Buy a used iPod Touch (under $100 USD) and wire it to charge off of the scooters battery, then you can use "Find My iPod" service if the scooter is ever stolen.
Which will work great if the thieves haven't left your house yet. I'm pretty sure no model of iPod Touch has more than WiFi for networking, nor do any of them have GPS function that isn't tied to said WiFi, nor will they even acquire an unknown WiFi network without user input. All which would make them completely useless as a tracking device.
Why? For $5,000 you could buy a bike that will last the rest of your life, buy it a lojack, you'd combine some daily exercise with your commute, and you might even have some money left over.
Unless your commute isn't safe on a bicycle or you live well over 10 miles from campus I can't imagine any good reason to buy a scooter, other than as an eco-hipster penis extension.
And come to think of it, a commute of more than ten miles and/or not safe on a bicycle wouldn't be much more pleasant on a scooter...
Give credit where it is due, Chicken Little, Thailand floods are purely anthropogenic in nature -- a result of deforestation, bad farming practices and non-existing city planning, not global warming.
And you don't think deforestation, bad farming practices and non-existent city planning contribute to global warming? Which could contribute to flooding?
The climate change skeptics on slashdot need to learn some ecology before they go spouting off about what could and couldn't be causes or effects of global warming.
And while I'm ranting, I can't believe the idiots who say they're climate change 'skeptics' because the 'appropriate use of the scientific method' is to be skeptical until things are proven. That's dead wrong. Science is about basing your opinions, and your future tests, on what the current data says is most probable. You follow the data. Systematic skepticism is just as intellectually dishonest as systematic credulity. The only proper application of science to belief and politics is to do and believe today according to what the data suggests is most probable today, while doing your best to prepare more data for tomorrow.
So the survey included twice as many boys as girls in the treatment group, and three times as many girls as boys in the control group?
That seems like a serious flaw. Men are widely considered more impulsive and more likely to have addiction problems in general, both in popular perception and in some research results. What if men's brains simply respond more to games and other dopamine-related activities (i.e. potentially addictive stuff) than women's?
I hate to be that guy who asks a possibly moronic, self-congratulatory question about sample size, basic method, etc., but I still think it's hard to statistically control the basic differences between men and women with such massively skewed gender samplings.
No, I don't like the formula, overall. I'm saying there's something enticing and addictive to the formula; I can get addicted to heroin, too, but that doesn't mean I like it.
I played Fallout 3 twice because there was a shadow there. The setting and some of the characters were at least an acceptable tribute to Fallout, they just weren't anything like a sequel. I resented being forced to trudge across the entire DC metro area on foot, not to mention explore miles of almost identical subway tunnels, to get at the rare bits of content in said tribute.
Overall, New Vegas felt like a sequel, while F3 had way too many portions that felt like a job, in the same way that MMOs sometimes feel less like a game and more like a job.
And the ending was definitely the worst thing I've ever seen in a serious game, or at least in a game that sincerely thought it was being serious. Good God that shit was bad. I don't know whether the freaking robot crashing around the wasteland or the actual final moment was worse; it's probably a toss-up.
Far behind Vegas? Vegas was made by Bethesda. U still mad bro?
New Vegas was published by Bethesda. It was written and developed by Obsidian Entertainment, which was founded by several producers, coders, and writers from Fallout 1 and 2. New Vegas was the real sequel; Fallout 3 was the fumbling of an outside studio too afraid to touch the canon, and for good reason.
Saying Bethesda made New Vegas is like saying Random House wrote The Da Vinci Code.
Thanks to the Elder Scrolls being Bethesda's cash cow and major recent experience with RPGs, the revival of Fallout became "Oblivion with guns" rather than a decent sequel. They raped its corpse.
I mean, I still played it twice. There's something to be said for the Elder Scrolls formula. But Fallout 3 is still far behind 1, 2, and Vegas when it comes to having solid plot and characterization rather than relying on a massive, largely empty environment to drive the whole game. I swear to God, Fallout 3 barely had a quest per square mile. That damn aircraft carrier was practically empty.
