Rilus, it may come to your mind that I dont comment on "arguments" that are totally idiotic and factless. I cant even change your opinion with the hardest facts and you want me to start to argue about idiot shit you posted? Right...

Did you actually notice that I gave more than 2 examples why Valve is more likely to do something stupid like implement spyware than other devs (even if its not very likely)? Yet you still claw yourself to it with your kiddy fanboy comments, ignoring everything I said. That normally is typical if you run out of arguments (or facts).
I am very sorry that I ignore your Newton approved comments and maybe hurt your ego with it, but somehow I feel more and more stupid the more I answer to such factless mud. Just look at your newly discovered evolve theory. I couldnt anything but laugh at it, or I would have felt extremely dumb to explain the word "evolve" to you. And be honest, would you simply come here again and say "oh yeah I was wrong, you are right". hahahaha in my 10 years of internet experience Ive never seen something like that happen with your kind. Soooo... I simply laughed at you.

The CPU usage problem I talked about (duh) and you seem to know nothing about but still had to spit out your opinion about. look below.

Skirtman: You might want to install a personal firewall or Motherboard Monitor and leave them in the background. Then open the taskmanager and look at the CPU usage of those programs, and while youre at it watch steam closely aswell, even though it wont be that frequent as MBM or the FW (you actually have to watch a few minutes). Its not much CPU power that is used but in demanding games you can notice it, even though most people dont notice it at all because it is so relative from person to person. Just like if some guys dont care if they are playing a game with a ping of 150 and others suck badly if their ping is any higher than 50.
I think I somewhere read that it has impact on 3dmark 03 and similar benchmarks, but you wont see it on your fps rate displayed on your screen. No wonder why those overclocking freaks only benchmark their computer with an empty taskmanager or fresh installed OS.
You might want to look into any hardware/software forum for more info about this. but it seems as you are one of those guys (the majority anyway) who dont notice it, heck even I dont notice it most of the time. But when I see my friends playing at their computers and other people on LANs I notice it very well.

noman: Oh, still a few more icons (which lead you to the awesome Steam browser too) on my desktop compared to JUST ONE for all kinds of games from various different developers that has awesome filters and a very nice and efficient query engine and only accesses the internet when you tell it to.
I was also under the impression that Steam checks for new modules and updated Steam version every few hours or so. I didnt know that you could switch to offline mode while playing a game over steam either. And if you want to go into offline mode you have to select it after you stopped playing, rightclicking the icon and shutting it down is faster actually.... well ok, that shutdown delay may make it faster switching to offline mode actually, lol.
All in all, Steam is slow as shit compared to GameSpy or ASE.
on a side note, what would you say if some car manufacturer would suddenly develop their own steering method and you have 4 cars, 1 or 2 from that mentioned manufacturer (which would get their steering reconstructed for free - but forced)?
I know I know, "if its a good steering method..." oh well. I hope you get my point anyway.

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I don't like arguing. Why can't we all just get along instead of fighting and arguing?