Um, yeah, that's what they do in MRIs. Only have to energize it and keep it cool. They get really ticked if they have to turn it off - very time consuming and expensive to turn it back on again.

Difference being, when deployed on a submarine, by nature of the mission you are cut off from the outside world.

When you are deployed on Mars, by nature of the mission, you are a celebrity doing PR appearances multiple times a day. I think this is just preparation for throwing in CNN's face: "No, you get the interview when we give it to you, if it doesn't come live at your optimal time slot, suck it up and play it delayed - we're not going to compromise our people's Martian rhythm for your advertisers."

Double tap strategy.

Retro.

Way better to weigh the costs...

The more enlightened employers also consider morale and mental health, not just as HR tokens, but as actual productivity tools

silicon - cone is for... cones.

Considering it is a form of ritualized suicide, in which the protagonist is doing himself in slowly over a matter of months or years, claustrophobia is small time.

Granted, the monk is also meditating to achieve a form of enlightenment, but I have a hard time seeing the value of his last 6 months or so of isolated life in which the only thing he communicates to the world is: "nailed it, my body didn't decay."

If you've got a loyal customer base, that's future money to be made - if they are losing money today with that loyal customer base, that's mismanagement, they can fix that in the future. Even if they fire every engineer and sell every factory, they can still sell the brand to someone who will make "Sony gear" and get those customers to buy the new products.

Agree about the movie studio branding, but, why does it matter what the name of the division is if the accounting is already separated? I suppose it would make sense to split the stock so you could buy Sony pictures separately from Sony electronics - if you care about such things.

I get that you love your PS3 for what you use it for. Anytime I turn mine on (and I'll be damned if I leave it in standby heating the room for months on end just so it can auto-update), I've got a ton of update hassle to wait through.

Defending the OtherOS thing is just hillarious, do you work for Sony legal? It was an arrogant, obnoxious move that took a single piece of hardware in my living room, that I bought and paid for and presumed I had some semblance of ownership of that used to do two things and told me, sorry Buzz Lightyear, you must choose.... What if you bought a car to go to work during the week and to do personal errands on weekends - how would you feel if a TOS agreement changed about the personal errands thing, telling you that if you ever want to drive your car to work again, you can no longer use it for personal errands without doing 6 hours of reconfiguration work to switch the "use mode"?

As for the media thing, we have a collection of DVDs, mostly kids stuff that they watch over and over. Being kids, if we watched from the discs, we'd have to buy the discs over and over, not to mention buying the player over and over - my 2nd PS3 (first one YLOD'ed after about 18 months, didn't really feel like doing the toaster oven reflow repair to get its 300W power draw back online since units 50% more power efficient had been released), 2nd PS3 lost its disc drive capability about 60 days after we got it - sure it was covered by warranty, but I had just gone through 12 months of warranty repair hell on the Vaio (4 months of downtime, bad screen, wait for onsite repair, onsite repair tries 3 times and fails, had to mail to factory for a month to get it done, then overheating at the 11 month mark, again mailed to factory for a month to have them declare that the fans were full of dust, a year later - being very careful to run the notebook only in the most dust free locations possible, the fans are packed out again, requiring disassembly to address or the thing will overheat after a few minutes of any processor load - f-ing joke.) So, no, not interested in sending the new PS3 back for warranty work with a chance that the kids stuck a postcard in the slot or something - open it myself, no, it's not the kids, it's defective mechanicals, but now I've voided the warranty by looking. Matters not, we mostly use games from the hard drive and movies from the server anyway... so, about that movie format thing, backing up our own owned videos from DVD to a file server - only specific types of DLNA servers were recognized (maybe that has improved with later software updates, wouldn't know, don't care), and after carefully selecting and ordering and installing a compatible media server, only specific MP4 encodings were recognized, had hunt down the specifics on the internet, because the first three formats I tried didn't work, so now the bulk of those backed up DVDs are encoded in the PS3 specific MP4 encoding format - once you know what that is, you can replicate it all day long, but if you had a previously made collection of videos, too bad, so sad.

So, sure, if you spend your life on the PS3, you can work around the pain and get some enjoyment out of it. Obviously, they can't be completely useless to everybody or they wouldn't still have 500 square feet of space in every Target and WalMart. But, ask yourself, how many hours a week do you spend on your PS3? How many hours cumulative since 2007? If, instead of playing PS3 all that time, you had been spending that time at a cash register, asking: "you want fries with that?" for $7.50 an hour and banking all that money, could you now afford one of these: http://www.chevrolet.com/2014-... ? For the lazy, that costs a little over 7000 hours at $7.50 an hour, or about 17 hours a week since 2007.

Mr. PS3 defender, do you spend less than 2.5 hours a day playing video games?

Not if you are a butterfly:

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

Blame Dr. Who.

People are bored with food, transportation is still interesting.

Say it with me Beavis:

Uber, crash, heh heh

Whether Sony spins off the PS3/games division, or spins off everything else and keeps PS3/games, or - most likely - organizes PS3 and games in their own business units while keeping the Sony brand on all of it, only really matters for consumer brand perception.

I don't see Sony leaving the TV type electronics or movie businesses anytime soon.

What they need are PlayStation games. Gotta have a PS3 in the living room in order to sell games into it.

Still small potatoes compared to movies, but probably a more reliable ROI.