I like how you cut off the quote of my post where I talk about the banks who work with visa and then the clearing fees... then "disagree" with me, in a way that completely agrees with me. Weird.

I play lots of casual games in addition to less casual ones. I would love to have a tablet that can run my steam games while I sit on the couch "watching" tv dramas with my wife. I already have a gaming rig... I should not have to buy a $1200 MS Surface to accomplish this.

I just want a tablet that will run modern versions of Civilization (preferably in tablet mode, which is civilization's windows 8 killer feature).
I don't care if it is streamed or run locally or whatever.

This is the only thing keeping me from buying a shield tablet, the other games I can easily see how they will work, and they are a "bonus" for me, I can and will run emulators on anything, so the seamless controller will be nice, but it keeps coming back to Civ.
I know Civ V (and eventually Civ Beyond Earth) can be played on the Surfac, and that is literally the biggest draw for me, every other feature the surface has, I can work around. I will probably spend 500 hours playing Beyond Earth, and I would love for it to not require buying a 2 piece laptop from Microsoft.

The truth is that credit card interest is the highest profit gig in the whole world. Because of this, Visa/Mastercard and all the myriad banks that work with them have a vested interest in making credit/debit card purchases VERY EASY.
Visa wakes up, takes a dump, then wipes its ass with $300,000 dollars. It is nothing compared to the billions they make in clearing fees alone.
Vendors are not even allowed to do things like require an ID, (I know they do, but it is against the vendor agreement), even though it would make purchases a lot more secure, because EASY trumps everything, EASY makes billions. Secure override codes... Who cares?

yup.

I don't do blu-ray, but for DVD I just use fair-use wizard. and I run through a completely ridiculous set of trans-coding and file copying... most of it I have automated with shell scripts, but it is one of those things where I got it "good enough" by just hobbling along.

"Sports" consists of:

4 hours of "This team is totally gonna sports all over this team, because of the sportsing. These 12 players will totally sports all over the sports because of sports."
followed by a 1 hour game that takes 4 hours
followed by a 4 hours of "That team totally sportsed all over the other team because of sportsing, but these 3 players were particularly sportsy because of sportsing.

eSports consists of deterministic matches, usually between 2 players. There is just not enough bullshit to fill the air and not enough stars to sell shoes.

Sports fandom feeds off of the non-deterministic nature of the games that are played, sure there are winners and losers, but there is very little room in eSports to blame Referees, because in the game world it would be called "Exploits" and would be considered verifiable cheating .
The format has a total lack of potential for a "Support your Team" mentality " Sure team A scored more points, but Team B Player 12 did the greatest thing ever, therefore my fan activities are more valuable even though my team lost" some of that can happen in eSports, but for the most part, the games don't even support/lend to that kind of team play.

Awesome. Made me laugh.

In my opinion AWS is the most mature and the most flexible of the "big enough to matter" cloud providers. I don't foresee them stopping this service any time soon, but if they did, the chances that some other provider would provide a "turnkey" migration from AWZ to their service are very very good.

Not much will need to be changed if you use some other provider...

Just wrap the hell out of your S3 specific code for when thee next trend in "CEO Beat" magazine is "Self Hosting - How to cut your cloud budget to zero!"

Long ago I started ripping DVDs the instant they come out of the package, they stream from my media server now. Having kids will do that... The 4th time I bought "Cars" on DVD, I knew it was just not sustainable.

Also, my kids would rather stream crappy content from netflix than dig out a DVD and wait for 15 minutes for the actual content to start... With my own content server, they get an interface as responsive as Netflix, but with the content I want them to have.

The contractor is Lockheed Martin, which is why it is not in the headlines.
Any time you ask them a question you get: "Well sorry, the reason it is late is classified." It is their typical scapegoat, so nobody even bothers asking them questions anymore.
"We have an excuse, we only work with the government, we didn't realize it actually had to work... we just thought we had to grease the right palms...Also we need more H1Bs please."

There is green paper-like substance that can be used to purchase goods and services. There is even a space for it in your wallet... it is that spot in the back that is twice as wide as the credit card slots.

Well, it was also loss of service, not just the data breech. They shut everything down for weeks while they sorted it out. Several of my 40-60 dollar games were 100% unplayable for nearly a month, because services Sony agreed to supply were unavailable (log-on servers).

I actually had a game I had never played at the time that was unplayable (because it required a patch that I could not get, thanks to services being down), and since I broke the shrink-wrap it was not returnable either.

yeah I have moved to prepaid cards for most everything video game related now, except for places where it carries a hefty premium, but that is rare, Steam cards even go on sale at Target sometimes... last month I paid $17.90 for a $20 gift card.

I have been a defacto member of several class actions... very rarely has it been a check in the mail. It has ranged from a Coupon to a month's free service, even gift cards. Paying in promotional materials seems to be the standard.

I would also like to note that PSPlus is a service that encourages you to purchase discounted items, and also that Little Big Planet and InFAMOUS both have sequels, making them excellent marketing give-aways. This is not punishment at all. This is a 15 million dollar marketing campaign.