The competition among virtual currencies and their continuing evolution demonstrate their uselessness as stores of value.

Economic value is like potential energy: it only makes sense in the context of some system. A dollar, a bar of gold or unspent transactions in the Bitcoin ledger have no inherent value, but someone might accept any or all of them in exchange for something else. But economy is ever-evolving, and in fact currently going through a major crisis, so economic value cannot be reliably stored for any length of time. The best you can do is watch which way the changes are going and transferring value away from failing forms.

Well, I always like to point people to this incident as a great example of guns and rage really not mixing well: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/michigan-concealed-carry-road-rage-two-dead_n_3956491.html

And it is still far, far more common than in any other western countries that do have strong gun control laws.

If that's their biggest problem, they are in better shape than I thought.

"It's a bit too much to go just to get a movie off the screen."

This is the country that's detonated nuclear bombs, sunk warships with torpedos, and fired artillery barrages at it's neighbours civilian villages, and leaked lists of thousands of civilian bank customers details just because it hasn't been given enough attention for a week like a petulent little child.

Nothing is a bit much for North Korea, if the Kim dynasty's fragile little egos are upset then you can expect an extreme reaction. This is the fat little man-child who had his own uncle executed - the guy is basically a living incarnation of Eric Cartman.

Honestly, Marc Rogers' analysis is fucking awful. It's entirely speculation - it's no different to your average Slashdot post where someone is just stating their opinion and passing it off as fact. Examples:

"1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesnâ(TM)t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in âoeKonglishâ. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English."

Really? Please expand on that. Please give examples. To me it looks like just about every other piece of broken English I've seen online. Simply declare it not such without explaining why is not an argument.

"2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they donâ(TM)t speak traditional âoeKoreanâ in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden."

Interesting, but hardly stone cold evidence. If it was a North Korean spy that's trained in South Korean because they were behind the past hacks on South Korea then they may find that this is the easiest configuration for them. Is the North Korean dialect even a configuration option? If not then what else could they use? English? I'd guess not given how broken their English is.

"3. Itâ(TM)s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sonyâ(TM)s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While itâ(TM)s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occamâ(TM)s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as."

Again, entirely just speculation, poor use of Occam's razor. Occam's razor doesn't suggest it was an insider out to get Sony any more than it suggests the attackers simply spent a bit of time surveilling their target before following through with the hack. This argument again adds nothing.

"4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down."

Isn't this an argument FOR it being North Korea rather than against given that North Korea has vocally made it clear that they're unhappy with Sony over the film? If anything this is an argument in favour of it being North Korea.

"5. The attackers only latched onto âoeThe Interviewâ after the media did â" the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign."

Sure and North Korea spent a few days figuring out whether to admit responsibility or not rather than outright denying it. It's now becoming the defining point of their campaign which seemed to be something North Korea was keen on - if it was the internal employee theory then why has Rogers' now changed his mind about maximising damage? Simply making Sony cancel a $42million film is small fry damage - an inside job would focus on continuing to be far more damaging than that. But to follow on this same point:

"After all, if everyone believes itâ(TM)s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die."

What? Why? The FBI will just give up if it's thought to be a nation state? No, on the contrary it'll be escalated to the CIA and NSA. This point doesn't even make sense.

"6. Whoever is doing this is VERY net and social media savvy. That, and the sophistication of the operation, do not match with the profile of DPRK up until now."

Um, you mean they can use Twitter? So can half the child population of this world. Unless there's a suggestion that North Koreans are inferior people with IQ's less than your average child and who couldn't possibly look at what's worked for other succesful hacker groups like anonymous then this point is monumentally stupid.

"7. Finally, blaming North Korea is the easy way out for a number of folks, including the security vendors and Sony management who are under the microscope for this."

How the fuck is turning this into something where it turns from a corporate problem un-associated with the US government to threats of mass terrorist attacks on US soil requiring intervention by the US government including the president an easy way out exactly? Getting the NSA/CIA et. al. involved isn't an easy way out for anyone.

"8. It probably also suits a number of political agendas to have something that justifies sabre-rattling at North Korea"

Yes because it's not like there's been any reason to sabre-rattle at North Korea up until now is there? I mean it's not like they threatened to nuke the mainland US not so long ago or anything is it.

"9. Itâ(TM)s clear from the leaked data that Sony has a culture which doesnâ(TM)t take security very seriously."

This is a valid statement of fact but I don't really see what relevance it has to whodunnit.

Honestly, I don't know why anyone is giving this guy time of day. It reads like a 9/11 conspiracy theory blog post - 99% speculation, 1% bullshit, and some of his points even just outright contradict each other.

Am I saying it's North Korea? Not for certain, I personally think it probably is with odds of maybe 60% or so, but I'm open to the idea to a reasonable degree that it's not. Posts like Rogers' don't add anything even though they purport to be great insights - his comments are no better than anything you or I can string together, he has no great insight, he's not even close to finding some groundbreaking evidence that shatters the NK theory and on the contrary, even strengthens it in some cases.

