Could have just seen the Circles page on your machine, or possibly noticed a post you made to the 'Family' circle where everyone else its shared with are relatives, and figured it out that way. That is a disadvantage of the whole 'shared with XYZ other users' display imho, it allows you to indirectly infer the circles involved rather easily - hopefully there will be some way to disable that for posts you make, or perhaps there already is one and I haven't realized yet.

So this is similar to the cries about OpenOffice not supporting .doc formats with 100% compatibility, when MSO won't support ODF or others *at all* even though they are better structured & documented?

Unlike GP, I am not emotionally attached and have (thankfully) not had any relatives murdered etc. - but I would still side with making life difficult for those guilty of really serious crimes like murder. I do agree that all the others in for minor crimes should have far better facilities, even though I do not buy the whole 'this guy is a breadwinner, so reduce his sentence' argument that defense seems to be fond of making (atleast from some of the news articles I come across, again no personal experience of this).

Same here, bought the console recently - to go online I had to update to 3.50. I do that, and a few days later there is a 3.55 which adds 0 new features ... just canceled that upgrade. I'm seriously thinking of hacking it now, even though I have plenty of legally bought games to last me for several months - I also dislike their idea of no PSN w/o updates at all, why do they need to have any checks in place even for downloading demos?

Its very unlikely the students were unaware of what was going on, there are plenty of scams in India as well - this was surely an organized scheme with willing participants, who wanted to settle abroad and didn't care about breaking the law to do it. As an Indian, I guess our government has to make the requisite noises to show they care (hey they're politicians too!) - personally I hope these 'students' get on some watch list so they can't end up as 'naive victims' elsewhere too.

Oh and just an fyi, our foreign minister (S M Krishna) hails from Karnataka which is a neighbour of Andhra Pradesh (where all these poor innocent lambs came from). Not that I'm saying AP is full of scamsters - well it is, but that's true for most of India and the world ;-)

I haven't even hacked my PS3 yet, but after upgrading to 3.50 and a few days later I got the message about 3.55 - I've stopped upgrading it. I rarely play online games anyway, and I don't appreciate Sony forcing me to upgrade each time even to download demos - what am I going to do, pirate all of them?

So far, they have Amazon to thank for me buying several games as I got them for reasonable prices. Seriously considering whether to hack the machine, I will lose nothing considering my offline playing and a hacked console can probably go online w/o constant upgrade pestering too. Of course if I do go this route, it will be quite tempting to just try new games with the full versions instead of demos, esp. since the full version is likely to have more seeded torrents available (and if I try to get a demo from PSN, I have to worry about bans & probably won't get to connect in the first place ... )

You do know that the last boss doesn't lose HP unless it is staggered right? Just use Rav/Rav/Rav to get him into stagger mode, before you try to chip away at any HP :)

Similar opinions here, I disliked VIII's monster leveling but its nothing compared to XIII. Luckily I bought it only recently when it was available for really cheap, and got enough enjoyment that I don't regret the purchase.

Some suggestions to get you thru the game (and hopefully enjoy it a bit):
1. Think of it as a tech demo for graphics & the battle system: I liked both of these, the actual ingame CG is even more impressive than the cutscenes imho (since it has to be done in realtime)
2. Skip all cutscenes with Vanille for first few chapters (say upto 8 or so), I didn't and regret that :p
3. Later on, Vanille becomes tolerable but Snow & Hope start getting extra preachy, so you might want to skip those scenes.
4. Don't bother with training or leveling up before Chapter 11 (Gran Pulse), just enjoy your tunnel ride with occasional looking around for treasure chests in obvious locations.
5. Consider having savegames before each cutscene so you can watch those again, we don't even get a cutscene menu after game completion :(.

As for 'what happened', I've read that partly it is due to the xbox space limitations - which does make sense, else not including the Japanese voices on PS3 bluray version is quite inane (but I'm sure they didn't want to highlight the space issues by differentiating it from 360 version).

It is actually a good game as a tech demo of the crystal tools engine, with a decent battle system (the paradigms are a good concept, not a big fan of crystarium though). Just don't confuse it with an actual RPG lol, let alone something of the scope of other FF titles.

You just need to make sure poor broke fat ass is accompanied by a face that looks like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise etc (or whoever is considered as a 'hot' actor, I don't pay attention to guys ;) ). On this site, shouldn't that atleast get you an initial date with the Schiffer, Portman or Johannson lookalikes? :)

Considering there is a fairly good emulator available for PCs (which obviously don't have Emotion Engine chips in them), this might mean that it becomes easier to get ports of such emulators on ps3 perhaps - which would be great if we can also do postprocessing (4x AA etc.) on the PS2 games as well :)

Pick a region of the US which is less than 3.44% of the total size, and has more than 1.73% of the population - like say, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles etc. To paraphrase your post, isn't it an embarassment that someone can't fully cover a region that tiny? ;)

Just posting to say that I completely agree with your viewpoints; you're going to get a lot of flack for this but good to see that people are modding you up as well - no points or I would've done the same.

People don't seem to get that 'mercy' is basically escaping consequences for (bad) actions; and as such should be a rare privilege of the powerful rather than a universal principle. A king can pardon a minister for treason, because there is an implied threat that any further intrigues will get him executed. For random crooks, getting easy bail or minimal sentences just encourages others with similar mentality who see the risk of getting caught as low, and the penalties if caught as being insufficient deterrent.

I am very fortunate that none of my close friends or relatives has been the victim of a serious crime (bicycle examples aside, I'm sure many have had stuff stolen). But whenever I read about people committing multiple murders and getting off with 8 years and time off for good behavior etc. (or the usual 'insanity' plea!) I am amazed that family members of the victims just accept the punishment. If I was in their shoes, I would be tempted to go kill the murderer and then just announce 'ok now I will just sit in jail for 8 years instead, and I'm well behaved too so I'll be out in 4 yrs' .

Harsh punishment IS a good deterrent; to any future would-be criminals whether they are burglars, robbers, murderers, rapists - or just bicycle thieves. It is a simple matter of risk / rewards, which these guys understand quite well - if say shoplifting meant 1 year in prison w/o parole, sure a lot of people will whine how it is 'excessive punishment' but far fewer people will take the risk to do so.

Who's going to charge them - the crooks who stashed their money in the banks, or the bank officials who were happily profiting off this activity?

Its amusing (and a bit sad) to see all these comments of outrage on stolen data being used, but very little on how this helped tax evasion / bribes / money laundering etc. be detected & prosecuted.

Some people may be like me, wanting to have a good smartphone for occasional use of its capabilities but perfectly happy not using it to the fullest extent possible. I have net access at home & at work, my commute is around 20 mins or less and I'm driving at the time ... I don't have a data plan because I realistically can't justify paying $30 for it considering how little I would benefit.

A non-expiring option to pay $40 for 1gb, that I can use anytime and just shuts off (instead of a surprise $200 bill) would be really welcome for me. That way; I can actually use my phone as a gps (its Android, so the offline gps capabilities are quite lacking) and also for quick email checking if I'm expecting an important mail. Oh and I don't plan to use satellite or street views when I want to navigate using cell gps, so I still won't need large amounts of data unless the apps are just badly optimized.

The only reason I am under contract to T-Mobile right now, is because I could get the Samsung Behold 2 (crappy Android 1.6 phone) w/o a data contract. Once my term is up, I'll probably just buy a good phone for full price and go prepaid, since all the carriers only offer smartphones with compulsory data plans so they can have higher profit margins.