As far as I'm concerned, it's just marketing bullshit trying to put a good face on Sony's latest breach. If it were their first, I might think differently, but it's pretty clear Sony's "security" is a freakin' joke. Add in a movie that would have probably bombed without all the exposure, and you have all the excuses you need to paint a "North Korea" connection.

It doesn't hurt that the US has a hate-on for North Korea so they can try to score some political points off the story, too.

Shame on Obama for selling out to Sony so blatantly.

Whether North Korea was the sponsor or not, the hack doesn't appear to have originated there. Last I heard someone was pointing a finger at Thailand as the locale, but not at anything official. Speculation was that someone had been hired to do the job. Believe it if you want to, I don't really. I don't think anyone has enough evidence to come to ANY reasonable decision.

Well, just spinning a story here, but as I understand it North Korea threatened to sabotage South Korea's nuclear power plants. Around that time Obama stopped to have some conversation with some Chinese diplomats....perhaps about Korean relations? And soon thereafter North Korea got blamed quite publicly for a hack that may have been detected a bit before it was made public. Now North Korea's internet connections are sabotaged to keep them from intruding into South Korea's power plants, with China standing mum and not protesting, but the story about why this is going on has to do with this silly movie.

OK, it's just a story. But AFAIKT it is consistent with everything that happened.

FWIW, I believe that North Korea made some threats about sabotaging South Korea's Nuclear piles. That, to me, is a more credible reason for taking down their internet....if that's what happened. (That their internet went down is apparently true. That it was taken down externally I have heard no acceptable proof of.)

Do you even have any evidence that the folks who sent the threats were the same people as the ones who copied the files? Any good reason to believe it? Certainly it's a possibility, but I'd like some acceptable evidence before I start believing it. The unsupported word of someone in a position of authority isn't something that I consider acceptable evidence.

I'm willing to accept that North Korea *MIGHT* do such a thing and then not admit it. But the path from possibility to belief is not, for me, swift and certain.

There are a lot of things that I don't believe I have evidence to decide. This is one of them.

But it does raise a serious issue - they're studying changes that don't necessarily reflect the selective pressures of present-day life.

Think about it: what are the leading causes of death for people in the prime breeding age (15-34)? Car accidents - by a good margin. So isn't this significant selective pressure to beef up the neck against whiplash, the skull against forehead impact, survival during significant blood loss, etc?

#2 is suicide. I don't know how this rate has changed over time or whether the methods modern humans choose for attempts are more effective than would have been chosen in the past. For example, while men commonly turn to firearms, which are a very effective way to commit suicide, women more often turn to prescription medication overdoses as a method, which overwhelmingly fails.

#3 is poisoning. While humans have always been around poisons, the sheer number that we keep in our houses, most of types that we didn't evolve to, suggests that this may be a stronger selective factor now than it was during our agrarian days, perhaps comparable to that when we were hunter-gatherers or worse.

#4 is homicide. We've definitely gotten a lot better at that, a person is far more likely to die from an intentional gunshot wound than a beating or stabbing. Selective pressures: surviving blood loss, mainly. Stronger, thicker bones may help in against low velocity penetrations.

#5 is other injuries. Again, we're not as likely to suffer from, say "crushed by a mastodon" as an injury, but we've developed plenty of new ways to get killed or maimed in our modern lives.

Then it gets more complicated on the basis that the issue isn't just about survival of the individual, but their social group as a whole, so even nonbreeding members can have a major impact...

All drivers on OS X are already required to tell the operating system ahead of time that a device is about to DMA to memory. That's how that VT-d is able to configure the IOMMU hardware to allow those devices to access RAM without worrying about 64-bit address spaces. So the OS already knows precisely which pages of physical RAM should be accessible by PCIe devices using DMA. If other pages of RAM are accessible, that's a bug.

Similarly, making the Thunderbolt controller's IOMMU mappings be driven by that part of the kernel should not break any drivers at all, by definition, because PCIe devices shouldn't be issuing DMA requests except at driver-preapproved locations. So AFAIK, the only way such a fix could break any device would be if that device was trying to do something really dangerous, like reprogramming one of the PCI bus bridges, or reflashing the computer's EFI firmware....

I mean, I suppose that some drivers might be inadvertently configuring a mapping for a page of memory that also contains executable code or class instances (with function pointers), in which case fully fixing this would also require Apple to modify the IOMemoryDescriptor class to ensure that the DMA-enabled pages are whole pages owned by the descriptor, but that should still be pretty minor, and should result in only a modest amount of wired kernel memory bloat.

In the worst case, such a change might require a CPU-driven copy-on-prepare and/or copy-on-complete to work around drivers that provide their own virtual addresses for a memory descriptor that aren't page-aligned, which would cause a big performance hit for those few drivers, but I'd expect most driver developers to quickly fix those design mistakes to eliminate the performance hit. (And that's assuming this isn't done already—for some reason, I thought those buffers had to be page aligned or you'd get a panic, but I'm not seeing anything about it in the docs, so I might be remembering wrong.)

No. Offense can surely be given. But trying to magically legislate it away is a horrific, cowardly, hubris-ridden mistake. Offense arises because of difference in opinion and grasp of fact, intentional or not.

Because of this, it can and will always arise, no matter how narrow you choke down the channel of discourse, unless or until all have the same opinions and grasp of facts, which, one hopes, will never, ever come about.

The most productive course is to try not to give offense, and if received, to assess it and take value (warning, insight, stance, new information) from it if possible — otherwise, let it go.

Restricting opinion by legal means is one of the worst ideas ever. Offense is not a legitimate mitigating factor for censorship and repression. When enacted into law as justification for anything, what it tells us is that we need new legislators, because the ones we have demonstrated fundamental incompetence.

I'm sure that you think you have a point, but I haven't a clue as to what it is. Even as a troll this is sub-par. If you're trying to be serious you really need to think more about how to present your argument.

You are, I think, responding to the claim that you aren't noticing that many small changes can yield an important difference. What you intend your response to mean I find opaque.

What's a bomb? Seriously. An explosive device remotely explodable can be used in mining, or as a weapon. The exact same device.

Just refuse to allow anyone to be named Gatling.

(Well, I know that's not exactly a Gatling gun, but it's pretty close.)

Right. That, after all was the purpose of copyright. To give people a *LIMITED* monopoly. When it expired, then everyone would inherit the work as a common good.

I would argue that 17 years is too long. 5 years with one (fairly expensive) renewal would be better, though the ideal number does differ between fields of endeavor. I could also go with a 3 year first copyright, a renewal for, say, $100. And an nth renewal for $100^n. (You could consider the original publication to be the 0th renewal if you want, and charge a $1 registration fee needed if you intend to apply for any renewals.)

That was because the rules were only applied in favor of white males. As written, however, they work quite well where the population is thinly distributed and the communications are slow. They aren't perfect, but I can't think of anything better.

As things are, however, those rules would not work and could not be made to work. They should, however, have been properly ammended rather than being ignored.

There were enough tells in the first movie that I decided to skip both prequel sequels. My only regret concerns the movie not made.

The problem when you have a strong emotional investment in something is that one's instinct is to give it one more chance. By the time you've watched two bad movies, you're almost pot-committed to watch the third.

It takes a special will to abandon a franchise without falling into the emotional mulligan trap, and so there's ultimately little incentive for Jackson to not do what he did.

I'm slowly learning. My loyalty function has now evolved to where it's almost vertiginous.