His is another perspective, and one or two bits are interesting considerations, but it really does nothing to debunk the possibility of it being NK. His case is incredibly weak, and IMO weaker than the arguments for it being NK in the first place.

Long story short, thanks for your opinion Marc, but you've not argued your case anything close to well or consistently enough.

Are you joking? I thought it was well established that there were chemical weapons in Iraq we just only found weapons designed by us, built by Europeans in factories in Iraq. And therefore the US didn't trumpet their achievements. In the case of Iraqi chemical weapons, the US established that Iraq had chemical weapons not because they said so but because Western countries had all the receipts.

Cuba has a relatively low income, and the boycott is responsible for much of that (that was the purpose of the boycott, remember?) That's the result of U.S. policy, not the failure of Cuban socialism. So you cut their food and then blame them for rationing food.

In other low-income countries, especially free-market countries like Guatamala, when people can't afford to buy the food or health care that they need to live, they just die. That even happens in the U.S., where people die from curable diseases all the time because they can't afford to pay for medical care http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

However, unlike most other low-income countries, Cuba has distributed their scarce resources, like milk, to those in greatest need, particularly to pregnant women and children. Prenatal nutrition is a big factor in infant survival. The studies of the Dutch famine during WWII showed that. There are studies of animals. That's established medical science. So doctors would expect Cuban infant survival to be lower because they give pregnant women more food. And it is. Even the CIA agrees. It's not because they define infant mortality differently.

Once again, there are no studies that meet the standards of science (published in peer-reviewed journals, adjusted for any differences in definitions) that say that Cubans have a higher infant mortality than Americans. The "scientists" who made that claim (in the letters section of Science, for example ) can't support it with facts.

Low-income people in Cuba have better health care than low-income people in the U.S. That's the facts.

There are people who form their conclusions based on scientific facts and people who form their conclusions based on ideology. You are free to join whichever group you want.

In that case them getting $0 from the net profits would be justified anyway given how utterly terrible the film was.

It was a dull, boring, uninteresting waste of like 2 - 3 hours of my life.

This malware relies on weakness in wetware rather than software. No general-purpose operating system can save you from PEBKAC issues, at most partially mitigate them. Unix-style execute bit rather than Windows' extensions reduces the number of vulnerable idiots by like 2-3 orders of magnitude, but you can bet that if the webpage kindly provides instructions, a good number of marks will still manage to get infected.

Chrome also complains about self-signed https, so you lose. Sorry.

Winning, as von Clausowitz said, is accomplishing policy. One of the stated purposes of the war was to replace Saddam Hussain with a leader that was more agreeable to us, while converting Iraq into a free market economy (according to what I read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page). Douglas Feith said, it would be like installing a new chip on your motherboard.

Instead, under Bush, they dismissed the army, were unable to create a new one capable of maintaining security and safety, and were unable to maintain the economy. It's a failed state.

Bush had six years to do whatever he wanted. Roosevelt and Truman won World War II in less time. Bush didn't accomplish his goals. He created a mess, and handed it over to Obama. I can't imagine how anyone could restore order to Iraq again. It might take another 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. You can't blame that on Obama.

Except NK denied being behind the hacking.

Now there is no reason to believe anything NK says, but I would think they would be very proud of their computer achievements if they had been behind it.

The reason they don't falsely claim they are behind it is because they are worried the actual hackers would be found and then it would be clear they were lying.

That article seems to undercut your own argument.

In August of 2002, as George W. Bush and his allies were building the case for regime change in Iraq, Scowcroft warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that an attack on Iraq “would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken.” Though Scowcroft was confident that the U.S. could succeed in destroying Saddam’s regime, he was also confident that military action would be expensive and bloody, and that it “very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.” As we all know, Scowcroft’s warning went unheeded by the Bush White House.

The war hawks in the Bush Administration, like Douglas Feith, were telling us that we could replace Saddam Hussein with our own dictator, Chalabai, like replacing a chip on a motherboard. The free-market ideologues were telling us that all we had to do was destroy Iraq's government-run industries, and replace them with the free market, and they would flourish.

Instead, the new free-market Iraqi health care system fell apart, the power system failed and couldn't supply electricity to run the air conditioners and sewer pumps, and most of all, neither the U.S. military nor the "free" Iraqi government could maintain security, against the armed sectarian gangs that started killing each other, as that Slate article described. Bush struggled in Iraq for longer than it took to win the entire WWII, and he failed. 600,000 Iraqis died, and 4,000 American troops and contractors.

Bush lost the war. At what point do you face that and cut your losses? Maybe you don't care about the 600,000 Iraqis, but do you want to lose another 4,000 Americans? Did you volunteer? Where did you earn your battle stripes?