The last election had one candidate who was indifferent towards my job and one who was openly hostile towards it. I had to vote for the one who was indifferent in the hopes of preventing the hostile one from rising to power and putting me on the streets. It was that simple.

Indeed there was no candidate who cared about it or wanted to preserve it. But there was a candidate who plainly wanted to exterminate it.

Are you off your ritalin or something? You are changing topics more quickly than a kid with ADHD.

There is an important orthogonality between a politician giving a job and a politician taking away one. These operations are not just opposite actions. I don't seek a politician who wants to give me a job, I just seek a politician who does not want me on permanent unemployment (sans benefits, of course!).

Certainly not any assertion of mine from this discussion, nor an accurate take of any assertion I made elsewhere.

ICANN is a bunch of incompetent greedy buffoons. I wouldn't expect them to be any more capable of resisting a phishing attack than the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.

Where do you think you're going with that statement? Nothing I said actually helps make President Lawnchair look better. I flatly said that the Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 was a giant handout to his corporate masters. it is accepted that every republican president we have ever had would have gladly signed the same bill into law had they been POTUS.

That is a rather difficult hypothesis to support. How do you show that the hackers were hired by North Korea? What would North Korea be able to offer in compensation?

The third generation Kim is not quite the rogue actor his predecessors were. Jong-Un seems to be aware of the fact that his country is under a microscope now and that he can't always just do what he wants. Furthermore he seems aware of the fact that the support they used to enjoy from China is quickly becoming exactly that - support they used to enjoy. While not the most logical guy at the party, Kim Jong-Un seems to have a little more awareness of the world than what we used to see from North Korea.

What part of his record of (in)action up to that point caused you to think that President Lawnchair would stand up to his corporate masters? He signed the bill into law that they wanted, and they showed their gratitude by shitting on the American public. The insurance industry had no reason to behave morally after being given all the power, being as they no longer had anything to lose by doing so.

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.