That's what the Elder Scrolls means to me. The poisoning of decent CRPGs with set-piece driven exploration games.
I think the truth is that the basics of the GUI, at least as far as consumer operating systems go, are now almost 20 years old. There's been an incredible amount of change in the capabilities of the average computer, not to mention the possible interface options, since the first Mac hit the streets and it's perfectly right to see a lot of bold changes as tablets and fancy phones inspire a much needed review of the basics.
Now many of these new, individual products will suck but that doesn't mean anyone should disdain the necessary process of inventing the next era. Even if you really hate the new systems, at least pay attention to and be vocal about the pieces of them you liked. Your input won't be useful if you never say something positive; who wants to make a business strategy out of pleasing the un-pleasable?
Any business that won't take credit cards at all is worth a closer look for that fact alone; Costco won't take them, and look at their model. Fantastic customer service, decent prices, one of the only stores left with a real return policy, and their treatment of employees is also bar none.
It's telling when a company would rather lose a fraction of possible sales and keep the screw factor down for everyone rather than roll over, jack up their prices 4%, and suckle up on the Visa teat.
It's all well and good to call people with retail bank accounts "complacent and lazy...enablers", but it really isn't so simple in many places to avoid traditional banks. I used a credit union throughout high school and my first two years of college. Then I transfer to North Carolina and I swear to god there aren't any credit unions.
I've Googled myself blue; there appear to be literally zero public credit unions in my country, if not the entire state and the closest place I can even get shared branching is 15 miles away. I opened a Wachovia account, now Wells Fargo, and I hate every minute of it. I'm hardly in hicksville, either; I live in Chapel Hill. 50,000 people, home of the flagship public school and just 20 miles from the capitol. Still no public credit unions that I can find.
Am I some lazy enabler because I think it's not worth a maze of mailing and notarizing and faxing every time I want to handle anything more complicated than a deposit, not to mention the types of business I can't do at all? If you want to go heaping this much blame on people who don't use credit unions then please, please come to my town and start one. I will be your first customer. Otherwise get off your damn high horse.
Remember the early PIII era? What fun that was, until AMD got competitive again.
As far as I'm concerned Intel went straight from Pentium 2 to Core 2. Whatever that crap was in between, it sure wasn't the product of an industry leader.
Man, if anyone's "too big to fail" it's the second largest company in a critical industry with just two major players. Maybe that would be too small too fail. Whatever.
Intel's certainly done well at keeping up a legitimate release schedule in the last five years, especially for a company with no real competition at all, but I'd hate to see the world where Intel suddenly gets that last 20% of processor market share by default. Their prices aren't exactly low to begin with.
I mean really, what's the most recent company that had any real development capability and brand presence besides those two? Cyrix? Via?
Why is it a problem that someone receive an upper-middle class salary for a job that typically requires a PhD, gold-plated references, and often post-doctoral and/or teaching fellowships? We're talking about a job that only certified geniuses are likely to get before the age of 30, which often doesn't pay as well as using those credentials outside of academia, and you think it shouldn't pay well? Even at Harvard assistant professors start at just barely six-figures, and they have the highest compensation in the top 50 schools. It takes 4-8 years to make it past assistant professor, and many people are simply fired at that point because they didn't make tenure. I know people who got ulcers trying to get their tenure, and when they didn't make it they were 40 years old and unable to use their 15+ years of higher education and experience for anything but term-by-term lecturing work.
Trust me, most academics who take it easy in their 'plush office' did decades of very hard work to get there, and truthfully almost anyone who makes it that far has a personality type that won't let them stop working hard.
And as for your obvious hatred of the arts and humanities, some of us understand that there's more to life than science and consumerism.
