I understand that you have poor luck with thinking, but don't take out your inadequacies on someone else hoping if you yell loudly enough, they won't notice your own stupidity. A rather trivial case of a database entry not updating correctly is what's at the heart of this massive blow-up. But consider that they tweak things all the time, and major, super huge, universe-affecting things just stop working for days on end. Now, how likely is it that if super epic failures like that happen... that the minor stuff is less likely to occur.

Sorry, not a lie, you're just too stupid to brain today.

Everything in that story just about is wrong. Firstly, "Over 70 of the game's biggest and most expensive ships, the Titans, were destroyed. Individual Titans can be worth upwards of 200 billion ISK, which is worth around $5,000." ... They aren't actually worth that. Because the game offers the ability to exchange realworld money for a "plex" -- this valuation is almost twice what you'd pay for game time if you bought it straight up. In other words, it's the highest valuation possible. Realistically, it'd be worth less than half that.

Secondly, the guy responsible, a 29 year old banker who was literally asleep when it all went down, insists that the virtual money was in the account and it was set to autopay. People close to this suggest the word for this is "bullshit", but it has been "petitioned" -- a claim by a player that the server screwed up. This isn't without precident, as the game is currently limping about with it standings system broken. Standings is basically Eve's IFF system. Right now, nobody in the game can tell friend from foe. Needless to say, it's a massive issue. So it's possible they farked up, but unlikely.

There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened. And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.

In short, while the cover story smells of stupidity, greed could also be in play.

Your quote from Futurama is amusing, but there's something even more amusing, or sad, depending on how you look at it. It's that one dude's car died, and somehow this is a reflection on the entire model line? I live in Minnesota, in the coldest major city by average temperature and up here, every cold snap results in thousands of dead batteries. The number one call out for tow truck companies out here isn't a flat tire but a dead battery. And simple physics provide plenty of explanation for why this is; Yet somehow, out of the thousands of cars that wouldn't start (to the point that it's a running joke: "Come for the low unemployment rate and good schools, stay because your car won't start")... one dude got selected and they say his electric car is somehow defective because of this?

Dude... if ONE car dies during a cold snap out of the entire model line, that's not a problem, that's an engineering success up here of epic proportions when it comes to cars. Maybe you've heard about our roads? We only have two seaons: Winter and road construction. Believe me... if a line of cars can survive up here and only one of them goes tits up in the cold, then someone's doing it right.

If you ask me, the OP hasn't learned anything. He used the phrase "need-free future" which pretty much put him somewhere on the intelligence scale between below average and creationist. Humans will always need yummy nitrogen-oxygen mixtures, food, fresh water, and social contact. Run out of any of those four basic things and what you get is either death, or something close to it. There's more things people would probably put into the 'needs' category, but the point here is that there is no such thing as a "need free" future, and whether it's utopia or dystopia you believe in, the question we all face is not whether or not we have a future, but rather what kind it will be as numbers increase and resources diminish.

If our previous 20,000 years of history is any indication, there's only one way it ends: With a lot of death. Whether it's due to plague, starvation, or war, eventually a large portion of the human race is going to die. Recycling is a good idea, but humanity's survival doesn't depend on it... it's a quality of life issue, not one of survival of the species. We can use up our whole planet and render it into a wasteland and there will still be humans on it.. they just won't be very happy.

A sledgehammer, but it really is a poor substitute. They aren't as strong as the N900 was. As I understand it, the replacement program for the Space Shuttle suffered a major setback after they were discontinued; they're having to rely on conventional heat shielding now to re-enter the atmosphere.

Figures it'd take an anoymous coward to ruin the joke by posting the answer... ;) You were supposed to make some snide comment about how I couldn't do math and I needed "more training"... not be all intelligent and shit. Guh! Know your place, Anon!

Five things will happen because of this:

1. Someone will publish it to Youtube and it will promptly be blocked because of some automated cease and desist that algorithmically determined that there was a set of two notes that, if piped through a cat being boiled, then fed through a synthesizer and finally broadcast over shortwave halfway around the world, might vaguely resemble their copyrighted work. If you were drunk.

2. Someone will (correctly) observe that it has more artistic value than the last couple of One Direction albums.

3. Someone will comment on how it's an epic waste of tax dollars, and demand to know what possible value the entire field of science and technology has. They will do this using a computer, sitting in a temperature controlled building, connected to a power grid, which has CNN streaming on TV in the background through a satellite. They will not see the irony.

This picture has some interesting commentary on protesters who carry government-regulated and controlled tracking devices with full surveillance capabilities while trying to piss in the government's cheerios.

