I'm pretty sure our ancestors didn't evolve to eat corn that was licensed by Monsanto. Just a thought.

But I understand GMO foods are going to totally fix world hunger, which is why they're primarily sold in the US, where judging from the girth of people I see on the street, everybody's hungry as hell.

Meanwhile, the concern is being handled through the appropriate processes.

I'm sure officials in Fukushima would have said the same thing on March 10, 2011.

People would lost their minds here if electricity prices tripled.

Energy costs make up a small part of a family's budget compared to health care, education, etc etc.

No, people would not "lose their minds" if electricity prices tripled. You just might not have as many houses decorated with extravagant Christmas displays for two months every year. There's so much energy wasted in the US it's not funny. Living in the same home, working at the same place and using the same gizmos, my family's been able to cut our energy outlay every year by more than 60% and without impacting our quality of life one bit.

Once they're installed, solar panels don't send you a bill every month.

Solar also only works well in areas with lots of sunshine and when there are no clouds which is a small part of the USA.

Germany is cloudier than Chicago.

Mainstream news outlets are a lot more guilty of clickbait headlines than Buzzfeed. Don't get me wrong, Buzzfeed is a dopey website, but the mainstream sites have taken it to a whole 'nother level.

If you use the twitter, the absolutely best follow is someone called, "@SavedYouAClick", who basically takes clickbait headlines and defuses them by reading the article and giving you the bit you actually might want to know, saving you from having to click and a barrage of ads and trackers. They're really really useful, and now whenever I see clickbait, before I even think of clicking, I go see @SavedYouAClick. I wish I knew who it was so I could thank them personally.

For example, from the other day:

No you haven’t. RT @EliteDaily: Apparently You’ve Been Tying Your Shoes The Wrong Way Your Entire Life:

or,

Nope. RT @HuffingtonPost: Is Jennifer Lawrence starring in Quentin Tarantino's next movie?

My favorite is when @SavedYouAClick really nails some sacred cow:

"Change your passwords" and "don't be stupid." RT @CNNMoney: Ok so you've been hacked. Now what? Here's what to do right now:

Yes, somebody is paying....Americans . American's are subsidizing entertainment for the rest of the planet.

So, it's about "fairness", is it? Well, that's a completely different discussion then.

As I've shown, there's plenty of profit to be made from DRM-free media. And there's no question that DRM is only a hassle for the paying customers. So you punish the ones who pay to get back at the ones who don't.

The question is, does Sony (and does Microsoft) actually need to be hassling their customers? Does their business model fail without DRM? Clearly it does not. It's just about control, not about profits, not about successful business, not about making sure the people who actually create the media get paid.

1% down time doesn't justify dropping a perfectly good working server model.

Is there something wrong with the dedicated server model? It was pretty successful for a little game called Starcraft.

Look, if it's just about DRM, then just say so. Don't pretend having private servers where you can set up your own LAN parties is a bad model for any other reason than that it takes away a tiny bit of control from Sony.

Well, $400 for the PS4, $60 per game and let's assume at least, what do you think, the average person buys a total of five or six games over the life of the PS4? So now you're up to over $700 of useless kit when you can't connect to Sony's DRM server.

I really like your answer!

It is really, really difficult to protect ourselves from every abuse to which a corporation might subject us.

It's important in this conversation to understand that batteries have limited lifetimes, perhaps as little as 2 years, or less if defective.

I was standing in a store thinking of buying a top-of-the-line unlocked HTC phone for $750. Then the salesperson told me that the battery is not replaceable! That caused me to try to avoid buying anything from HTC. I don't like helping abusers.

I never would have guessed that an expensive phone would be considered a throwaway.

HTC CEO: If you learn that I have joined the board of directors of HTC, I will try to convince the other board members that abuse is bad practice. If I am successful, leave the building immediately. You are fired! It's unlikely I would be asked to join the board of directors, but that is a way of expressing the intensity of my dislike for abuse.

Why buy an unlocked phone? Travelers in other countries buy local SIM cards for GSM phones. That means anyone you meet can call you at a local number while you are in the area.

