The thing is, the name may be new, but the ploy is old. All they did was add "on the internet".

I actually think that "very mature, well-oiled capitalist machine" except for the comment about oil. It's not new, but rather old, so mature fits. It involves individuals (or at least non-state actors) creating a need and offering to fill it, so capitalist sounds correct. Machine is a bit dubious, but the metaphoric use of machine has a long history, so that's reasonable usage. I think you just don't like thinking of criminals as capitalists, but they usually are. Often quite poor ones, admittedly, but these folk seem to not be incompetent.

How about refusing to allow money to be transferred over the internet. That would quickly sink all this stuff back to the "give me a cookie" level. Of course, for many people money is all the internet is about. Oops.

FWIW, my wife insists on having Adobe Flash installed, even though I warn her that its dangerous. Actually, its worse than dangerous, as Adobe doesn't keep the Linux version up to date. And they are (or were) pushing some advanced version that there just isn't a Linux version for. I may end up losing her to Apple because of this. (That will be unpleasant. I've read the Apple EULA [well, not this decade] and that was why I originally switched to Linux. I won't agree to their EULAs, but she can't install software and dislikes keeping her system up to date, because they keep breaking something.)

I don't actually hate proprietary software in principle, but I do hate the EULAs they inflict on everyone, and I hate the way they manage their software. Reading an Apple EULA before every security upgrade was shear torture, and not having that problem was one of the really nice things about switching to Linux. There are also details about the implementation (of proprietary) that I really hate. Copy protected disks with no backup is high on the list, but not even having the originals to reinstall with is much worse.

How would you go about observing this? For that matter, how could you tell how fast the universe was spinning (and in which dimensions)?

Perhaps the universe is spinning in n dimensions around some axis in the n+1th dimension. That would seem to mean that there would be a force seeking to expand the universe acting perpendicular to the axis in every dimension less than n. Unfortunately, it would also seem to mean that the force acting along different dimensions could well be uncorrelated in magnitude, so this is probably a bad model.

If you mean FTL, that's probably impossible. If it weren't I'd expect that someone would have shown up around here.

If you mean a generation ship, well, sort of. The problem is that by the time people get to the destination they won't be interested in living planetside.

The reasonable alternative is a "colony ship", where the ship itself is the colony. You don't need, or want, high speed, since your desire is to be moving just slightly differently than the "free planets" around. You depend on encountering them occasionally for resources. This probably requires controlled fusion reactors, but might possibly be doable with fission. And you'll need a fairly large colony, because it needs to be a self sufficient population capable of maintaining a civilization. (If they lose it they're probably dead.) They aren't planning on a destination. They only "land" in case of severe problems that aren't too bad for them to reach a "habitable" planet (where habitable may include using extensive technology). What star systems are usually good for is reproducing. (Think of this colony as a form of MacroLife. Thank you George Zebrowski.)

FWIW, I generally envision these colonies evolving out of mining colonies out in the Oort clouds getting into some kind of disagreement with the folk back home, and just leaving. That lets all the pieces be checked out ahead of time. I'm sure, however, that there are other possibilities, with religious differences being near the top.

More to the point, gold may be an excellent investment, but not at the current price. And not at any price that is ever available to the public.

If you're expecting a collapse of civilization, then whiskey is probably a better investment. It's not only entertainment, it's medicine. But keeping it in fragile containers is a problem. The advantage of gold is that it's mobile. But an education in primitive medicine (not first aid, which is just what to do til the doctor arrives, and not modern medicine which depends on medicines that won't be available) would be an even better investiment. Bonus if you can do primitive dentistry.

If you're not expecting a collapse of civilization, then gold is more reasonable. It's important in lots of nano-tech and a non-corrodable covering of this and that. Of course, they don't use much, but then the amount of gold is rather limited unless you want to make it in a reactor, in which case I believe it will be radioactive...which might be an advantage if you want to trace your nano-gizmo.

