Or you could write the book, publish it at a large publishing company and get tenure + more money elsewhere.

It was kind of nasty, though, was it not? Muhahahahahaha... *evil laughter*

That's true, but it also should not be too hard for a company of the size of Sony Pictures to set up a network in a way that allow one to quickly detect traffic to C&C servers that's not supposed to exist.

Judging from the machines we build, which commonly break right after their warranties have expired, I'd say: No.

I don't understand the initial problem. If A temporally precedes B, then B cannot have caused A but it may have been caused by A. (Unless there is backwards causation, which presumably violates many laws of physics.)

So why can't they properly take into account time?

True, it's a bad precedent but on the other hand it's also questionable whether a lousy comedy is worth that some people die. If this was like Chaplin's The Great Dictator or Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be I would think otherwise, but judging from the trailer it's really just trash.

Nah, they're just slower because they are starting to accumulate errors that in one year from now will lead to a complete failure.

Why don't they 1-index then? Are they that stupid?

That's the reason why you should not put things in the cloud in the first place, and if you do so you should at least check where the servers are located and decide for yourself whether that's a good place for your documents to be and whether they are legal there.

Jesus Christ, is that so hard to understand?

And yes, prosecutors of country A can already ask prosecutors of country B for a warrant in country B, that's done all the time and that's not what this case is about.

Imagine how different would the world be if you could just copy the seat, though. Then you wouldn't take it away from anyone. :)

They also have unrestricted root/administrator access to your machine.

Well, it's Sony. They used to sue their own customers, so why shouldn't they sue the press now.

They sure know how to make friends.

No, it can't be emulated by equalization. If at all it could be emulated by special DSP effects that also add some special distortion. There are plenty such effects available (in fact, a bit too many), but it's usually a horrible idea to slap one of those over an already mastered track.

The real problem has nothing to do with the warmth of vinyl, though. The real problem is that as a result of the infamous loudness war digital CDs are nowadays mastered in a completely different way than vinyl records, a way that is so overcompressed that it completely destroys the sound quality of the music - and provably so, as you can measure the horrible effects of this mastering precisely. It's not a subjective thing at all. Vinyl records have become much louder over the past few decades, too, but they have physical limits that digital media like CDs don't have. If a vinyl record was mastered like a CD, the needle would literally jump out of the track. (With adequate mastering CDs would be superior to Vinyl in almost every respect, but the reality is different due to the way mastering engineers were and are still forced to squeeze every inch of dynamics out of productions.)

Things get much worse with modern digital formats like MP3 or AAC. These would be barely tolerable with very careful mastering, but with modern "loudness competitive" mastering they create even worse artefacts than CDs due to intersample peaks and the interplay with the lossy recording process. Mid/side processing can reveal the horrible blubbering effects that these formats produce in case you can't hear them. (Although, if you can't hear them then you're probably deaf anyway and it won't matter.)

There is great hope that once broadcast stations have adopted new loudness measurement standards like EBU R128 the problem will vanish over time. These standards level the broadcast signals not to standard amplitude levels but according to broader loudness criteria - measuring mean values and taking into account the dynamic range of the audio material using standardized procedures. With these new standards we will hopefully get some dynamics and audio quality back to digital media which are principally vastly superior to vinyl.

I've never had any problems with WD, but fully agree about Seagate drives. They must have a built-in self-destruction device.

No, it is illegal wiretapping punishable by 21 years in prison. However, it will be made legal for them once they've figured out how to do it, simply because they are large corporations.