The reason that companies do this isn't to take advantage of some sort of psychological compulsive need to use up points. It is so that when they sell a game in 15 differing countries with 15 differing currencies their pricing doesn't look like some sort of nightmarish stock exchange. The point cost for a title is fixed across all countries and currencies, and the cost of buying cards or points can be floated against the current exchange rate.
I'm sure that some people will compulsively try to maximize their point spending, but that wasn't the reason why they created the system they way they did.
due entirely to Sony's fuckwitted lack of security concerning sensitive data, I have had to take measures to protect my identity
Fuckwitted, indeed. By making this (dubious sounding) claim, they have just poked anon with a stick after it has just been demonstrated that they have a major security problem. There is a fair chance that anon has a sizable population of already irritated PSN users. In light of the whole HBGary fiasco, does this REALLY seem like a wise thing to do?
GG Sony, you are proving to be more entertaining by the day...
Putting rootkits on CDs is evil. Storing passwords in plaintext is stupid. Being evil doesn't make you stupid.
Someone on/. has a sig that say something like 'Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity' which seems pretty prophetic in this case. In the end is the net outcome any different?
Anyway, a better point to look at is: With society being where it is, why is anything being stored in a DB in plain text anymore? You can't do partial string searches on hashed values but how often do you need to do 'like' db searches on SSNs, Addresses, City, State, Zip, Names, and birth date fields? As a developer, I am saying to my fellow devs: Paranoia is your friend, encrypt every dam thing you can. Given enough success, your product WILL be hacked.
You don't get it. IE is far superior from a technological point of view, because it leverages the native source console features of the HTML 5 api to produce superior page state management and rasterization of dynamic content streams. The convergent meta-buffering features alone, make IE far more optimized for modern greb-drizle frazzle dazzle alacazam gibblety gobbilty goo.
Don't try to fight the marketing droids with reason. You cannot win.
Yeah, you would think the government would work on actually saving lives by providing people with timely alerts about legitimately dangerous things, like...FUCKING EARTHQUAKES.
If you read TFA, the guy was a REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER in California according to TSA records.
WHOAH, how is that fact even relevant? Even convicted criminals have civil rights. Just because you find this guy personally repugnant doesn't mean that he isn't a person under the constitution.
Replace 'sex offender' with the word 'jew' and try to repeat your statement without sounding like a Nazi. Go on, I dare you.
What they *are* are very knowledgeable laymen, applying basic scientific methodology...
Sounds like a scientist to me. I mean, isn't that what science is about? Applying scientific methodology to test a theory is pretty much the whole point. The white lab coat is an optional extra.
Is this sort of like the study where student who sit at the front of the class did better on average than students sitting at the back of the class? I tried to move to the front of the class, but strangely my grades did not improve. I also loved this line:
...the workforce is lagging in the percentage of younger workers with college degrees, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Is this because kids aren't tanking algebra 2, (sarcasm people, not really asking...) or because we are in ha huge recession, and state educational budgets are being slashed like crazy, reducing funding for public higher education? Here in Washington, tuition for public universities is going to be hiked for something like the third or four year straight. Perhaps there are less kids getting degrees, because nobody can afford it....
But who would hold a judge accountable? Another judge?
yeah that raises a good point. If a lawyer did something that has this kind of conflict of interest, they would be dis-bared. Who or what dis-bars a judge? Isn't there some kind of judicial ethics oversight committee that will come down on this stupid bint for even ruling on the case?
The amount of children that view/play violent media is likely staggeringly high. How many of them are actually insane enough actually imitate the violence and try it on others?
I know, right? Remember when we were kids, and we would always emulate looney tunes and drop anvils on neighborhood dogs that we had put on rocket powered roller skates? Oh, wait, THAT NEVER HAPPENED.
news flash: normal people don't get violent because they see violence. Mentally 'fragile' people are dangerous in any case.
I kind of like the term czar. Recall that a Czar was considered by the West (at the time) to be an out of touch, despotic ruler of a backward country. I think that description fits the roles that it is being applied to quite nicely.
