Steam

Steam is proported by Valve to be a new game authentication and update program that will replace the infamous won.net WON ID authentication in Half-Life and auto-update mods and maps for games. It will eventually also be used to sell new games and mods, allowing them to be downloaded and played right away. A test version of the Steam Client is already available and "release" version is coming soon.

Questions:

1. Some people say that within a week or two of Steam's release, won.net will go down permanently. Does this mean that HL mods will have to be rewritten to support steam? If so, what about all the single-player and no-longer-updated mods that I like playing every once in a while?

2. A quote from the steampowered.com faq: "At a LAN party, this means that Internet access must be available to every machine on which Steam games are being played." <--- Does this mean I MUST have an internet connection at all my LAN parties? What if we want to just play locally? Or what if the ISP sucks and we can't connect?

3. Am I forced to run the newest version of the game or can I choose not to update and run older versions?

4. It is rumored that the beta Linux version of steam is buggy and may not be released in a final version. Is this true?

5. I've heard that steam does a bad job of banning some people who don't cheat. Is it possible this person would be forever banned from all steam-enabled games as a result?

...I have more, but perhaps I'll post later.

1. no
the rest I don't know

I don't know, check out their forum announcement