The same sort of logic is the reason why there aren't a lot of new painkillers. That and tort issues.

Painkillers save zero lives per year (directly - maybe you could make a hand-waving argument about suicide prevention or something like that). Even the most common and safest ones have some risk of serious side-effects, including death. Thus, looking at it in a simplistic manner, painkillers are almost never of medical benefit.

Now, when you get to quality of life then obviously painkillers make a lot of sense. The problem is that when one person in 10 million takes your pill and dies, and you get sued, you can't point to the millions of people who are happier as a result of taking your fancy pill and use that to justify the occasional death. The result is that people developing painkillers tend to abandon them early in development if there are any issues.

The result is that we have a rather poor selection of painkillers to choose from.

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.

Tend to agree, though there could be another possible future. Nations get tired of this nonsense and start instituting border proxies. Maybe traffic is unrestricted between nations that agree to punish those who attack on other signatories, and refrain from government attacks (think US+EU and a few others). Countries that don't crack down on hacking get their traffic proxied, with only whitelisted protocols accepted (maybe strict html without javascript, plus images in specified formats chosen for simplicity and checked for standards-compliance, and email subject to a delay to allow for spam discovery and scanning/etc - perhaps without attachments). It would basically be the death of the internet as we know it, and obviously the usual suspects will be all for it.

When what happened to Sony starts happening to many major corporations there will be a lot of talk about changing how things work. From what I've read Sony's security seemed pretty typical for any large company - a firewall against incoming connections, and little else once you get inside. Companies aren't going to want to build a complex security infrastructure internally, let alone really strong measures like isolated networks - it costs a lot and is a lot less useful unless you punch a million holes in it (which diminishes the security). With regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley companies want to be able to account for every hour charged to every project and every mile expensed and every bolt ordered against the bottom line each quarter. Gone are the days when everybody just managed their department on a spreadsheet and cascaded the numbers up the levels. Then you have all the tax nonsense - governments don't like it when the value you declare to customs doesn't match the value you get when you finish doing all your double-irish whiskey with a shot of bermuda rum shell games, and good luck having that happen without about 14 layers of integration. Keep in mind the guys running all this IT stuff are in China next to the guys doing all the hacking on behalf of North Korea in the first place. :)

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.

Sounds like a win-win, so why is anyone opposed?

(Well, OK, the Seattle police have some decent arguments, but they also appear to have a shady history which causes one to doubt that the arguments raised are their real reasons. Still, they *are* decent arguments. I'm not sure what the resolution should be, but I am sure it should involve continual taping to an archival store that cannot be edited...which is an impossible ideal, but get as close to it as possible.)

Well, not the only ones, but certainly some of the most important ones. I wish I could believe that they would fairly see the evidence, but there are so many games played with what evidence juries are allowed to see that I'll be a bit dubious until it starts happening.

Well if he'd had his camera going, this would be made clearly obvious. So why are the police against camera? (To be fair, many of them aren't. But I'm talking about the ones that are. Which to me means they've got something to hide, if nothing more than a feeling that their privacy is being invaded, and where they were dominant, now they are supervised.)

Unfortunately there have been enough instances where the police are obviously lying and at fault that I prefer objective evidence that doesn't require that I theorize to fill in the pieces. E.g., there are power stains on someone's hands, but how do you know that he got them when you think he did? A reasonable hypothesis is that he got them struggling to take the officer's gun, but it this actually what happened? And if he was 150 feet away when he was shot, was he fleeing? A camera would remove uncertainties...provided it was secured against tampering. (Yeah, OK, nothing's certain. It could reduce uncertainties quite significantly.)

And why is anyone against having a camera to prevent this kind of uncertainty?