Beware a city's wrath. Continue?
I did my civic duty Saturday. No, I didn't vote yet. I returned my long-awaited copy of Spore.
Earlier this year, conflicting stories in the tech press suggested that after extensive consumer protest, Spore would not ship with the SecuROM copy-protection software. Ultimately, it apparently did.
Originally, Spore / SecuROM was meant to phone home to Electronic Arts every ten days and see if your CD key had been leaked to the public, and keep you from playing the game if it had. After the consumer outcry, EA's plan was for Spore to check in at first installation and then whenever you went online to download new creatures. That's functionality that can be built into the program itself. A separate program that clandestinely hooks itself into your system, cannot be removed or disabled (even if you remove the parent game), and may interfere with ordinary computer use is totally unnecessary to implement the copy protection EA described in its compromise proposal. But I guess they were just too committed to SecuROM to implement copy protection without it.
Most of the people complaining about Spore's copy protection point to the three-installation limit as their biggest grievance. Honestly, I don't get that. Windows XP and Microsoft Office have less forgiving product activation. The original SimCity set the bar for obnoxious non-computerized copy protection. So copy protection itself is something I'm apparently willing to tolerate.
But SecuROM is way beyond the line. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about this and I need to hand in my Geek Card.
And in bizarre legal news...
In an effort to stop a perceived outbreak of infanticides, many states passed laws allowing parents to legally surrender infants to state custody. Nebraska's implementation of this law allows any minor to be legally abandoned to the state. After four months of this law being on the books, two mothers surrendered adolescents to state custody in unrelated incidents.
On the one hand, this makes me wish social services were easier and less stigmatizing to obtain. On the other, this makes me worry that a kneejerk reaction to this story, or others like it, will make it harder and more stigmatizing to get social services.