But not in this context. If someone shoots you today, you can't go after them with a gun tomorrow after you get out of the hospital. These actions are not self-preservation at all, just retaliatory in nature. And that is clearly defined in both the explicit statutes and case law as a no-no.

Everyone's missing a significant point here: the airlines severely penalize anyone who travels in this fashion. Yes, there are insanities about their pricing models that make it possible to actually save money this way. But the first time you do it, you will get a nastygram from the airline...and if you continue to do it, they will actually ban you. Furthermore, if you're doing this on the first half of your trip, you'll find that your return flights have all been canceled; even worse, the airline will NOT be sympathetic to your plight when you call them up to try and get back home.

I wish I could remember the industry term for this practice, but suffice it to say that a database of flight options that allow you to do this is essentially useless anyways. Google it...type in "skipping the last leg of a flight" and see what you find.

Based on that perspective, Sarah Palin would be a marvel of helping human knowledge and understanding progress.

Only, she's not :)

No, it's not.

It's no more his job to explain things to me than it is for some guy to just barge into my home and begin telling me how I should redecorate. I didn't ask him to, I didn't hire him to, I didn't indicate any desire on my part for him to do so.

What his role is, however, is much closer to someone you meet at a social gathering who has views on things. He has no particular obligation to conform to guidelines given to him...but at the same time, it's not exactly wrong to push back on what he has to say either. He wasn't hired, he wasn't even invited, and so it's not like asking someone for their views and then whining when you get them. We're allowed to find fault with the man.

Except that historically, he's always denied responsibility for attacks that were clearly accredited to NK. It's kind of like Putin's behavior in the Ukraine, only even a bit more bizarre.

The cast of "Duck Dynasty" did North Korea's hacking for them? I didn't know this...

Oil...no matter where you buy it on the planet, or from whom...is priced in dollars. In no market is the price of a barrel of crude listed in euros, pounds sterling, or any other currency for that matter.

Why does this matter in this case? Because Russia is basically an entire economy propped up solely on oil revenues. If the ruble devalues against the dollar, then essentially they are subjected to a brutal form of arbitrage where oil is cheaper from Russia than other places. So they get less money than the other oil producers do. If they boost production, it drives the cost of oil down even further. If they restrict production, they get less money that way too. Either way, they're fucked.

And you know what? GOOD. Fuck them.

Seems Gollum was right...

This is like saying "Sure, but car's shouldn't have anything that propels them forward...that's how car crashes happen."

The sole and entire point of control systems (aka SCADA, DCS, or ICS) is to make it possible for software to control hardware. And it's impossible to make *anything* that can't be broken or cause damage if it's abused. When you factor in things like blast furnaces, substations, or other real-time applications that involve massive amounts of energy (kinetic, electrical, thermal or otherwise), you're harnessing one hell of a big thing, and that means careful balances and lots of risk. You can't have a situation where there's thousands of degrees of heat and gigantic crucibles of molten steel and yet have it impossible for something to be done wrong.

It always makes me crazy when assholes (yes, that's my word for a novice who pontificates about the "incompetence" of actual professionals without citing anything concrete or meaningful) who don't have any experience whatsoever with control systems put forth their idolized version of reality that somehow means that everything can be simple and as safe as a Fisher-Price toy, despite the fact that these environments have never been foolproof in all of human history. Trains crash, pressure vessels explode, chemicals leak, boilers beer-can, transformers flash...it's always been that way, and always will be. Control systems make them less likely to do so for accidental reasons, but also allow an attacker to force it to happen for deliberate ones. That's the trade-off, and to this day it's still a trade-off that's had a positive outcome. It makes no more sense to back out these systems than it did for banking to go back to using adding machines, just because there were cyber security incidents early on in the financial sector. The next step forward is better security for these environments, which is in the process of happening as we speak.

Only when appropriate. Questioning the discovery of the Higgs-Boson, if you know what you're talking about? Valid. Questioning gravity as a way of holding up your science teacher and keeping him from teaching anything important because you're forcing him to repeat the already well-validated science to prove that gravity is indeed real? Bullshit.

At some point, you have to accept that something is proven, and move on, unless you have something compelling to introduce real doubt. At the end of the day there has to be some agreement, to quote Lewis Black, as to "what the fuck reality is."

Um...Sony is headquartered in Japan. And there's no way that a decision with this level of financial impact was made without permission from management back hom.

Probably the fact that tons of us have tried to tell people this in our jobs in the past, but few have been able to put it as clearly and as succinctly as this, while still stating all the factors that play into it.

Well put. On the other side of it, I don't see how it should in any way be a surprise to anyone who knows Amazon at all (like their warehouse employees) that this kind of thing would be on its way. There is a certain reality to the fact that people must grow and evolve their skills to maintain their own employability no matter what their career path.

A more cynical, if not entirely inaccurate, way to describe the other side of that equation is this.

Well, I gotta say...the next two years are going to be an absolutely wonderful time for comedians!

How about demoting the incompetent boss and the fuckwit who promoted them that one step too far together? Root cause analysis, after all, is crucial when resolving a process failure...