Btw, isn't there a clause in the constitution somewhere that says, "no citizen of the US shall bear a title?"
This is an issue like stealing bicycles. Bicycle thefts total far more than bank robbery losses and more deaths result from bicycle thefts than bank robberies as well. Yet a bank robber can easily get 20 years for a first offence and a bicycle thief will rarely be put in prison. We have it backwards.
bicycle thieves rarely use shotguns to execute their crimes...
The launch pad is currently holding the space shuttle Endeavour, which is slated to launch on April 19."
I thought we were done launching shuttles? Wasn't the most recent mission the last one? There was just an article the other day about William Shattner sending a final congratulations message to the orbiting shuttle crew.
Steam is less intrusive than other forms of DRM, so I hear people say that they don't mind it. Valve WILL fuck you with their DRM eventually, they just haven't gotten around to it yet. It make take 5 or ten years, but it is coming.
Repeat after me: There is NO such thing as good DRM.
Why is this surprising? He has always struck me as a very smart, pragmatic engineer. If brand x widgets are now better than brand y, any good engineer will switch. His goals seem to be fairly obvious: he wants to build the fastest, most efficient graphic engine he can so he is going to pick the best tools available to do so.
His honesty is refreshing in a world of shills, ego based flame-wars, and corporate astroturfing.
My vindictive side thinks the man should die in a fire, but I am trying REALLY HARD not to give in to my vindictive side.
I find it disappointing that people here are joking about killing a guy who basically annoyed them with some e-mail. Yeah, spam is annoying, but really? Where were you people when wall street ruined the economy, and the government opened an illegal prison in Cuba?
If the technology is out there to do this safely and securely, how could it possibly be a bad thing. These being used at major gatherings - Olympics, Superbowl, World Cup - all round the world these should be able to be used given the current state of the world we live in.
Assuming that these were cheap, and completely safe (ha!), you still would be completely wrong in your thinking. You should not be doing this because simply have no right to do this. Do you frisk down everyone who comes to visit you at your house?
More to the point, what do you hope to accomplish by doing this? What problem are you solving? Is there some sort of problem where people are bringing guns into sporting events and shooting the place up, because l have yet to hear of an instance of this sort of thing happening. Or, are you just buying into the bullshit that the world is an inherently dangerous place to live, and more rent-a-cops with metal detectors will fix it?
"He who trades liberty for security deserves neither"
..if you consider that handing control over to the corp might drive down virus related support costs, and the overall cost of the service you are paying for. If 33% of the people who have phones on your network incur expensive support costs, guess who is paying for it?
If it raises reliability of the network as a whole, and lowers operating costs, it might be a good idea to consider. Everything is a trade off.
Amen brother. I have read (parts) of the Silmarillion, and they dry and boring. Moreover, they really add nothing to LoTR on the whole. Does it really matter if we know of Suaron's beginnings, or who Gandalf is? Not one bit.
If you think that the Tolken estate is bad, wait until George Lucasdies....
Man, i may dump my savings into apple stock once it bottoms out after his death. There's going to be a massive unloading, we all know it.
Good point, some investors will dump stock the moment he dies. Buy then, and sell in the next year or two, when his actual influence filters out of the company and apple reverts to being just another mega-corp.
If you were really the gambling sort of vulture, you might even short some stock now and hope he is unhealthy as he looks.
I think the squid ending was more interesting and a better ending for the comic, but there was no way they could have stuck the squid in the movie, had it make sense, and clock in under 6 hours, so I thought the change was a good move.
There was a problem with the comic book ending though: If Dr. Manhattan isn't turned into the perceived villain by the Ozzy's plot, why would space squids be any more of a problem than the Russians? If Dr. Manhattan is still fighting for the 'good guys' (for earth as opposed to against it), why would the countries of the world band together?
The movie solution actually makes more sense when you consider that for Ozzy's plot to work, the world must be alienated from Dr. Manhattan.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason that companies do this isn't to take advantage of some sort of psychological compulsive need to use up points. It is so that when they sell a game in 15 differing countries with 15 differing currencies their pricing doesn't look like some sort of nightmarish stock exchange. The point cost for a title is fixed across all countries and currencies, and the cost of buying cards or points can be floated against the current exchange rate.
