Agree with what you wrote in spirit. Just a minor correction. While they have long range missiles (terrible quality BTW) they don't actually have an ICBM.

The bottom line is that families were split apart and have remained apart for 60 years directly because of squabbling between the US and the former Soviet Union.

Directly because? Certainly the USA and the Soviet Union encouraged the hostility but the Korean people aren't robots. The reason North and South Korea are apart and have such lousy relations is because of Koreans. Non Europeans are also responsible for their actions.

Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment are two totally separate companies that for all intents and purposes are completely disconnected at all but the most senior executive levels (the C-Suite).

"The setup, on an enterprise scale, takes thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in hardware"

You are off by at least two orders of magnitude, at last by any reasonable definition of "Enterprise".

An enterprise grade hadoop cluster that is dealing with enterprise workloads is going to start roughly in the mid-six figures and grow into the low 7 or 8 figures over time and scale. Scale is not cheap.

Sony are sometimes jerks regarding stuff like DRM. They don't starve millions of their own people to death. I'm not unclear about which side I'm on in this one.

We've lost it. It is pathetic. Agree completely. Even if this was a credible threat we shouldn't cave.

Sony is a big corporation. They do about $200m in revenue per day. The idea that some tin pot dictator can import his censorship into the United States is unthinkable.

The head of the Port Authority was not fired for 9/11, no one is going to want to fire the head of Sony pictures for this.

First off Sony has already lost millions from the hacking. How would a bombing have cost millions to Sony?

I can't do much about this and neither can you. But if you would to be a little bit constructive I started a petition:
https://www.change.org/p/regal...

I went to events where there were terrorist threats. New Years 2000 being a great example. No you don't live in fear and no you don't let them create hysteria.

Note the difference between "flow" and "revenue". Two completely different things. The reason why most of google's money flow goes through EU is various tax break arrangements. As a result, if it were to get kicked out, not only would it lose the market, it would lose lucrative tax deals.

I have no idea where Google is hiding money. But I'm sure there are plenty of African and Latin American countries that would happy to play the role of illicit bank.

Suggesting that EU is "losing" here sounds a lot like "oh EU is losing to microsoft, what can it do?" back in the days of browser monopoly fight. Until EU decided to actually take action and suddenly "oh EU is losing" whine changed to "oh evil EU is oppressing this nice US company" tune here on slashdot

What are you talking about? Microsoft managed to hold the line on browsers for almost a decade and thereby prevent the transition to web based applications. They finally lost share to Safari, Firefox, Chrome... as those browsers advanced. The evidence for that being the transition happened in the USA as well as the EU. There is no evidence that the EU was able to effectuate an early switch.

Well yes actually. That's what they are being sued for. I know it sounds ridiculous but that is the plaintiff's claim.

The more appropriate question is whether their prevention of competitors DRM Schemes on the iPod drove up prices of either the music itself or the iPod devices upon which said digitally purchased tracks could be obtained.

That's a hard question to answer in a suit against Apple. Certainly the RIAA wanted Apple to be nothing but a device manufacturer allowing a host of other formats and selling agents. At the same time the other ones available like Real they didn't want. So it is hard to find a monopolistic act where Apple wasn't under contract. That's a much better question for an anti-trust suit against the RIAA.
 

These two questions:

A) Is DRM a bad thing?
B) Did Apple's DRM raise the price of iPods?

are two very different questions. If is very easy to see how someone could answer the questions differently. The court was asked to decide B not A.

FWIW I've bought software before where the contract has both a license agreement and a limited patent license when the software is designed to throw me into violation of their patents. I've never heard of a company arguing they can sell the one and not the other while claiming both however.