It's not as easy for their children to blow us up or cut off our heads?

N. Korea could really tick Sony off by re-editing it and making it good.

I treat the battery as a built-in UPS, so I have no idea how long it would run if run right until drained. It's lasted at least as long as promised in the past, but I don't tend to do much besides play music and edit code when it's unplugged and on the road.

(And no, there's nothing racial about that phrase.)

There are few jobs for great programmers. Great programmers tend to work best on an independant task and can put out an ungodly amount of functional code in the same time as a whole team of "competent" programmers.

But that's not the kind of work most companies need done. What they need done are huge applications (primarily web based nowadays) that can only be accomplished through teamwork, because the sheer volume of work required is far beyond that of any one programmer by themselves.

So the vast majority of jobs only look for (and barely pay for) merely "competent" programmers. They're not looking for and not interested in hiring "top talent" if they can get 2-3 "bodies" for the same price.

I agree with most of the posters that if you want to attract top talent you need to pay top wages. But for every company that wants to hire a "Linus Torvalds", there are a thousand that want to hire "Joe Coder" instead.

Nobody has defined "computer science" in a clear way, at least not with any kind of consensus behind it.

They may not compile, but in a cool way. "Yes, Mr. Boss, section X failed to run without warning and lost us 4,000 customers, but it did so in an intellectually stimulating way."

What a terrific idea for the most-hacked media company on the planet who's servers have been down the most often of any of the gaming companies. :(

So these types of threats are being taken seriously.

What was that about surrendering essential freedoms to gain temporary security?

You have negative freedom, that is freedom from interference and limits on your behavior

And that's the only freedom there can be...

Then you have positive freedom, the freedom to participate in society and to prosper.

You are confused. The freedoms to participate in society and to prosper are the same as those from interference and limits. One does not have a right to prosperity and/or happiness, but only to a pursuit of them — America's founding fathers noted this right in the Declaration of Independence (before the war was won and the Constitution written).

In Europe that kind of thing would clash with a person's freedom to have a private life, i.e. to privately grieve for their loved on at the funeral.

This makes no sense — you can not have a right to privacy in a public place. Those crazy Democrats "thanking god" for dead American soldiers may be an extreme case, but if you devise a law to shut them up, will it not also apply to weddings and birthdays, which are bound to take place on the same block, where other folks are grieving?

We also see the right to a private life

I fail to see, how you can demand privacy while in public — and that includes your making connections to other people's servers.

US company's desire to profile everyone and use their personal data for commercial gain, which Europeans consider to be a massive loss of freedom but Americans consider to be a corporation exercising its free speech rights.

No, actually, one's right to record and remember whatever he has once observed has nothing to do with free speech. I, once again, fail to see, how you can possibly demand somebody forgets about you without opening yourself up to the same demands from others. Do you want your ex- to be able to force you to undergo a memory-alteration procedure — to make you forget, how she looks naked?

1) The /. article is titled: "How Target's Mobile App Uses Location Tech To Track You" (highlight mine).
Yet the article and the conclusion is that this app doesn't track you because of hyper sensitivity to privacy, even though their experience and most surveyed users WANT that feature. So, clickbait headline or didn't you even RTFA yourselves?

2) "I have an aversion to shopping in general, and large-format retail in particular. While I think I have a strong sense of direction most of the time, put me inside of a big box store with its scores of aisles and the sometimes impenetrable logic of its layout, and I get turned around and frustrated right quick. I tend to avoid this kind of shopping, opting instead for the convenience of online purchases or smaller bricks-and-mortar stores that Iâ(TM)m familiar with or that offer a more curated experience." OK, we know you're a condescending douche, got it. We understand that you don't go to these sorts of places, probably because you're tragically hip. Editors at Xconomy: asleep at the switch? Maybe cull out this sort of patronizing crap from reviews?

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.