Senate floor vote, was derailed last week after the attachment of the Cheuvront amendment during the Senate Committee of the Whole (COW), creating a Class 4 Felony for private sellers of firearms who fail to verify a buyer’s citizenship when the sale is conducted at a gun show: http://www.azcdl.org/html/news.html#CheuvrontAmendment .

Now that we have a second bite at the apple, it’s critical we remind the Senate Appropriations Committee members to support the amended SB 1108.  A letter has been prepared and is waiting for you at our Action Center:
http://capwiz.com/azcdl/issues/alert/?alertid=14750316 .

We have more good news.  Representative Frank Antenori (http://azcdl.capwiz.com/bio/id/51325), who sponsored the House version of Constitutional Carry (HB 2347), has been appointed to replace Senator Jonathon Paton who vacated his seat to run for the U.S. House of Representatives.  Senator Antenori is expected to be present when SB 1108 moves to the Senate floor for debate and vote.

Meanwhile, Senator Antenori’s House version of Constitutional Carry, HB 2347, passed out of the MAPS Committee on February 3, 2010 and is awaiting a review by the House Rules Committee before heading to a floor debate in the House COW.

In other news, we are expecting SB 1168, the Senate version of the firearms preemption bill, to be scheduled for a Senate COW debate, hopefully this week.  When the calendar is posted, we will let you know via an Alert.

Stay tuned!  When critical legislation moves, we will notify you via these Alerts.

If you want to get legislative news as it happens, follow AzCDL on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AzCDL_Alerts .
AzCDL “tweets” from the Capitol with committee votes and breaking news as it happens.

You can also follow AzCDL on Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/FacebookAzCDL .

AzCDL’s Political Action Committee (PAC) is also on Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/FacebookAzCDLPAC .

These alerts are a project of the Arizona Citizens Defense League (AzCDL), an all volunteer, non-profit, non-partisan grassroots organization.  Renew your membership today!  http://www.azcdl.org/html/join_us_.html .

AzCDL – Protecting Your Freedom
http://www.azcdl.org/html/accomplishments.html .

Copyright © 2010 Arizona Citizens Defense League, Inc., all rights reserved.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Without repeating that and just so I understand your position, how could some member of the Court write the — this opinion to say that this right is not fundamental, but that Heller was correct?

MR. FELDMAN: I — the Court would just say that what Heller held was if you look at the meanings that the words in the Second Amendment had, the common meaning — as the Court said in the Heller opinion -the common meanings that the word had in 1791, it imposed limitation on the State. It took a preexisting right that had not been — was not codified in the Constitution, and it said, this self-defense right we need in the Constitution in order — in order to protect the militia against being disarmed by the Federal Government.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: That sounds an awful lot to me like the argument we heard in Heller on the losing side.

RTWT.

StarCraft 2 bloggage will return this weekend.

. . . [N]o-one of any sense has ever bet against the scorn and resourcefulness of young men.

Jerry “Tycho” Holkins, A Cyclical Argument With A Literal Strawman

Holkins was writing about Ubisoft’s ridiculous new digital rights management scheme, but this principle is just as valid when applied to prohibition of any kind.

Some new elements of the UI are pretty nice. Your ‘control groups’ are displayed at the top of the unit pane and can be selected with a click. Each group lists the group number and the strength of the group (in number of units). Although not strictly necessary for someone like me, who has long since developed standards for control group assignment over decades of strategy gaming, it’s definitely a handy feature to have, especially for keeping track of group strength in the middle of battle. I now realize that I forgot to check out how many units can be selected in a single group. SC1 had a group limit of 12 units, but I do not know the (current) limit for SC2. I will find out and report it later.

Another nice feature is the improved end-of-match report. There is a new screen on this report which shows each player’s build order. This will be a great tool for helping to improve one’s game when matched against significantly better opponents, to be able to see in detail when they build their resource gatherers, when they expand and build their armies, etc. A good build order is key to victory in multiplayer matches, and a poor one can easily cost a player the game.

The graphics are also quite good. I  will, however, admit that I am a sucker for the way Blizzard’s art style can make even low-poly models look beautiful. The movies and screenshots that were available before this beta really do not do this game justice.

Of course, playing the game only highlights how utterly terrible I am (and always have been) at multiplayer strategy games. This Penny Arcade comic about Warcraft III (NSFW for language) sums up my experience with online strategy games. My opponent disconnected in the middle of the match, but I took a look at his forces and he would have stomped me quite soundly if he had stayed. Hopefully over the beta period I’ll be able to improve my skill. It also looks like I’m going to have to install FRAPS because printscreen does nothing in SC2 as far as I can tell.