Nothing presently suggests that any of these fish will accumulate more PCB simply because they're resistant to its toxic effects, and thus predators will not learn to avoid them based on heightened PCB content. The Tomcod in particular will actually accumulate much less PCB, because the biochemical component with which it used to bind will simply let it pass.
In fact, these resistances could be one of evolution's many double-edged swords: if the predators learn anything, it may be that they should eat these fish, because PCBs are very dangerous teratogens (they fuck up embryo development), and any prey containing less of those poisons could lead to higher levels of survival in the predators' offspring.
I don't think you're reading his statement correctly. I'm not sure you can read any justification for sovereign manipulation into his statements. He's simply saying that if we insist on putting troops in other countries to suit our interests (which includes nations we like, by the way, such as Japan, Germany, and Turkey) why do we ignore that option when an immediate neighbor has paramilitary uprisings in border territories?
Asking why we're pursuing the imperial option stupidly and inconsistently doesn't mean he's justifying the imperial option itself.
So your organization is called Anonymous and when one of you goes missing you threaten the suspected culprit while still not naming the missing guy?
It's not like the Zetas only 'disappear' a couple guys a year; they're a massive paramilitary threatening the public safety of entire states. How the fuck are they supposed to know which guy to return? Furthermore, this splinter of Anonymous is already at war with the Zetas. If they believe they can damage the Zetas so heavily with their supposed cache of information why didn't they do so weeks ago?
It all seems like weird internet posturing, although of course hacker groups and drug runners aren't exactly paragons of transparency. There may be so much back story missing that it's pointless to comment on.
Unions may have been necessary once, but now the produce nothing but trouble.
So do you want unions abolished? Also, your condemnation doesn't properly apply to unions any more than it does to governments, trade associations, affirmative action groups, militaries, universities, etc. Do you want every one of those organizations abolished, as well? Once people have some power they become deluded enough to invent reasons they should continue holding that level of influence even when many of their aims have been met. They become complacent and guide their attention to unworthy targets. It almost never happens any other way; there's a reason Cincinnatus is a legend to this day, and became a major role model in the forming of the United States.
The solution to greed and complacency is checks and balances, such that an unstable equilibrium can be maintained between competing claimants - including the public - to political and economic influence. Just because that system is no longer tuned correctly doesn't mean it's fundamentally wrong. The total destruction of any organization retaining more power than it currently needs will just leave a nation spending more effort on destroying than on building.
Skype and their PR people are calling the project "malicious" and "nefarious", but it sounds like all it does is emulate Skype, so that you can send messages to Skype users while not having a proper account
They mention the possibility that it could be used for spam, but that sounds like blaming the tool. Is there some other way that this thing could be inherently "nefarious" that I'm not understanding? Because it doesn't look dangerous to me.
Unless you count the risks of an independent developer making something interoperable with, and potentially better than, the original product. We all know that's a grave and terrible danger to the safety of the free world.
The changes will cost U.S. residents paying less than $30 a month for telephone service an additional $0.10 to $0.15 a month
This sounds great. Good for people without broadband, insignificantly more expensive for people who currently get a POTS subsidy from the program.
Now how about an urban broadband fund, to replace the worthless service tens of millions of us still have, service so bad it isn't even legally 'broadband' in any other industrialized country, with something usable?
In other words, the government is obligated to obtain the shittiest services possible?
You may not know just how right you are...
Many government agencies, from the federal down to the municipal, are actually required to accept the lowest bid. They also have no clawback provisions and no punishments for completing a project over-budget.
It doesn't take a genius to see what will go wrong, and yet they continue using this system....
You gotta love when someone offers a $50,000 prize for an improvement that would save them millions of dollars in labor, not to mention the value of files reconstructed that might have been ignored before it became so much easier to do.
A million dollars for improving the movie recommendations on Netflix, and $50,000 for a massive intelligence breakthrough?
