I am noticing an alarming trend of software that needs to "phone home" every time you run it, or even needs to STAY connected the enire time youre using it. What really irks me is that this is for OFFLINE software. If this keeps up its soon going to become a standard.

How much longer till non-game software like Office or even Windows starts doing this? What happens if the company goes backrupt and takes down the servers? Hell.... a company could force you to upgrade by taking down a verification server for a product.