I'm sure that some people will compulsively try to maximize their point spending, but that wasn't the reason why they created the system they way they did.
But, maybe they were forced to do it while John Travolta held a gun to their head and Halle Berry gave them a blowjob.
...or maybe Halle Berry held a gun to their head, and John Travolta gave them a blow job...
due entirely to Sony's fuckwitted lack of security concerning sensitive data, I have had to take measures to protect my identity
Fuckwitted, indeed. By making this (dubious sounding) claim, they have just poked anon with a stick after it has just been demonstrated that they have a major security problem. There is a fair chance that anon has a sizable population of already irritated PSN users. In light of the whole HBGary fiasco, does this REALLY seem like a wise thing to do?
GG Sony, you are proving to be more entertaining by the day...
Putting rootkits on CDs is evil. Storing passwords in plaintext is stupid. Being evil doesn't make you stupid.
/. has a sig that say something like 'Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity' which seems pretty prophetic in this case. In the end is the net outcome any different?
Someone on
Anyway, a better point to look at is: With society being where it is, why is anything being stored in a DB in plain text anymore? You can't do partial string searches on hashed values but how often do you need to do 'like' db searches on SSNs, Addresses, City, State, Zip, Names, and birth date fields? As a developer, I am saying to my fellow devs: Paranoia is your friend, encrypt every dam thing you can. Given enough success, your product WILL be hacked.
You don't get it. IE is far superior from a technological point of view, because it leverages the native source console features of the HTML 5 api to produce superior page state management and rasterization of dynamic content streams. The convergent meta-buffering features alone, make IE far more optimized for modern greb-drizle frazzle dazzle alacazam gibblety gobbilty goo. Don't try to fight the marketing droids with reason. You cannot win.
Yeah, you would think the government would work on actually saving lives by providing people with timely alerts about legitimately dangerous things, like...FUCKING EARTHQUAKES.
If you read TFA, the guy was a REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER in California according to TSA records.
WHOAH, how is that fact even relevant? Even convicted criminals have civil rights. Just because you find this guy personally repugnant doesn't mean that he isn't a person under the constitution.
Replace 'sex offender' with the word 'jew' and try to repeat your statement without sounding like a Nazi. Go on, I dare you.
What they *are* are very knowledgeable laymen, applying basic scientific methodology...
Sounds like a scientist to me. I mean, isn't that what science is about? Applying scientific methodology to test a theory is pretty much the whole point. The white lab coat is an optional extra.
Is this sort of like the study where student who sit at the front of the class did better on average than students sitting at the back of the class? I tried to move to the front of the class, but strangely my grades did not improve. I also loved this line:
...the workforce is lagging in the percentage of younger workers with college degrees, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Is this because kids aren't tanking algebra 2, (sarcasm people, not really asking...) or because we are in ha huge recession, and state educational budgets are being slashed like crazy, reducing funding for public higher education? Here in Washington, tuition for public universities is going to be hiked for something like the third or four year straight. Perhaps there are less kids getting degrees, because nobody can afford it....
But who would hold a judge accountable? Another judge?
yeah that raises a good point. If a lawyer did something that has this kind of conflict of interest, they would be dis-bared. Who or what dis-bars a judge? Isn't there some kind of judicial ethics oversight committee that will come down on this stupid bint for even ruling on the case?
I for one, welcome our Futurama renewing studio execs...
*ducks*
...I would pay 10 bucks to see a film with that title...
The amount of children that view/play violent media is likely staggeringly high. How many of them are actually insane enough actually imitate the violence and try it on others?
I know, right? Remember when we were kids, and we would always emulate looney tunes and drop anvils on neighborhood dogs that we had put on rocket powered roller skates? Oh, wait, THAT NEVER HAPPENED.
news flash: normal people don't get violent because they see violence. Mentally 'fragile' people are dangerous in any case.
I kind of like the term czar. Recall that a Czar was considered by the West (at the time) to be an out of touch, despotic ruler of a backward country. I think that description fits the roles that it is being applied to quite nicely.