Are you really going to go full retard on me? Show me where the NSA created a secret police force in another country (repeatedly), and trained them, created a large network of "sleeper agents", assisted in smuggling in weapons and nuclear secrets, created and financed a terrorist organization responsible for thousands of civilian deaths, deseceration of cemeteries, orchestrated a large-scale industrial chemical disaster solely to distract from domestic problems, numerous assassinations, and routinely engaged in psychological warfare of social undesireables so extreme that its victims often committed suicide or went insane.

Please, show me this amazing and never-before documented evidence you have about comparable NSA activities. Because that is what the Stasi did in East Germany. To compare them to the NSA is, to put it mildly, intellectually dishonest. While you're at it, invest in a double-wrapped tin foil hat, because apparently single-ply isn't getting the job done with you anymore.

Oh, I'm sorry, do you think the NCA, Mossad, Al-amn al-Watani, Ministry Of Intelligence and Security, State Security Department, etc., don't spy on their own citizens too?

The NSA got caught. That's the distinction here. Not what they're doing. Everyone else is doing the same damn thing, they just didn't leave a cheeky 20-something unattended in the server room of their security archives.

I don't think the NSA is the worst of the lot, not by a long shot. There's plenty of recent historical examples of shit other intelligence agencies have done that make what the NSA is doing today look rather germane. There is no reason, whatsoever, to believe that they all suddenly reformed the day a wild Snowden appeared, and it was only the big, bad, evil NSA, that continued to rape, pillage, and whatever else.

No country would put its intelligence agencies at a competitive disadvantage merely to satisfy the petty outrage of an internet pundit.

Citation needed. Please show me a European company that's been subjected to as much scrutiny as, say, Microsoft. Or show me a European company that's been fined as much as Google has. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We know about Microsoft and Google... but sadly, I don't think you'll find anyone who's heard of these amazingly large fines towards European IT companies. That might be because there aren't really any counterparts to Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc., in Europe. And maybe, just maybe, Europe would like to change that. Perhaps... with really big fines?

What I'm getting really tired of, is people who idiotically believe that a government won't act in its own economic best interests because that would go against whatever whack-ass worldview they have about their own country vis a vis all the other countries. I mean, it seems rather obvious, but nobody's national anthem is "We're Number Two!"

Correct! Big companies in Europe are the "people" the European governments are supposed to protect. -_-

False. They're protecting their own economic interests. Google is an American company that pays little (if any) taxes to Europe. Europe's governments therefore have an incentive to try to lock Google out via cumbersome and expensive legislation to encourage a European competitor to emerge. But I love how you think there's a government out there who honestly cares about the "rights of the citizens". If only there were some historical document [the] illustrating how [declaration] often that [of] happens we [independence] could look at.

Clearly you don't watch a lot of TV... because that's the only way you'd find this observation interesting. Mass media has conditioned them to react that way.

Our already low standards can always be revised downward. It's called aging. When you're in 5th grade, you think you got a pretty good idea about how the government works, and it seems like an alright system. By the time you graduate from college, you have this suspicion that the country is run by morons. When you hit your 30s... you're certain of it.

Thank you, Sir Armchair Lawyer, for that insightful commentary. I'm sure you're a far better expert on the topic than the legal departments of all these major companies. Consider that just the laws of the United States are so numerous, so complex, that nobody on this planet is capable of being fully versed in them, and in fact they cannot even be counted with any accuracy. Entire libraries exist for the sole purpose of collecting these laws. Now, multiply that problem by the number of countries we're talking about here... and you can quickly discern that there is no clear-cut "legal" or "not legal" to be had. Anywhere.

You're sucking at it.

So what you're basically saying is that you're actively engaged in unethical business practices, and are maliciously and intentionally subverting the law on behalf of your employer. Where did you say you worked in "risk management" again?

The only thing I'm surprised about... is how often people fail to utilize any critical thinking skills. But I have no empirical basis for this: Stupid people pretty much cram every nook and cranny on every internet forum. Perhaps it's some vestiges of youthful optimism that I haven't yet rid myself of...

Wrong, defined: You. The "ad companies" are not the people collecting thie data, they're not the ones whose servers are being hacked, aren't the ones with crappy internal security procedures, and are not collecting massive amounts of data on people's online habits and aggregating them into profiles. The "ad companies" are the consumers of this data, not the producers of it.

Yes. It's every "ad company" that's doing this, not just a few rogue ones. Let's just throw the entire industry under the bus because of the actions of a few bad apples. Surely this reasoned response to the problem will provoke a long-term solution...