Sony are sometimes jerks regarding stuff like DRM. They don't starve millions of their own people to death. I'm not unclear about which side I'm on in this one.

We've lost it. It is pathetic. Agree completely. Even if this was a credible threat we shouldn't cave.

Sony is a big corporation. They do about $200m in revenue per day. The idea that some tin pot dictator can import his censorship into the United States is unthinkable.

The head of the Port Authority was not fired for 9/11, no one is going to want to fire the head of Sony pictures for this.

First off Sony has already lost millions from the hacking. How would a bombing have cost millions to Sony?

I can't do much about this and neither can you. But if you would to be a little bit constructive I started a petition:
https://www.change.org/p/regal...

If somebody damages your car, would you want your insurance company to pay to fix it?

That means they can set prices based on risk. And risk in this case means "perceived risk". It's not brave or not brave. It's just corporate behavior. This is why corporations are not considered people except by reactionaries and the far Right.

I went to events where there were terrorist threats. New Years 2000 being a great example. No you don't live in fear and no you don't let them create hysteria.

Yes, because it is very hard to find a barber here in Austin at a reasonable time

I've been to Austin, and judging from the looks of the locals, it did not appear that the barbers had been very busy.

Yes, I'd go to the mall. I have a better chance of being killed in an accident driving to the mall.

I will bet your chances of being killed in a mall go way up if there are specific threats against that mall.

I would bet that the decision to not show this movie was made entirely by whoever provides insurance to the theater chain. It must be killing the theater owners not to show a movie that has gotten this much publicity at opening. But if your insurance provider says "No", you do what they say.

Note the difference between "flow" and "revenue". Two completely different things. The reason why most of google's money flow goes through EU is various tax break arrangements. As a result, if it were to get kicked out, not only would it lose the market, it would lose lucrative tax deals.

I have no idea where Google is hiding money. But I'm sure there are plenty of African and Latin American countries that would happy to play the role of illicit bank.

Suggesting that EU is "losing" here sounds a lot like "oh EU is losing to microsoft, what can it do?" back in the days of browser monopoly fight. Until EU decided to actually take action and suddenly "oh EU is losing" whine changed to "oh evil EU is oppressing this nice US company" tune here on slashdot

What are you talking about? Microsoft managed to hold the line on browsers for almost a decade and thereby prevent the transition to web based applications. They finally lost share to Safari, Firefox, Chrome... as those browsers advanced. The evidence for that being the transition happened in the USA as well as the EU. There is no evidence that the EU was able to effectuate an early switch.

Actually, the main crop that is quite profitable but requires vast amounts of water is not rice, but nuts, specifically Almonds.

I like almonds, but they kind of bind me up, you know? We make almond milk and add some flax oil and then use the almond pulp to make delicious cakes. It's better that way. If you put some ground flax seed in with the almond pulp, it makes you shit like a goose so it all works out.

I think the fact that I know these things is a sign I'm getting old. Oh well.

I just tweeted out your idea to see if we can get it trending.

An English major is NOT getting into a STEM Ph.D. program, no matter what.

Even if they were, job prospects are worse for STEM Ph.D. holders than for MS/BS holders—there are far fewer jobs that require Ph.D. level qualifications outside of the professoriate and academics, and for Ph.D. holders in particular, employers are absolutely loathe to hire overqualified people.

Inside the professoriate and academics, the job market is historically bad right now. It's not "get a Ph.D., then become a lab head or professor," it's "get a Ph.D., then do a postdoc, then do another postdoc, then do another postdoc, then do another postdoc, really do at least 6-7 postdocs, moving around the world every year the entire time, and at the end of all of that if you've managed to stay employed at poverty wages using highly competitive postdocs that you may not even get, while not flying apart at the emotional seams, you may finally be competitive enough to be amongst the minority of 40-year-old Ph.D. holders that gets a lab or a tenure-track position, at which point the fun REALLY begins as you are forced onto the grantwriting treadmill and feel little job security, since universities increasingly require junior faculty to 'pay their own way' with external grants or be budgeted out."

And that's INSIDE STEM, which this person is almost certainly likely to be uncompetitive for as a B.A. holder trying to get into graduate programs.

Much more likely is that with great grades and GRE scores they'll be admitted to a humanities or social sciences Ph.D. program, with many of the same problems but with CATASTROPHICALLY worse job prospects due to the accelerating collapse of humanities budgets and support on most campuses.

Ph.D. is absolutely not the way to go unless you are independently wealthy and are looking for a way to "contribute to the world" since you don't actually have to draw a salary.

For anyone with student loans, it's a disastrous decision right now, and I wouldn't recommend it.

I say this as someone with a Ph.D. who is on a faculty and routinely is approached by starry-eyed top students looking to "make the world a better place" and "do research." Given the competition out there right now, only the superstars should even attempt it, and then only if they're not strapped for cash. Hint: If you don't know whether or not you're a superstar, you're not.

I think in a decade I've strongly recommended that someone enter a Ph.D. program once, and greeted the suggestion favorably maybe three times total, out of thousands of students, many of them with the classic "4.0 GPA" and tons of "books smarts."

In short, I disagree strongly with the suggestion. Unless you absolutely know that you're competitive already on the academic market, DO NOT GO. Don't listen to the marketing from the schools; it's designed to drive (a) your enrollment and tuition, and/or (b) your cheap labor as a teaching assistant/research assistant forever once you're in the program. It's a win for the institution, not for you.

The easiest sanity checks: Do you know exactly what your dissertation will be about and what you'll need to do, in broad strokes to conduct your research, as well as what resources you'll need? Do you already have personal contact with faculty on a well-matched campus in a well-matched department that are championing you and that want to bring you in as one of their own students/assistants?

If you answers to either one of these questions is "no," then while you may be offered a position somewhere, you will be on the losing end of the deal and would be naive to take it.

Well yes actually. That's what they are being sued for. I know it sounds ridiculous but that is the plaintiff's claim.

The more appropriate question is whether their prevention of competitors DRM Schemes on the iPod drove up prices of either the music itself or the iPod devices upon which said digitally purchased tracks could be obtained.

That's a hard question to answer in a suit against Apple. Certainly the RIAA wanted Apple to be nothing but a device manufacturer allowing a host of other formats and selling agents. At the same time the other ones available like Real they didn't want. So it is hard to find a monopolistic act where Apple wasn't under contract. That's a much better question for an anti-trust suit against the RIAA.