Correction: Navy *pays* a company $0.01 to a company for the service of removing it and dismantling it.

It didn't sell anything.

As far as I'm concerned, it's just marketing bullshit trying to put a good face on Sony's latest breach. If it were their first, I might think differently, but it's pretty clear Sony's "security" is a freakin' joke. Add in a movie that would have probably bombed without all the exposure, and you have all the excuses you need to paint a "North Korea" connection.

It doesn't hurt that the US has a hate-on for North Korea so they can try to score some political points off the story, too.

Shame on Obama for selling out to Sony so blatantly.

Whether North Korea was the sponsor or not, the hack doesn't appear to have originated there. Last I heard someone was pointing a finger at Thailand as the locale, but not at anything official. Speculation was that someone had been hired to do the job. Believe it if you want to, I don't really. I don't think anyone has enough evidence to come to ANY reasonable decision.

Well, just spinning a story here, but as I understand it North Korea threatened to sabotage South Korea's nuclear power plants. Around that time Obama stopped to have some conversation with some Chinese diplomats....perhaps about Korean relations? And soon thereafter North Korea got blamed quite publicly for a hack that may have been detected a bit before it was made public. Now North Korea's internet connections are sabotaged to keep them from intruding into South Korea's power plants, with China standing mum and not protesting, but the story about why this is going on has to do with this silly movie.

OK, it's just a story. But AFAIKT it is consistent with everything that happened.

FWIW, I believe that North Korea made some threats about sabotaging South Korea's Nuclear piles. That, to me, is a more credible reason for taking down their internet....if that's what happened. (That their internet went down is apparently true. That it was taken down externally I have heard no acceptable proof of.)

Do you even have any evidence that the folks who sent the threats were the same people as the ones who copied the files? Any good reason to believe it? Certainly it's a possibility, but I'd like some acceptable evidence before I start believing it. The unsupported word of someone in a position of authority isn't something that I consider acceptable evidence.

I'm willing to accept that North Korea *MIGHT* do such a thing and then not admit it. But the path from possibility to belief is not, for me, swift and certain.

There are a lot of things that I don't believe I have evidence to decide. This is one of them.

Don't feel too bad, that guy kind of looks like Stephen Fry. But not Hugh Laurie.

I'm sure that you think you have a point, but I haven't a clue as to what it is. Even as a troll this is sub-par. If you're trying to be serious you really need to think more about how to present your argument.

You are, I think, responding to the claim that you aren't noticing that many small changes can yield an important difference. What you intend your response to mean I find opaque.

What's a bomb? Seriously. An explosive device remotely explodable can be used in mining, or as a weapon. The exact same device.

Just refuse to allow anyone to be named Gatling.

(Well, I know that's not exactly a Gatling gun, but it's pretty close.)

Right. That, after all was the purpose of copyright. To give people a *LIMITED* monopoly. When it expired, then everyone would inherit the work as a common good.

I would argue that 17 years is too long. 5 years with one (fairly expensive) renewal would be better, though the ideal number does differ between fields of endeavor. I could also go with a 3 year first copyright, a renewal for, say, $100. And an nth renewal for $100^n. (You could consider the original publication to be the 0th renewal if you want, and charge a $1 registration fee needed if you intend to apply for any renewals.)

That was because the rules were only applied in favor of white males. As written, however, they work quite well where the population is thinly distributed and the communications are slow. They aren't perfect, but I can't think of anything better.

As things are, however, those rules would not work and could not be made to work. They should, however, have been properly ammended rather than being ignored.