Unless I'm forgetting something, 9/11 involved planes crashing into large buildings. Most movie theaters in the US are single-story buildings and seldom have much around them of great significance (ie they are in big empty suburban parking lots). They would have to completely destroy dozens of theatres in order to match the death total of 9/11, and in the process wouldn't come close to the monetary damage.

But that leaves the giant question of how. You can't take down a full movie theatre with one suicide bomber, you would need several (at least one for each screen, somehow synchronized to maximize damage). 9/11 was 19 terrorists killing almost 3,000 others; you can't get anywhere near that level of destruction with suicide bombers.

Really? What would North Korea have to gain by doing this? They already have less than one friend on the global stage (ie, only partial support from China). If they go around encouraging cyber warfare like this they are only inviting more pain back towards themselves.

Even more so this is likely beyond the technical capabilties of North Korea. Some people have suggested that this hack took upwards of 100TB of data. First of all, it is unlikely that North Korea has the ability to move that much data through their connection to the internet in the amount of time that transpired. Second, even if all the "best" hackers from North Korea did their best job to steal this data and place it elsewhere, it would have been pretty easy to figure that out as well.

So really, scratch North Korea off the list.

Some people have suggested that the hackers are "sympathetic to North Korea". To this I say bullshit as well. If someone wanted to make North Korea look like victims, launching a cyber attack is not a good way to do that. And how would a cyber attack on Sony make North Korea look strong or capable?

I would say the most likely case is we have some hackers who really despised Sony and found a way in. They then laid this "North Korea" cause as a red herring.

We found useful amounts of oil off the Cuban coast not terribly long ago. It just took this long for the oil companies in this country to put enough pressure on the US government to move towards "normal" relations.

Well, reality does have a known liberal bias. Sorry that factual statements have such an impact on you that you find yourself forced to describe them as "whines".

I guess this time you randomly opted to just abandon the discussion entirely instead of going for either of your party's other two officially endorsed tactics (one being insult the other person directly and two being change the topic completely). Fair enough.

Tucows had a reputation for some time as a registrar who was very spammer-friendly. Are they going to sell bandwidth to the spammers as well to get a cut of that action too? It is noted that they just managed to spamvertise their own services here on the slashdot front page as well...

That's a lot of huge assumptions, there. As usual, they have quite nearly zero connection to the topic at hand - or to reality in general.

GWB needed more troops than were available through any other acceptable means in order to keep his wars going, and he certainly wasn't about to admit defeat. Getting rid of DADT was inevitable. This was the least unpalatable option for those who wanted the war machine to keep going but couldn't be bothered with facing the actual costs of two unwinnable land wars.

If you stuck to what I actually say, instead of inserting what you want to hear me say, you might approach having an argument.

Now you're sounding like me. I stated before that GWB would have eventually signed off on the abolition of DADT in the military. After all, his empire building was quickly depleting the straight segment of our volunteer forces and draft would have been a no-go even if it was economically segmented more than the last one.

I can tell you that in my field, Chinese is used at least 4x more often than Spanish. Next after Chinese (which is after English) would be Russian, followed likely by German. Whether Spanish is spoken in my field as much as Arabic is debatable.

In other words, the value of a language comes down to who you want to use it to communicate with.

Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame. And it's not even paywalled, you can download it from anywhere. You're welcome.

The kinds of MTBF I've been seeing with Seagate lately have caused me to select any drive other than theirs for any data storage needs.

I could never stand the interface of the original iPod. Apparently though, I was the only person ever to live who did not like that silly interface (or so I have been told many many times). While touchscreens aren't really much of an improvement in phones, IMHO, they made a huge improvement for music players.

Nobody but nobody can snatch failure from the jaws of victory like they can. They won the election in 2000 yet rolled over and played dead and gave the white house up to the village idiot instead. They won the election in 2004 but didn't care enough to actually see it through so they left the same idiot in for another 4 years of destruction. Considering the overwhelming apathy that would go with a nomination of Hillary Clinton I wouldn't see them fight hard to ensure her placement.