Way to go, Pentagon. Way to prove that even with a defense budget of $649 billion dollars you can still be a total cheapass.
How about the fact that they push playback, transfer, and region restrictions in both hardware and media more aggressively than any other company? How about the DRM on their music CDs that turned out to be a full-fledged rootkit? How about the fact that it wasn't just removing OtherOS as an official feature, but continually updating the firmware to disable every hack anyone invented to get it back after it was disabled in the first place? Is it really such a crime to want control over something you bought and paid for that I'm just some "butthurt" little whiner if I criticize Sony?
There. I gave you other arguments. Sony probably does more than any other company to punish you for the crime of buying their product. I can't imagine what kind of ignorant twit could, with a straight-face, call someone "a damn cliche hipster suffragist" for calling Sony a bunch of assholes without specifically listing every single example of their malfeasance.
With occurrences like these it's no surprise people sometimes think antivirus and security recommendations consist of 75% FUD and 25% common sense.
How many of us have seen just about every damn thing we download labeled as some kind of trojan or other?
It's commonplace on file sharing sites to see outright mockery of those who raise alarms about the scary alert their AV just popped on those files; that's how bad antivirus programs get.
I understand that sometimes shady files do contain viruses, but nevertheless I've seen claims from major security vendors and from Microsoft that the vast majority of illicit files contain viruses. Seems like I'd have noticed some missing money, some funny things on my credit report, or some suspicious traffic in my router logs if that was true, but they've all been squeaky clean. And I used windows XP SP3 with no firewall or antivirus until this year.
Bottom line, I should be using better protection and it's possible I've had some viruses, but if I did they clearly haven't harmed me yet. And it's still difficult to distinguish the level of actual threats from the hilarious mistakes and massive, obvious disinformation campaigns going on.
Slashdot Mirror
Buy a used iPod Touch (under $100 USD) and wire it to charge off of the scooters battery, then you can use "Find My iPod" service if the scooter is ever stolen.
Which will work great if the thieves haven't left your house yet. I'm pretty sure no model of iPod Touch has more than WiFi for networking, nor do any of them have GPS function that isn't tied to said WiFi, nor will they even acquire an unknown WiFi network without user input. All which would make them completely useless as a tracking device.
an electric scooter that is worth over $5,000
Why? For $5,000 you could buy a bike that will last the rest of your life, buy it a lojack, you'd combine some daily exercise with your commute, and you might even have some money left over.
Unless your commute isn't safe on a bicycle or you live well over 10 miles from campus I can't imagine any good reason to buy a scooter, other than as an eco-hipster penis extension.
And come to think of it, a commute of more than ten miles and/or not safe on a bicycle wouldn't be much more pleasant on a scooter...
Give credit where it is due, Chicken Little, Thailand floods are purely anthropogenic in nature -- a result of deforestation, bad farming practices and non-existing city planning, not global warming.
And you don't think deforestation, bad farming practices and non-existent city planning contribute to global warming? Which could contribute to flooding?
The climate change skeptics on slashdot need to learn some ecology before they go spouting off about what could and couldn't be causes or effects of global warming.
And while I'm ranting, I can't believe the idiots who say they're climate change 'skeptics' because the 'appropriate use of the scientific method' is to be skeptical until things are proven. That's dead wrong. Science is about basing your opinions, and your future tests, on what the current data says is most probable. You follow the data. Systematic skepticism is just as intellectually dishonest as systematic credulity. The only proper application of science to belief and politics is to do and believe today according to what the data suggests is most probable today, while doing your best to prepare more data for tomorrow.
So the survey included twice as many boys as girls in the treatment group, and three times as many girls as boys in the control group?
That seems like a serious flaw. Men are widely considered more impulsive and more likely to have addiction problems in general, both in popular perception and in some research results. What if men's brains simply respond more to games and other dopamine-related activities (i.e. potentially addictive stuff) than women's?