I can't think of any possibility in which gold is the best investment, but if you can get it at a good enough price it's not a bad investment. It *has* increased in value even during my lifetime and relative to the costs of other things, and it doesn't have much in the way of up-keep costs like real estate does. (And it's portable. Did I mention that? This is possibly its majore benefit. Portable and anonymous.)

I prefer message passing through queues, but it clearly depends a lot on what problems you're working with.

Also, some problems can't be done in parallel, but we won't know how many can until we start trying....and then try for a few decades.

I won't even use bifocals. Instead I have two pair of glasses, one for the computer, one I would use for driving. (I'm near sighted enough that I just take off my glasses to read.)

The computer is a fixed distance from your eye. You want a single lense fixed at that distance. For other purposes, perhaps a progressive lens might be the best choice, it would depend on you, what you do, and what your eyes are like.

Forwarding an email is, legally, copyright infringement. But copyright infringement is only (legally) enforced if the owner of the copyright is willing to either enforce it or to delegate the enforcement to some other entity. The problem with the DMCA is that there is no penalty for fraudulent use of takedown notices. (Well, there *are* penalties, don't *you* try it, but any lawyer can work around them.)

IIRC, the DMCA only requires that you have a "good faith belief" that you control the copyright in order for mistaken use to be allowable without punishment. That's a pretty hard thing to disprove. And, also IIRC, a lawyer is allowed to have a "good faith belief" that his client is telling him the truth even if said client has a very long history of lying. (Did a lawyer actually issue the request? It's often done that way.) In that case the client risks NOTHING, except being refused.

So why *wouldn't* Sony cause spurious DMCA takedown requests to be issued?

It's my understanding that the usual practice is to "buy off" the local power structure ahead of time, and save the military threat for a threat. And the US would be unlikely to object at force being used to protect "private property". So China's military force is more than quite sufficient. (As far as I know, they've never needed to move from "threat" to action in the last decade or so.)

This isn't something new. Low wage jobs have already fled China to Indonesia. Factories more more slowly because of the capital investment in building them. Personally I doubt that many will head to Africa yet. But do note the "yet". You need stable enough conditions to trust that you can build a factory and have it pay for itself before it is rendered unusable in some way or other. And it doesn't matter WHAT you economic system or politics is, except that different forms of systems/politics enable different forms of payment to be acceptable. (E.g., when China builds a factory in a foreign country, typically the workers in that factory will be Chinese. This often causes local unrest, but the profis for China include exporting people and their associated support system. This allows China to pay off those running the country, and the locals are usually quite willing to sell to the Chinese laborers at the factory the supplies they need...possibly at a marked up price. So over time the locals become more accepting.)

The purpose of the police is to protect the state. Normally they do this by enforcing the laws in such a way that those with the power to threaten the state feel that they are more secure being supported by the state than by threatening it. Additionally they often enforce other laws that happen to be there.

Don't read this remit too narrowly. Consider it in context with "The law in its majesty forbids both the rich and the poor man from sleeping under the bridge."

Unfortunately, I have described an honest and upright police force, not the one we've got.

Sorry, but the term "cracker" was only created after the media started to refering to ANY computer exploit as the work of a hacker, and only publicizing the unlawful ones. It never caught on outside of a quite limited community. Give up the battle, it's time to invent a new word to mean what hacker used to mean.

Why do you think that was incompetence rather that political manuvering? Ask 10 people at random, and if they even know about the Sony hack, most of them will blame North Korea.

Lies, rather than incompetence, is what you should expect here until there is evidence to the contrary. (OTOH, if they were really competent, and cared, they could at least have come up with some decent evidence. My take is that they didn't care, however, rather than that they were incompetent.)

How certain can you be that you got the right servers? How certain can other people be?

It's not clear to me that this is justified. It's too easy for it to go wrong, or to "accidentally" target someone other than the ostensible attacker.