That's an excellent point, thanks for bringing it up. I will bear that in mind before voting for layoffs.

This is the kind of story I think of when I hear that these agencies need more money. It seems to me they are overstaffed and overfunded if they have time for activities like this.

This is the most effective form of security, and often the hardest. If you have nothing of value, there is no risk. Of course that ideal state is impossible but that doesn't mean opportunities to reduce risk by reducing the impact are overlooked.

You aren't going to appear to hide data if it is part of your data retention practice. If you can say that you were deleting everything over five years old long before any issues came to light, that isn't going to be a problem. Now if you start deleting it the day before you get the subpoena, you've got a problem.

I wonder how many people in NK even have access to their national 'intranet' let alone the global Internet.

The article seemed a bit overexcited to me. Is it really that surprising that they use 10.x space? It's not like Internet access is widely used in NK. And most of the other items were not what I would call weird, just what you would expect in a regime like this. Still, kudos to the author for doing this analysis.

Speaking of economics, if the government starts providing money for students with 'good grades' to pay tuition, doesn't the college now have a huge incentive to hand out good grades regardless of performance?

Elasticity of supply is a bit questionable in this instance. How elastic is it? It is not like anyone can just open a college, there are all sorts of barriers to entry. Accreditation, etc.

I refuse to update my phone anymore, due in part to what you describe. I've had updates break data access. I've had updates take away root. I've had updates break applications. And then I had to deal with all the pointless UI changes. I will bring a new device up to date, but once I have everything dialed in I will never do a system update. If they supplied security fix only patches that didn't screw around with functionality I would consider applying those.

The last line should end in "false positive" there.

False negative v. false positive is very relevant here. I don't know what the rates are for a polygraph, but if there are no false positives (i.e. if it says you are lying then you are definitely lying) that would be extremely valuable even if it only works 75% of the time. When combined with other measures especially. Now if it says you are lying when you aren't that is a different story. An employer or gov agency might still be OK if the false negative is extremely low, since at worst you might reject a small percent of viable candidates. But I sure as heck would not want to take one as a criminal suspect if there was a significant chance of a false negative.

It is a lot more than that, the article only covers "direct" male descendants. i.e. son of son of son of son of son of son of son. If you were the son of one of his daughters you wouldn't count. So 17.5 million men should have the same last name as him, if he had one. Maybe someone else can do the math, I wonder what the number would be if you accounted for females, and how that would compare to any other person from the same time period.

I am curious why so many people have such a negative attitude about the present. There are thousands of companies investing in products that might become useless. In fact, thousands of their products do end up being useless. They just aren't necessarily divisions of some large player.

And of course don't forget the unskippable warnings and menu animations. That isn't unique to Sony though.

I hate their products since they tend to not do what I want. For example, I have a Sony DVD player (last Sony product I will ever buy) that will not allow me to eject the disk after powering it on until it has finished reading and loading the disk that is already in there. So I have to sit there for a minute waiting just to get the damn drawer to open.