I hate to be that guy who asks a possibly moronic, self-congratulatory question about sample size, basic method, etc., but I still think it's hard to statistically control the basic differences between men and women with such massively skewed gender samplings.
Obviously we can't have a discussion without the summary all but telling us how we're supposed to react.
Thoughts?
No, I don't like the formula, overall. I'm saying there's something enticing and addictive to the formula; I can get addicted to heroin, too, but that doesn't mean I like it.
I played Fallout 3 twice because there was a shadow there. The setting and some of the characters were at least an acceptable tribute to Fallout, they just weren't anything like a sequel. I resented being forced to trudge across the entire DC metro area on foot, not to mention explore miles of almost identical subway tunnels, to get at the rare bits of content in said tribute.
Overall, New Vegas felt like a sequel, while F3 had way too many portions that felt like a job, in the same way that MMOs sometimes feel less like a game and more like a job.
And the ending was definitely the worst thing I've ever seen in a serious game, or at least in a game that sincerely thought it was being serious. Good God that shit was bad. I don't know whether the freaking robot crashing around the wasteland or the actual final moment was worse; it's probably a toss-up.
Far behind Vegas? Vegas was made by Bethesda. U still mad bro?
New Vegas was published by Bethesda. It was written and developed by Obsidian Entertainment, which was founded by several producers, coders, and writers from Fallout 1 and 2. New Vegas was the real sequel; Fallout 3 was the fumbling of an outside studio too afraid to touch the canon, and for good reason.
Saying Bethesda made New Vegas is like saying Random House wrote The Da Vinci Code.
For one big reason:
Thanks to the Elder Scrolls being Bethesda's cash cow and major recent experience with RPGs, the revival of Fallout became "Oblivion with guns" rather than a decent sequel. They raped its corpse.
I mean, I still played it twice. There's something to be said for the Elder Scrolls formula. But Fallout 3 is still far behind 1, 2, and Vegas when it comes to having solid plot and characterization rather than relying on a massive, largely empty environment to drive the whole game. I swear to God, Fallout 3 barely had a quest per square mile. That damn aircraft carrier was practically empty.
That's what the Elder Scrolls means to me. The poisoning of decent CRPGs with set-piece driven exploration games.
I think the truth is that the basics of the GUI, at least as far as consumer operating systems go, are now almost 20 years old. There's been an incredible amount of change in the capabilities of the average computer, not to mention the possible interface options, since the first Mac hit the streets and it's perfectly right to see a lot of bold changes as tablets and fancy phones inspire a much needed review of the basics.
Now many of these new, individual products will suck but that doesn't mean anyone should disdain the necessary process of inventing the next era. Even if you really hate the new systems, at least pay attention to and be vocal about the pieces of them you liked. Your input won't be useful if you never say something positive; who wants to make a business strategy out of pleasing the un-pleasable?
Any business that won't take credit cards at all is worth a closer look for that fact alone; Costco won't take them, and look at their model. Fantastic customer service, decent prices, one of the only stores left with a real return policy, and their treatment of employees is also bar none.
It's telling when a company would rather lose a fraction of possible sales and keep the screw factor down for everyone rather than roll over, jack up their prices 4%, and suckle up on the Visa teat.
It's all well and good to call people with retail bank accounts "complacent and lazy...enablers", but it really isn't so simple in many places to avoid traditional banks. I used a credit union throughout high school and my first two years of college. Then I transfer to North Carolina and I swear to god there aren't any credit unions.
I've Googled myself blue; there appear to be literally zero public credit unions in my country, if not the entire state and the closest place I can even get shared branching is 15 miles away. I opened a Wachovia account, now Wells Fargo, and I hate every minute of it. I'm hardly in hicksville, either; I live in Chapel Hill. 50,000 people, home of the flagship public school and just 20 miles from the capitol. Still no public credit unions that I can find.
