Which people? I'm in Silicon Valley, unlike people who work in San Francisco.

Actually I have been an IT contractor for a school district, that was my third job. But back then $128K could buy a lot of ARCnet adapters and NetWare licenses.

Good old reliable tape. None of this fancy random access hard disk garbage that fails all the time, or complicated wear leveling flash nonsense.

Maybe something like core memory or bubble memory if I need some random access behavior.

I hear it's down to a penny per bit, only around 1200 megabucks for 10 gigabytes of Core memory.

But is the data even worth $128K? It's not like schools don't already annoy parents with redundant requests and useless information. Having everyone register for school again would at least allow attendance to happen.

So their only copy of the student roster is gone? they can't even take attendance? they don't have back-ups?

Surely this is a problem that can be solved with money, and significantly less than $128K. (the point of my original post, I wasn't suggesting we actually replace all the computers, just that the ransom seemed a bit high)

And why would the NSA potentially reveal the techniques just to capture some crooks? That classified information is surely worth more than the $128K. If it were up to the NSA, they would just pay the ransom and focus on finding terrorists instead.

Maybe 200-500 computers. Is the ransom higher than what it would cost to replace everything? (maybe not enough to replace them with Macs, but Linux and Chromebooks are possible). How many computers does a district with 1700 students really need to get the basics done?

Just seems like a steep ransom to me. Especially since if I replaced all the computers, the old equipment is worth something and I could probably auction it off.

The data is gone if you don't pay the ransom (or crack the encryption). Sadly I don't have a way to resolve that problem, other than to start over again and hopefully anything important has backups. (ideally in a form that doesn't spread infection)

I totally agree with you. I honestly don't know where the $100k number comes from or why it was mentioned. Other than maybe to convince all of us to watch the video.

well a war is $1T, so this $100k could have helped 0.00001% as many people as spending war money better could have.

I think you have bigger fish to fry, so you can hop to it now if you actually give a shit.

This $100k astroturf project was money well spent in that their effort got me to watch 5 minutes of it. The film is crap obviously, and it's only viral because of the media attention it received. (does that make it not really viral?)

I wish the behind the scenes video covered how the PR campaign worked and how journalists were contacted, I would have found that level of detail very useful indeed.

We don't have to operate our society as a free market experiment if we don't want to. We're not really setup to live some kind of libertarian utopia, so what you suggest isn't going to work well without an overhaul of our system. Luckily there is already a system in place that has mostly worked well for modern society, so maybe we should use it.

We operate a representative democracy that [theoretically] answers to the people, and has a long history of actively preventing a tyranny of the majority by offering some protection to minority view points. (minority in the most general sense of the word). A community can assert certain standards of behavior from individuals if those standards do not illegal and ideally are not unethical.

You can interpret this as the government taking away your "rights", and get upset about the restriction. I prefer to view this as all of us collectively agreeing to some limitations on individuals in order to operate a desirable society. (agreeing, but not unanimously, and not necessarily formally)

I'm not sure how we romanticized each of us living as a rugged individual that answers to no one. King of our castle, and master of our domain.

I choose to live among other human beings and seek ways to coexist with them.

Is there not room for multiple viewpoints, or is there only one right answer?

If we choose freedom and liberty, but can see the potential to trigger for a major escalation of armed conflict are we remiss in discussing alternatives or in failing to choose to discuss those alternatives?

During hurricanes and floods the grocery store could choose to sell to the blonde and blue-eyed families first.

Doesn't seem like you have to have any hard rules, you can change why you refuse people service whenever you'd like without any announcement.

If I were serving prison lunches, yes. If not, then I'd wonder why they aren't in prison.

He has a right to the Pursuit of Happiness. And what makes him happy is to operate a business as a bigoted twit.

(no, he doesn't have a Constitutional right to operate a business under and terms he chooses)