What you're missing is the depth of the investigation. There are plenty of reasons to believe HSBC execs should have known the money was dirty, it sinply wasn't investigated deeply enough.

Some do have that special bone but I think it's in their head actually...

As I understand it, the damage was indirect. The software was left in such a state that the furnace was at the time undamaged but could not be properly shut down. That left only the emergency shutdown procedure which was the cause of the damage.

The real failure was not being able to physically operate the controls to at least manage a clean shutdown.

Where is the "only public enemy number one" rule written down?

Mockery is what we do to political leaders, our own included. Some of us even mock political leaders we support. And that's the test of whether you truly believe in someone or in a system. Everybody mocks people they disagree with, it takes real confidence to mock people you agree with. At least that's the way Americans view things. A leader who can't take a ribbing is weak, and the more elaborate the display of machismo or military trappings the weaker we think he is.

If North Korea actually did it, it was a brilliant move. They've gotten the US, including the government, via the president, to whip itself into an impotent frenzy. Impotent? There's a fair chance that North Korea has nukes, they certainly have the ability to deliver them to several large cities in the region, and they have a large and powerful neighbour who won't take kindly to hostile military action on their borders because of some stupid movie. Nobody is going to be invading North Korea. So Kim gets to laugh as the US is forced to back down.

I don't think NK managed to engineer so much. Some independents hacked Sony and the US government saw it as a great opportunity to get a few Internet surveillance laws passed.

I'm pretty sure his entire post was sarcastic. The phrases "people are stupid" and "fuck the evidence" sort of give it away.

Where are these cheap bastards you speak of? Cheap bastards would be paradise, next to the *predatory* bastards in Congress who pose as cheap bastards while steering money to political allies' companies.

Real atrocities don't make good TV. They're mostly just smoking rubble by the time the cameras get there. Staged atrocities are much easier to turn into fifteen second segments.

In the name of freedom.

True. North Korea lies about everything. The US only lies about important things that advance it's agenda. Like weapons of mass destruction in countries they'd like to invade.

The root cause of the problem is a yellow too short to allow every car in motion to either clear the intersection of stop safely before the red. Once the light traps you in that situation it's just a matter of choosing your risk.

Throwing an unfair fine into the mix can lead to poor decisions.

"So assuming hacking sony is the result of wielding a superpower"

I wrote that for a reason. The hack shut down Sony operations and let the hackers blackmail a multinational corporation. I find that quite a bit more impressive than getting a crappy movie release postponed.

What makes you think your tax money isn't going to SpaceX?

You can turn that question around. Given the manifest possibility of such a act, why haven't more organizations taken steps to prevent them?

We keep hearing from the companies attacked and the press that these attacks are "sophisticated", but this attack started with a simple spear phishing attack. People use "sophisticated" to mean "more trouble than we were prepared for."

Comparisons to Stuxnet seem overblown and (in some cases) self-serving. Stuxnet was designed to undermine systems the perpetrator had no access to; it would work even if the administrators of the target system successfully locked the attacker out. In this case the administrator failed to secure the network from the attacker.

Not every persistent threat is an advanced one.

The problem is that without some form of guidance, we're more likely to end up with the rich enjoying the machines and the rest thrown to the wolves (at least until they overwhelm the rich and kill them or at least threaten to)