Am I some lazy enabler because I think it's not worth a maze of mailing and notarizing and faxing every time I want to handle anything more complicated than a deposit, not to mention the types of business I can't do at all? If you want to go heaping this much blame on people who don't use credit unions then please, please come to my town and start one. I will be your first customer. Otherwise get off your damn high horse.
Remember the early PIII era? What fun that was, until AMD got competitive again.
As far as I'm concerned Intel went straight from Pentium 2 to Core 2. Whatever that crap was in between, it sure wasn't the product of an industry leader.
Man, if anyone's "too big to fail" it's the second largest company in a critical industry with just two major players. Maybe that would be too small too fail. Whatever.
Intel's certainly done well at keeping up a legitimate release schedule in the last five years, especially for a company with no real competition at all, but I'd hate to see the world where Intel suddenly gets that last 20% of processor market share by default. Their prices aren't exactly low to begin with.
I mean really, what's the most recent company that had any real development capability and brand presence besides those two? Cyrix? Via?
A world without AMD would suck...
Why is it a problem that someone receive an upper-middle class salary for a job that typically requires a PhD, gold-plated references, and often post-doctoral and/or teaching fellowships? We're talking about a job that only certified geniuses are likely to get before the age of 30, which often doesn't pay as well as using those credentials outside of academia, and you think it shouldn't pay well? Even at Harvard assistant professors start at just barely six-figures, and they have the highest compensation in the top 50 schools. It takes 4-8 years to make it past assistant professor, and many people are simply fired at that point because they didn't make tenure. I know people who got ulcers trying to get their tenure, and when they didn't make it they were 40 years old and unable to use their 15+ years of higher education and experience for anything but term-by-term lecturing work.
Trust me, most academics who take it easy in their 'plush office' did decades of very hard work to get there, and truthfully almost anyone who makes it that far has a personality type that won't let them stop working hard.
And as for your obvious hatred of the arts and humanities, some of us understand that there's more to life than science and consumerism.
Nothing presently suggests that any of these fish will accumulate more PCB simply because they're resistant to its toxic effects, and thus predators will not learn to avoid them based on heightened PCB content. The Tomcod in particular will actually accumulate much less PCB, because the biochemical component with which it used to bind will simply let it pass.
In fact, these resistances could be one of evolution's many double-edged swords: if the predators learn anything, it may be that they should eat these fish, because PCBs are very dangerous teratogens (they fuck up embryo development), and any prey containing less of those poisons could lead to higher levels of survival in the predators' offspring.
I don't think you're reading his statement correctly. I'm not sure you can read any justification for sovereign manipulation into his statements. He's simply saying that if we insist on putting troops in other countries to suit our interests (which includes nations we like, by the way, such as Japan, Germany, and Turkey) why do we ignore that option when an immediate neighbor has paramilitary uprisings in border territories?
Asking why we're pursuing the imperial option stupidly and inconsistently doesn't mean he's justifying the imperial option itself.
The person reportedly kidnapped is not named...
So your organization is called Anonymous and when one of you goes missing you threaten the suspected culprit while still not naming the missing guy?
It's not like the Zetas only 'disappear' a couple guys a year; they're a massive paramilitary threatening the public safety of entire states. How the fuck are they supposed to know which guy to return? Furthermore, this splinter of Anonymous is already at war with the Zetas. If they believe they can damage the Zetas so heavily with their supposed cache of information why didn't they do so weeks ago?
It all seems like weird internet posturing, although of course hacker groups and drug runners aren't exactly paragons of transparency. There may be so much back story missing that it's pointless to comment on.
Unions may have been necessary once, but now the produce nothing but trouble.
So do you want unions abolished? Also, your condemnation doesn't properly apply to unions any more than it does to governments, trade associations, affirmative action groups, militaries, universities, etc. Do you want every one of those organizations abolished, as well? Once people have some power they become deluded enough to invent reasons they should continue holding that level of influence even when many of their aims have been met. They become complacent and guide their attention to unworthy targets. It almost never happens any other way; there's a reason Cincinnatus is a legend to this day, and became a major role model in the forming of the United States.