Btw, isn't there a clause in the constitution somewhere that says, "no citizen of the US shall bear a title?"
She is the stupidest person ever for getting upset and canceling the party....I mean, Jesus, think of how many presents she would have gotten...
This is an issue like stealing bicycles. Bicycle thefts total far more than bank robbery losses and more deaths result from bicycle thefts than bank robberies as well. Yet a bank robber can easily get 20 years for a first offence and a bicycle thief will rarely be put in prison. We have it backwards.
bicycle thieves rarely use shotguns to execute their crimes...
The launch pad is currently holding the space shuttle Endeavour, which is slated to launch on April 19."
I thought we were done launching shuttles? Wasn't the most recent mission the last one? There was just an article the other day about William Shattner sending a final congratulations message to the orbiting shuttle crew.
Steam is less intrusive than other forms of DRM, so I hear people say that they don't mind it. Valve WILL fuck you with their DRM eventually, they just haven't gotten around to it yet. It make take 5 or ten years, but it is coming.
Repeat after me: There is NO such thing as good DRM.
Why is this surprising? He has always struck me as a very smart, pragmatic engineer. If brand x widgets are now better than brand y, any good engineer will switch. His goals seem to be fairly obvious: he wants to build the fastest, most efficient graphic engine he can so he is going to pick the best tools available to do so.
His honesty is refreshing in a world of shills, ego based flame-wars, and corporate astroturfing.
My vindictive side thinks the man should die in a fire, but I am trying REALLY HARD not to give in to my vindictive side.
I find it disappointing that people here are joking about killing a guy who basically annoyed them with some e-mail. Yeah, spam is annoying, but really? Where were you people when wall street ruined the economy, and the government opened an illegal prison in Cuba?
If the technology is out there to do this safely and securely, how could it possibly be a bad thing. These being used at major gatherings - Olympics, Superbowl, World Cup - all round the world these should be able to be used given the current state of the world we live in.
Assuming that these were cheap, and completely safe (ha!), you still would be completely wrong in your thinking. You should not be doing this because simply have no right to do this. Do you frisk down everyone who comes to visit you at your house?
More to the point, what do you hope to accomplish by doing this? What problem are you solving? Is there some sort of problem where people are bringing guns into sporting events and shooting the place up, because l have yet to hear of an instance of this sort of thing happening. Or, are you just buying into the bullshit that the world is an inherently dangerous place to live, and more rent-a-cops with metal detectors will fix it?
"He who trades liberty for security deserves neither"
..if you consider that handing control over to the corp might drive down virus related support costs, and the overall cost of the service you are paying for. If 33% of the people who have phones on your network incur expensive support costs, guess who is paying for it?
If it raises reliability of the network as a whole, and lowers operating costs, it might be a good idea to consider. Everything is a trade off.
Amen brother. I have read (parts) of the Silmarillion, and they dry and boring. Moreover, they really add nothing to LoTR on the whole. Does it really matter if we know of Suaron's beginnings, or who Gandalf is? Not one bit.
If you think that the Tolken estate is bad, wait until George Lucasdies....
Man, i may dump my savings into apple stock once it bottoms out after his death. There's going to be a massive unloading, we all know it.
Good point, some investors will dump stock the moment he dies. Buy then, and sell in the next year or two, when his actual influence filters out of the company and apple reverts to being just another mega-corp.
If you were really the gambling sort of vulture, you might even short some stock now and hope he is unhealthy as he looks.
I think the squid ending was more interesting and a better ending for the comic, but there was no way they could have stuck the squid in the movie, had it make sense, and clock in under 6 hours, so I thought the change was a good move.
There was a problem with the comic book ending though: If Dr. Manhattan isn't turned into the perceived villain by the Ozzy's plot, why would space squids be any more of a problem than the Russians? If Dr. Manhattan is still fighting for the 'good guys' (for earth as opposed to against it), why would the countries of the world band together?
The movie solution actually makes more sense when you consider that for Ozzy's plot to work, the world must be alienated from Dr. Manhattan.