When I see crowds grieving over MS' vulnerability to piracy, I understand why the company can't seem to keep its head above water financially.....

Anti-piracy is just counter-greed. And Microsoft has made unprincipled greed the American way, so their chickens, home to roost. As long as principled people buy their products, they will thrive.

In a year, I will be running Linux on all but one game machine. That machine will run W2K,  off my network, and a handful of entertaining games that it can handle. I'm devout AOE player, and I have not bought (and don't plan to) AOE III because, as I told my son, "I'm not buying an OS just to play a game." I quit buying TalonSoft games when they added an installer that checked for W2K and quit even though the game would run on NT.

Bill Gates IS BIg Brother, folks. Get a clue.