Why should that be impossible? On most hardware it may be, but if you're lucky enough to have a system with an IOMMU, the OS should absolutely be able to defend against such attacks simply by not permitting just any jerkoff application to access the disk controller directly. Applications then have to ask the driver to mediate all transactions, and the OS is definitely in a position to then prevent firmware tampering.

Profiting from sending other people's children (or, put another way, excess population) to die in other countries which can't meaningfully fight back doesn't sound all that risky to me.

We have the problem that we expect to be able to work whenever we want. But the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest at certain times, not all the time. Solution, reduce waste, and work when the energy is available, or find more power storage technologies and install 'em. Either way, big changes in the way energy is handled.

We're coming to a point where we need less and less workers, but we're expecting to do more and more work. What?

I hope they (we, etc) fail here too, but it's not a foregone conclusion. We often succeed, and that's what someone needs to take away from history before assuming that it won't happen to them.

Look, I'm not looking to familiarize local law enforcement with me. That's not even near my radar, let alone on it. I've got two great reasons for that, and only one of them is my well-earned prejudices against cops gained from such experiences as being able to speed at will by driving a Mercedes or being pulled over at double gunpoint (pointed at my face) in Santa Cruz for the crime of driving a Chevy Citation after 2 AM.

It wouldn't work because I would never fit in there. I wouldn't do what they wanted me to do, and they'd get rid of me, marginalize me, etc. They just wouldn't put me where I could make any positive difference. Indeed, they would send people like me to deal with the worst possible situations in order to dispose of them as rapidly as possible.

Still, I note that you continue to ignore my central point: It has been shown that the cops are at least as criminal as the rest of us and probably moreso, and are therefore utterly unqualified to be policing. If they can't manage to follow the law, what hope do the rest of us have, and why should we care? If they want us to believe that they have our best wishes at heart, they must follow the rules scrupulously. The whole idea that we can police ourselves through crime is insane.

You mean, like the rude awakening you'd be in for if you really knew how much police malfeasance was going on? Because it's got to be much, much more than they're being prosecuted for.

If he weren't rich, they would have done it already. But if they nail him without truly solid pretext then other rich people (who are in a position to actually enact social change) will be leery of their pogrom. I mean, program. Wait...

Well, the short answer is that in the long run I would prefer a society not based on artificial scarcity, so that people aren't so worried about getting a piece of what I've got.

You are just like my ISP. When I raise a salient point, you prevaricate. I tell them that their service frequently does not get my packets to the internet, they quote link uptime statistics. I give a fat fuck whether my radio link was up, if its radio link was down, and I couldn't get to the 'net. And likewise, I give a fat fuck whether Kim was living in the USA, because a) he was doing business in the USA and b) if you assume that the long arm of the USA ends at our borders, you're a fucking moron who ignores history and the news. There is no evidence that he is actually that stupid. If he were, he'd be locked up right now, not chillin' in a mansion in NZ.

I agree with you, but I also agree with his idea that information should be set free. We The People enable, protect, and to a large part even pay for the production of mass media content due to Hollywood's and Big Music's creative accounting practices which show them losing money or breaking even on clearly profitable media. And the same goes for the telecommunications infrastructure: We The People largely paid for that, not just by paying for services but actually through government grants and the like, and it's used against us to milk us of every possible cent while providing the lowest possible standard of service. The fact that we still pay more to send calls across town than to send them across the country is just ridiculous and it's based on legislation bought by the telecoms industry.

I feel about Kim the way I feel about a big rock rolling down a hill. It's going to make a path I can follow, but I don't want to hang out with it... or in its way

Nobody involved with enabling massive copyright infringement (for good or ill, let's save that for other arguments please) is ignorant of the fact that the USA has criminal copyright infringement. It's a ridiculous idea that to suggest that they were blindsided by this. What's happening here is that Kim is making a statement for the record, which is actually a lie, and it's being amplified and rebroadcast by the masses of asses, like slashdot editors.

What? Yes, you absolutely can. Yes, it was absolutely predictable. Yes. YES! Look, yes. The answer to all your objecting questions is yes. Yes, he could and should have predicted that the USA would do its best to sow his ground with salt. Just fucking look at us. LOOK AT US. Of course we would do that.

There's nothing good at the bottom of that hole, unless you've got a smoking gun that proves not incompetence, but deliberate negligence.

I think the flashlight-as-impact-weapon was just a brief stopover on the trip away from using more traditional blunt force weapons. Take away a baton and suddenly a 6 D-cell mag light is the new baton, unfortunately with characteristics more of a lead-filled blackjack than a high-impact plastic PR-24 "tonfa".

I kind of think that the increasing tactical fetishism of police is almost kind of a symptom as much as it is a cause of police violence. To a certain extent the increasing vilification of the police and the removal of intermediate force from their toolkit has increased their siege mentality, leading to a subverted kind of frustration that plays out in them getting soldiered up.

Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot wrong with policing, but the wholesale denial going on in "the community" doesn't help either -- treating every police interaction as a wholesale denial of civil rights and refusing to acknowledge minority-on-minority criminality or treating it as some kind of excusable byproduct of discrimination only makes the situation worse.

When I say something like this, I mean it. Yes, there would be a temporary disturbance (in the force?) if Sony went under tomorrow. But the world would eventually be a better place for it. Same with most corporations, honestly.

Flamebait means what you think I was doing, which also isn't what I was doing. Trolling is making shit up to make people angry. I was expressing heartfelt beliefs. I know many here agree with me. But I guess you're still humping your PS4

Actually, it's the argument from exaggeration, I think there's a better name for it, but I haven't formally studied logical fallacies. I didn't formally study to learn to read, either. Instead, I read stuff. I can't diagram a sentence for you, because I don't care and because we spent maybe one day on that in my entire school career, IIRC, with no homework. I can tell you when a sentence is broken, and usually suggest multiple ways to fix it. And I can tell you when logic is broken, and suggest that someone fuck off :)

The point of making the extreme example (a form of hyperbole) is to illustrate a point — where do you stop sliding down the slippery slope? Because history tells us that mission scope tends to creep, and that like any organization law enforcement agencies tend to acquire power when possible and give it up only at gunpoint. Oh, sorry, that was more hyperbole. I imagine you're crying into your Kix now.