I really wasn't trying to ignore it.  I just like science... and human evolution is a really interesting topic since it basically has been "unchained" from the usual contraints as we know them.

Ironically this has somehow led to evolution happening "faster", though unchained by the "Survival of the fittest" parameters.

I suppose this does make sense though when you really think about it, because without "Surivial of the fittest" mutations still happen... and nobody gets wiped out for them.

Because nothing has happend to anyone who had their information taken, they aren't letting cheaters and pirates overtake their system and they don't rip people off, they make good games, and these things happen to even the most secrure things and they are fixing the problem everyway they can, I can forgive their PR department being a little late assuming they knew about it before they told us

Haha fair enough

But the point is that this is not acceptable by any means...it just isn't and I don't care who the company is.

So it's not acceptable for someone to get hacked? 

Its not acceptable for a company to be so vulnerable that stores info of millions of people.

agreed but they aren't the first to have this problem and they won't be the last.

So then what do you say to visa and mastercard and all those other companies that got hacked and actually lost CC information, why is Sony being held to a higher standard then them?

I don't know about that one RROD affected a lot less people since the majority of the faulty hardware got sold at the beginning of the 360's lifespan.

I'm a Systems Analyst, with some ties to the Software Engineering department. This is my 12th year.

Your view of "everything is hackable" is indeed correct. However, the ease of breaching security is related to the amount of encryption placed on the data. You could be the smartest person in the world, but it still comes down to taking pot-shots in the dark when it comes to breaking encryption, and as key bitrates rise, the likelihood of success for one of these breaches becomes exponentially lower.

Sony made a few fundamental mistakes, and I'll point them out:

1. Sony stated that passwords may have been stolen. This in itself is a scary concept, considering a good system never actually stores the password in a text format, rather a hash of a digestable encryption format (complexity level 1 in one direction, but complexity level 2 ^ encryption-bitrate to decode). When the user enters a password, that is then digested, and checked against the stored hash. To say that passwords were taken implies that they have been keeping them in text format.

2. Sony was incredibly defensive over the security integrity with it's PS3 consoles for a reason. The fact of the matter is that they assumed that since they had the client-side locked down, there was no need to enforce a 2nd level of security on the PSN. It was to cut the costs in order to maintain a free service. Why else would they have a zero-tolerance approach to such consoles, even ones that weren't openly abusing the jailbreak for cheating. They neglected a major fundamental taught to even first year engineering students, and that is to never assume a secure system across a communications medium.

3. This hasn't been 100% confirmed, but there is talk that Credit card info was secured using 128bit encryption. This may have been acceptable in the 1990s, but it's 2011. Even Virtual Private Networks are encrypted with at least 256bit (plenty in the 2048bit range). Processing power has climbed to levels that can breach a 128bit encryption using purely brute-force (ie, checking every possible combination of 2^128 within the given time of expiration of the encryption. Once again, might just be a rumor floating around.

Sony is not 100% to blame, of course not. However, some of these obvious oversights does mean they deserve a good portion of the blame.