The solution to greed and complacency is checks and balances, such that an unstable equilibrium can be maintained between competing claimants - including the public - to political and economic influence. Just because that system is no longer tuned correctly doesn't mean it's fundamentally wrong. The total destruction of any organization retaining more power than it currently needs will just leave a nation spending more effort on destroying than on building.
Skype and their PR people are calling the project "malicious" and "nefarious", but it sounds like all it does is emulate Skype, so that you can send messages to Skype users while not having a proper account
They mention the possibility that it could be used for spam, but that sounds like blaming the tool. Is there some other way that this thing could be inherently "nefarious" that I'm not understanding? Because it doesn't look dangerous to me.
Unless you count the risks of an independent developer making something interoperable with, and potentially better than, the original product. We all know that's a grave and terrible danger to the safety of the free world.
The changes will cost U.S. residents paying less than $30 a month for telephone service an additional $0.10 to $0.15 a month
This sounds great. Good for people without broadband, insignificantly more expensive for people who currently get a POTS subsidy from the program.
Now how about an urban broadband fund, to replace the worthless service tens of millions of us still have, service so bad it isn't even legally 'broadband' in any other industrialized country, with something usable?
In other words, the government is obligated to obtain the shittiest services possible?
You may not know just how right you are...
Many government agencies, from the federal down to the municipal, are actually required to accept the lowest bid. They also have no clawback provisions and no punishments for completing a project over-budget.
It doesn't take a genius to see what will go wrong, and yet they continue using this system....
Are you really one of those pretentious assholes who thinks the age of someone's user ID indicates their intelligence?
Am I also an idiot because I didn't go to Harvard?
Nevermind, I'll just get off your lawn and move on with my day.
You gotta love when someone offers a $50,000 prize for an improvement that would save them millions of dollars in labor, not to mention the value of files reconstructed that might have been ignored before it became so much easier to do.
A million dollars for improving the movie recommendations on Netflix, and $50,000 for a massive intelligence breakthrough?
Way to go, Pentagon. Way to prove that even with a defense budget of $649 billion dollars you can still be a total cheapass.
How about the fact that they push playback, transfer, and region restrictions in both hardware and media more aggressively than any other company? How about the DRM on their music CDs that turned out to be a full-fledged rootkit? How about the fact that it wasn't just removing OtherOS as an official feature, but continually updating the firmware to disable every hack anyone invented to get it back after it was disabled in the first place? Is it really such a crime to want control over something you bought and paid for that I'm just some "butthurt" little whiner if I criticize Sony?
There. I gave you other arguments. Sony probably does more than any other company to punish you for the crime of buying their product. I can't imagine what kind of ignorant twit could, with a straight-face, call someone "a damn cliche hipster suffragist" for calling Sony a bunch of assholes without specifically listing every single example of their malfeasance.
With occurrences like these it's no surprise people sometimes think antivirus and security recommendations consist of 75% FUD and 25% common sense.
How many of us have seen just about every damn thing we download labeled as some kind of trojan or other?
It's commonplace on file sharing sites to see outright mockery of those who raise alarms about the scary alert their AV just popped on those files; that's how bad antivirus programs get.
I understand that sometimes shady files do contain viruses, but nevertheless I've seen claims from major security vendors and from Microsoft that the vast majority of illicit files contain viruses. Seems like I'd have noticed some missing money, some funny things on my credit report, or some suspicious traffic in my router logs if that was true, but they've all been squeaky clean. And I used windows XP SP3 with no firewall or antivirus until this year.
Bottom line, I should be using better protection and it's possible I've had some viruses, but if I did they clearly haven't harmed me yet. And it's still difficult to distinguish the level of actual threats from the hilarious mistakes and massive, obvious disinformation campaigns going on.