Microsoft hates people who don't have the Internet.

Over the weekend I played Rock Band 2 with some friends. I had been looking forward to it for three weeks because the previous two weekends plans had to be canceled. When I play Rock Band I always bring my HDD over because I have something like 114 songs I've bought through Xbox Live. I also have the 55 songs from the first game on there, which makes things much more fun than sticking with the 55 songs on the game disc.

Unfortunately my friend Tom had just moved, and didn't have the Internet hooked up at his new house yet. I didn't think anything of it, but it turns out I can't use any of the music I bought if I'm not signed into Xbox Live. It's on my HDD, but completely inaccessible. This is the kind of completely unnecessary digital rights management malarkey I can't stand. I'm sure it is meant to prevent me from copying all of my songs to someone else's hard drive, but they wouldn't be able to use it unless logged in as me anyway, and I'm not sharing my Xbox Live account with someone else. Every time they logged in I would have to log out, and they could buy all kinds of crap through my account for themselves while I foot the bill because it would be on my credit card. Why would I do that? Obviously I wouldn't.

Sure if I bought all this content through the Internet it is going to be a rare occasion when my Xbox isn't hooked up to Live, but this isn't a case of them not thinking of something. They had to put forth effort to make DLC not work on offline consoles. So it is the person at Microsoft who thought it was a problem that their shit might actually work I would like say, "Fuck you, buddy."