HotHardware looks at the brouhaha over Kingdoms of Amalur's content lock.

Essentially, if you bought a new copy, you get some "free stuff" that may or may not already be on the disc. If you buy used, you have to pay EXTRA money to unlock a part of the single-player game.

A number of people have declared this to be simple greed, but the situation isn't that simple. Consider this: When you buy a game from Gamestop, the studio gets nothing. Buying a used game and pirating the game outright are identical as far as their impact on the studio's revenue. That's inherently frustrating for developers, and the problem is made substantially worse by Gamestop itself.

The problem, after all, isn't the fact that a used games market exists, but that the used games market is dominated by a single enormous company. Gamestop's monopoly on the used game market gives it the ability to set prices on what a used game should sell for, and the resulting sale is 100% profit for the company. Unlike the MPAA, which prohibits selling new and used games side-by-side, there's no such restriction at GS.

I'm not the world's biggest Gamestop fan, but really, the used games market exists like a used market exists for just about every other product in the world. PC gamers don't get much of a used games market these days thanks to the Steam DRM lock, and it really annoys people and hurts the industry by making people less willing to buy a game that they may finish and want to give away to a friend. And the move to items you can't sell without breaking them hasn't come with decreasing prices, so consumers are even more leery of purchasing.

I don't like the idea of the death of the used games market, which is definitely what the game publishers want to see happen. It's bad enough knowing that there are a set of games from my Xbox Live Marketplace downloads that, once the Xbox dies or Xbox360 is deprecated from Live (just like they did to the original Xbox and its DLC packs), the content is almost impossible to see again.

Say hello to a scientific analysis of how mathematically hard some classic games are.

Location traversal and single-use paths, ala Pac-Man, is NP-hard. Pressure plates, ala Prince of Persia or Portal, is PSPACE-hard if there are two pressure plates, and NP-hard if only one is required to open a door. In the case of switches, one switch is P-hard, two is NP-hard, and three or more is PSPACE-hard.

Viglietta then uses these characteristics to classify each of the 13 games. Boulder Dash, which involves traversing a map strewn with boulders, is NP-hard. Prince of Persia, thanks to its pressure plates, is PSPACE-complete. Doom, with its multiple switches, is PSPACE-hard (and Viglietta claims that most other FPSes and adventure games are the same).

Regrettably, they don't have categories for games like Ninja Gaiden 3 or the original Castlevania, which qualify simply as "throw your controller at the wall repeatedly in frustration, Nintendo Hard."

SOPA/PIPA are dead, but could be revived.
A SOPA-alike is being considered by Canada.
ACTA is continually being pushed in Europe, despite the resignation of the EU's ACTA chief in disgust over attempts to push it through without required public comment and consideration of the EU governing bodies.

Contact your representatives. WHEREVER you are.

The SOPA bill, sometimes called the "internet blacklist", has been shut down in the US House of Representatives. Its Senate counterpart, called "PIPA", is still alive.

PIPA is less well known than SOPA, but the provisions are basicly the same. It still includes the same DNS blocking and censoring system that the original SOPA did, just without the SOPA name. There are around 40 co-sponsors of the bill in the Senate so far, with no word on how many senators support the bill in addition to that. There will most likely need to be 60 votes in the Senate in order to invoke cloture and end an almost guaranteed filibuster.

Focus your attention on your Senators for now, but keep your eyes peeled in case SOPA tries to make a stealth return.

We all know: Google is king in the search engine business. But Microsoft's "Bing" search just went past Yahoo.

Yahoo queries came in with 14.5% share, compared with 15.1% in November 2011 and 16.0% in December 2010. Microsoft’s Bing’s share of searches in December was 15.1%, compared with 15% in November 2011 and 12.0% in December 2010. Since Bing powers Yahoo search, combined the two search engine’s share of searches was 29.6%, compared with 30.1% in November 2011. AOL queries declined 8% in December with 1.6% share.

Yahoo's brand loyalty is fading fast.

As the new year picks up steam... anyone for some halo?

This stuff just kinda writes itself.

There's really not much more to say; it's just no help to anyone. Especially when it gets bad enough that someone tries to impersonate other people.

I think Gabe says it best: this guy is just a bully.

This is too weird but true: the BBC is actually going to recover some lost Doctor Who episodes thanks to an anomaly in space bouncing TV signals back to earth on a 47-year time delay.

They even have a screenshot from a Doctor Who episode recovered from the signals.

Amazing!

... is Pure Win.

This is great. I'd advise snagging it with a downloader, just in case some wag from Paramount gets it taken down.

Just in time for your christmas shopping needs, Humble Indie Bundle 4 has gone live.

Super Meat Boy's in this one, and if you beat the normal asking price, they'll throw in Cave Story+ and Gratuitous Space Battles as well.

And remember, part of the proceeds go to Child's Play - a true worthy cause.