Amazon does ship to Canada, in fact Amazon.ca specifically caters to Canadian shoppers.

Perhaps what you meant to say was that there were items you were interested in on Amazon.com and they could not be shipped to Canada.

Of course, we're all aware that not a single case of a supposed PSN stolen credit card being used illicitly has ever been reported.

The XBOX Live FIFA hack is a much more lucrative source of funds, thousands of accounts stolen and no end in sight...

Quite incorrect, perusing the PS3 hacking forums prior to the OtherOS debacle shows that the PS3 OS was under attack for years, the big players in the cracking scene were extremely reluctant to advertise their failures and resorted to the old “I could crack it if I wanted to, but who cares about the PS3, has no games” canard.

GeoHot’s announcement of a possible hack using OtherOS combined with Uncharted 2 being nominated Game of the Year threw the pirate community into a fit, here was a triple A game they couldn’t steal but GeoHot’s hack provided a ray of hope that the PS3 could finally be cracked.

SONY removed OtherOS (not their best move, but it was a voluntary choice and any hacker interested in custom firmware just had to say no to the patch) and GeoHot failed to come up with a followup hack, not a surprise considering his talent for self promotion far outweighed his supposed hacking skillz. Having the hope of a cracked PS3 presented and then suddenly snatched away put the pirate community on the warpath. A failed SONY boycott, threats against SONY employees and their families & children, followed up by a full on attack on PSN and a botched attempt to steal credit card information did nothing and resulted in nothing more than turning the PS3 users against the hacking communities.

It wasn’t until a Service USB dongle was stolen and reverse engineered that a brief window of open firmware was available, but SONY closed the hole so quickly and completely that to this day the PS3 is still locked down tight. GeoHot flaunted the cracked keys from the stolen USB dongle in an attempt to shore up his flagging reputation, then quickly caved when SONY filed a civil suit against him. The rumored master key to unlock the entire PS3 OS never materialized and those that were cracked using the USB dongle code are stuck with firmware 3.60.

In the end the PSN credit cards data was never used, OtherOS is still gone and the PS3 is still un-crackable.

And in XBOX land, hundreds (if not thousands) of XBOX-Live users have been suffering through a continued FIFA-2012 hack that has stolen countless amount of cash and point from users credit cards.

Americans won’t take manufacturing jobs unless they’re very well paid, require little education or skill and have plenty of benefits. While those jobs used to be had in America long ago when steel and the auto were king, Americans now hand those jobs off to imported labor (Mexico and elsewhere) rather than do it themselves.

America does not have the infrastructure or manufacturing flexibility that China has now. A design change at Foxconn that takes a week would likely require months at an American plant. No sign that any American investors are willing to put up the funds or resources to match what China has now (and has been building up for decades) or set up the massive supply chains and shipping systems that Foxconn has access to now.

You don’t want those jobs anyway, the good jobs (design, research, software, marketing and yes even retail) are the ones you want and all those are already in America.

Do you have a receipt for that claim that you paid for Linux on the PS3 ?

And the OtherOS removal patch was purely voluntary, if Linux on the PS3 was something so valuable to you that you explicitly paid just for that, why did you go ahead and remove it ?

Pirates are not customers, paying customers are.

If you never use Sony products, then you're not a Sony customer

If you pirate Sony software & media, then you're not a Sony customer

If you hack Sony networks to attack it's members and steal from them, you're not a Sony customer

So who exactly are you referring to when you state "Sony's war on customers" ??

Most hated among pirates & hackers I would think, actual customers not so much.

The vast majority of Sony's "real" customers (that is, those people who actually pay for and use Sony products) don't have the anger & entitlement issues that you and the remnants of #OPSONY seem to have.

Sony the #1 hated tech company? Citation if you please.

They never stored any data in plain text. The incident you're likely referring to was a PSN user that had installed custom firmware on his PS3. The CFW was purposely designed to steal credit card info and transmit it back in plain text.

Sony is hacked all the time because they're the only company to take a stand against piracy and mostly succeed (at least compared to Microsoft and Nintendo).

Ever since the GeoHot episode there has been a persistent campaign to smear Sony and attack their customers by remnants of #OPSONY , you know, the people who threatened to go after family and children of Sony employees, organized a completely unsuccessful boycott of Sony retail outlets, stole a hardware debug key and attempted to sell it off as a piracy enabler, then use it to attack users of the PSN network and knock it offline.

Meanwhile, we're into a full year of the Microsoft Live FIFA hack and hundreds (possibly thousands) of XBOX Live users having their credit cards used for fraud. The same company that knowingly sold a defective console for three years, charges a fee for their users to use an internet connection, fills their console with more ads with every update and deliberately degrades or disallows any third party media or hardware on their consoles.

Yet not a single verified case of a PSN user having their credit card or personal information compromised as a result of the PSN hack has come to light. Sony apologized for the downtime, offered free games and sucessfully locked down the PS3 once again (forcing the pirates to rely on old firmware of they wanted to keep their hacks).

And what has Microsoft offered it's users for the abuse they've suffered? Anything??

So when I see people talking shit about Sony, there's no doubt in my mind that they are either ignorant of the facts or shills working for Lulsec/Anonymous/4Chan or whatever piracy clique is popular now.

Microsoft lied & denied about the RROD for a full three years until the threat of a very public lawsuit forced them to admit the problem.

Not what I would call being honest.

The last Blu-ray profile update was in 2007. So forced firmware updates are unlikely unless your player was sitting unused in a box for a few years or the manufacture had to issue a technical fix. Occasionally a key update is required but those are quite rare, haven't encountered one for a couple of years.

I’ve gone through over 200 Blu-ray discs and have not encountered a single disc that had “unskippable” previews. Many go straight to the main menu, some required nothing more than a single button press from the remote and a few had multiple previews that required repeated presses of the skip button on the remote (Disney is the worst offender here). It should be noted that his behavior is nothing new, DVDs had the same problem and you’re actually less likely to experience this issue on newer Blu-rays than on the equivalent DVD releases.

  So when I want to watch an HD movie, I put in the Blu-ray discs and am watching full 1080p and lossless sound in 2 minutes or less. No worrying about bandwidth caps or the blockiness & banding that comes with low bitrate downloads. No fussing over codecs, audio problems or subtitles issue from pirate downloads either.

".. They were compliant with the DMCA, from what I understand.."

Apparently not, try ars technica for what these scum were really up to

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

Indeed, I keep telling people that ID theft is really ID sharing and it should be decriminalized, after all you can't steal information, right??

So when do we start the blackout campaign & letter writing to repeal Anonymous ?

Because I see absolutely no difference here between what SOPA/PIPA threatened to do and Anonymous does on a regular basis.

You Sir are full of crap

"...they are making an example out of an historic, legitimate, useful and well-known website. This is a prophetic glimmer of the coming war against pure free speech- the internet."

A flagrant lie on your part, the site was run by known criminals who not only profited from distributing copyrighted material, but even stole said material from their own customers who used the site to store personal files.

Try ars technica for the real story, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

Megaupload is/was run by scum, but they appear to be your kind of scum, so I guess that explains your self righteous indignation over the bust.