Yeah, I guess. Keeping people in line using military hardware seems to be a growth industry all over the world. I'm not sure I believe our overlords even see borders any more.

Yeah, I thought that too for a minute. But this part of the summary seems to suggest otherwise:

"Over at the Communications of the ACM, a new article — Computing's Narrow Focus May Hinder Women's Participation — suggests that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should shoulder some of the blame for the dearth of women at Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and other tech companies.

Clearly, they're including platforms other than the Microsoft DOS/Windows hegemony. There are lots of ways to compute today that don't involve those platforms.

I suppose maybe it has to do with the platforms these women grew up with, but assuming they're in their 20s, they would have had lots of other choices even then.

Who knows? My wife got a Masters in Computer Science before her PhD in Math, and she doesn't seem to like computers very much. From what I've seen over the past 20+ years, she prefers pencil and paper. She tells me that it's possible to do real Computer Science with paper and pencil, but I never fully understood how that works. She's the smart one in the family.

Think about all the second/third worlders supporting piracy on Slashdot. The hungarians/romanians/russians saying they pirated everything and then complaining about how no one wants to pay for their own software they make so they're thinking about emigrating...but that everyone should pirate Game of Thrones because media companies who want to make a profit are evil.

Forget about their reasons. Is it a problem that would make Sony unprofitable?

We've had the music industry give up on DRM over a decade ago, and they're still in business, doing better than ever. In fact, the Super Bowl is now making half-time acts PAY for the privilege of playing at the half-time of the Superbowl. All that piracy of music and there is still a huge music industry, still musicians making livings all over the world. Maybe some of the power shifted, but do you doubt that there are just as many musicians making livings today as there were in 1980?

The industry wants to say it's a SERIOUS problem, but all we have to go on is their outrageous estimates of lost revenues, and dire warnings. We had the same dire warnings about the music industry and they turned out to be completely false. I don't need a Playstation 4 if I want to play the latest music from my favorite musician. In fact, there are more ways for me to get that music and get it for free than ever before. Movies are pirated left and right and there's still a movie industry, in fact, it's bigger than ever. More independent movies than ever. More people making a living in the movie industry than ever, in more places than ever. The music industry and the movie industry have surrendered to piracy and lived to tell the tale. Yet, you tell me that somehow the game industry is different.

I call BS.

People can go on how Sony or Microsoft and other companies are evil and information wants to be free and all that.....but really it's just a bunch of people who don't want to pay.

And yet, somebody is paying. Here, look for yourself:

Billboard:

Global digital revenues were up 8% to $5.8 billion, climbing from $5.4 billion the previous year. Performance rights revenue was the fastest growing sector in the music industry, rising 9.4% to $943 million, up from $862 million in 2011. Synchronization grew 2.1% and totaled $337 million, up from $330 million. Global revenues from physical was $9.4 billion, a 5% decrease on 2011’s total of $9.9 billion.

And,

Statista:

Filmed entertainment revenue in 2013 was $88billion

That's billion with a "b". And the projections through 2018 are all up up up.

http://www.statista.com/statis...

All in all, the entertainment industry in the US made $632billion in 2013. So somebody is paying. Piracy my ass.

It is the responsibility of the CEO to coordinate the work of all the employees. The CEO must try new products and reject them if they need improvements. Steve Jobs did that.

I am also aware that some think that Sony should split itself up into two separate companies because of that.

Five, at very least.

And 75 percent of newbies were some second or third worlder

So, it's those people with no money in the Third World that are the threat to Sony. How big do you really believe the threat of Playstation piracy could be? Haven't we been over the actual statistics about piracy in the entertainment industry to be able to drop this notion that piracy is some "existential threat" to the industry? Sony makes a device. A different Sony makes a game. So who really is Sony's customer? The person who buys a Playstation or one of their "strategic partners"?

All you're doing is making my case for Sony being a company that is hostile to the people who buy their products. And their corporate structure and philosophy is what makes them evil. Anyone who does not buy the Sony nameplate is well rid of them. A company that deserved a lot of respect in the 60s, 70s and 80s has now lost all claim on respectability.

Free 2 Play is pretty terrifying.