Correct. The Irish Government's position is that the Mutual Assistance Treaty covers this, and is the appropriate method for the US to use to get access to the data.

Nevermind the fact that as a result of the torture he suffered, McCain cannot (fully) raise his hands anymore.

Only one person has gone to jail over this - John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who was prosecuted for revealing classified information about this activity.

What about John Kiriakou? He was a whistleblower on some of this stuff, and part of (if not the entire) reason we even know about this stuff. What happened to him? Oh, right, he got thrown in federal prison for his troubles.

Yes. What this underscored for me was just how much Cheney and his ilk were in control of things than had been suspected.

What's really sad is how much of this wasn't done by actual skilled interrogators, who know that torture is not only amoral but also horribly counterproductive to getting good intelligence. I've worked with some of those guys, and they're really good at what they do - and would have nothing to do with anything of this sort. Experts like Ali Soufan have long debunked the kind of myths that surround crimes like these - and that's what they are, crimes. There's no justification or excuse for it whatsoever.

I'm reminded of a quote I once heard from a U.S. Army interrogator (paraphrasing a bit to make the context and intent clear): "Torture and Drugs are something people do for fun - they're not used for gathering intelligence."

This has mostly been my experience. Certs will help get you an interview, but they won't get you the job if you don't know your stuff. If you know your stuff, and have some kind of prior experience, anyplace decent should have no problem hiring you. The only exception to that is in some government/government contracting work, where specific certifications are required by federal regulations (like DoD 8570), and they have to have someone with one of those certs in that seat.

The US government has a Fraud Waste and Abuse hotline for things like this. You can report anonymously, or not. If I recall correctly, too, there are also whistleblower provisions where they pay a share of any fine or settlement to the whistleblower.

Eventually we're going to hit a point where the competitive economic value of unskilled human labor is simply too low to earn someone a living. We may already be edging to that point, at least in the developed world. I don't mean to be snarky when I ask what the solution is? Not everyone is smart enough or trainable, so do we just let them starve? When we have that much productivity, I think it's honestly time to reexamine our Calvinist moral ideas about work and value. My notion is that we'd have to move to something like Milton Friedman's idea of a guaranteed basic income, and then rather than view those who don't "work" negatively, we instead value those who do create/work/etc positively. I don't think we're there yet, but it's where we're going.

North Korea doesn't always brag about its provocations. Consider the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which was sunk by a mysterious explosion that was later assessed to have been a torpedo, while off a South Korean island within spitting distance of North Korean waters. North Korea denied any involvement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROKS_Cheonan_sinking). Also, while hacker and hacktivist groups tend to be quite open about claiming credit, nation-state hackers tend to be very quiet about it (I don't think any country anywhere has officially claimed credit for hacking, offhand). Given what I've read on various sites, I certainly think it's a credible theory that North Korea was behind it (Motive, Means, and it matches their style), though I certainly don't think I'd rule out other possibilities completely.

What Sony did wasn't quite the same as Apple's game. The big difference was that Sony's game wasn't "get everyone to buy our players and only our players" but rather "get our proprietary media format to become the industry standard, so we can make money on licensing that". Sony was happy for others to make the players, because Sony was getting a cut of that. Some of these efforts fell flat on their face (Betamax, Minidisc, Memstick) while others (Blu-ray for example) took off.

Woops, I need to check my math. I'm off by a factor of roughly seven figures there...

It's roughly 83 Cubic Kessel Runs by the Millenium Falcon.