To make a political statement? Since when was this "a political statement"? It was an attempt to stop a movie that made fun of the Great Leader. An attempt that mostly succeeded. Which was done after previously threatening Sony about the issue.

What, exactly, is to gain by admitting culpability? Is that usually what criminals do? "Why, yes, officer! I threw the brick through my ex's window to get back at her and scare her. I'm telling you now so that you can go ahead and punish me!"

Because the world is just full of people who would hack a company to blackmail them not to release a movie about Kim Jong Un. Because everyone loves the Great Leader! His family's personality cult^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HVoluntary Praise Actions only take up about 1/3rd of the North Korean budget. And I mean, they totally deserve it. I mean, did you know that his father was the world's greatest golf player who never had to defecate and whose birth was fortold by a swallow and heralded by a new star in the sky?

No, of course it wasn't North Korea. Clearly it was the work of America! Because America wants nothing more than a conflict with North Korea right now. Because clearly Russia and Syria and ISIS aren't enough, no, the US obviously has nothing better to do than to try to stir up things out of the blue with the Hollywood obsessed leader of a cult state whose family has gone so far as to kidnap filmmakers and force them to make movies for him. It all just makes so damn much sense!

Cue the conspiracy theorists in three, two, one...

I know, write? Who gives a flying flip about an app to track a jolly magical man with an eating disorder.

Now, if someone would make an app to track the Yule Cat, Grýla, and her progeny, then that I would have interest in!

That seems more likely, but, when I was writing DMA code years ago, we put the buffers in non-cached RAM (and there were only written to from a driver in the kernel). Maybe explicit cache flushes are faster these days.

It apparently only happens if you read the same bytes from RAM 139,000 times in 64 milliseconds. If your program is doing that, you probably have a lot more to worry about than disk corruption.

If this was actually happening in the real world, computers would probably be crashing every few minutes.

Can you explain when you'd need to flush the cache when using multiple threads? You'd have to flush the cache back to RAM (isn't that a privileged instruction?), invalidate it, then read the data back from RAM. That's surely insanely slow compared to just using the CPU's internal cache coherency mechanisms?

Only if the sandbox lets you repeatedly access memory and flush the cache between accesses, and you happen to know where your data is in physical RAM.

According to the paper, EEC only reduces but does not eliminate the problem (section 6.3). Multiple bits can be corrupted at once.

If you're wanting to narrow it down, you won't like this line from the paper:

In particular, all modules manufactured in the past two years (2012 and 2013) were vulnerable,

It's pretty clever, and something I always wondered whether would be possible. They're exploiting the fact that DRAM rows need to be read every so often to refresh them because they leak charge, and eventually would fall below the noise threshold and be unreadable. Their exploit works by running code that - by heavily, cyclicly reading rows - makes adjacent rows leak faster than expected, leading to them falling below the noise threshold before they get refreshed.

If I remember correctly, the historical norm is that 20% of people have about 80% of the wealth. It's worse than that today because the government steal so much money from the middle class (or just print it) to give to the rich.

But, hey, elect more Liberals, they'll sort it out. Ha-ha.

You're funny. If Liberal policies really stopped those folks being disenfranchised, dispossessed, poor, hungry and downtrodden... they'd stop voting Liberal. That's why the real-world policies are designed to entrap those foilks into dependency on the Glorious Liberal State, so they'll keep voting for the politicians who are supposedly 'helping' them.

Russia imports processed foods *and* staples. Just because there's some products that they're net positive on doesn't change that picture, their food imports are about 6x larger than their exports. And even some of your examples are off. For example, Russia exports a couple hundred million dollars of milk every year but imports 1 1/2 *billion* worth.

Russia's top ag imports are beef, beverges, pork, milk, tobacco, sugar and honey, poultry, and cheese. Beverages is mainly alcohol. So take beverages and tobacco out of the picture, you've still got mostly staples. And the funny thing is, see the milk and all that meat on the list? Russia's biggest subsidies to its ag industry are *already* on its meat and dairy production, and it still vastly underproduces.

It should also be noted that the very thing that keeps Russia's ag industry competitive at all has been its steady shift from lousy Soviet-era farm equipment to modern equipment. The vast majority of which (and spare parts to keep current systems operational) are imported.

If it comes down to military force stopping loss of assets for failure to pay debt, then you're saying "stop all international trade with me this instant".

Russia imports nearly 40% of its food. So, say hello to the largest famine of this century.

GDP comparisons:

Major pro-sanctions players:
US: 16,8T
EU: 17,5T
Japan: 4,9T

Major anti-sanctions players:
Russia: 2,1T
China: 9,5T

Just ignoring the whole fiat currency issue and controlling the global banking system which act as large multipliers, China is simply not comparable to the economic pressure being levied against Russia.

China's in this thing with Russia for precisely one thing: China. They're taking advantage of a weakened Russia to strike deals that they never would have gotten before. A good example is the "Power of Siberia" gas pipeline deal that they signed for a few years back. China's been trying for years to get Russia to bite at bargain-basement prices that leave almost no profit for Gazprom (perhaps even a slight negative that would have to be somewhat subsidized by the government's gas royalties), and Russia had been refusing. Then they sign the exact same deal they'd been refusing a few months ago and herald it as a great victory.

China has Russia in an excellent position and is going to squeeze every drop of potential profit out of their bad situation that they can. And Russia will herald it as a glorious blow to the west all the way down.

That said - even China's GDP doesn't compare to the sanction imposers (US + Europe + Japan + misc), all the leverage multipliers of global banking and fiat currency that the sanction imposers have aside. Even if China's goal was to break sanctions - which it's not - it's just not big enough, it's a third their size. And Russia a trivial fraction of that. And the multipliers of controlling the banking system and a fiat currency are very real. Throw trade into the picture, forget it - Moscow is closer to Newfoundland and Liberia than it is to Beijing. There's a giant barren wasteland between the two. They have a border but it's more of a barrier than a facilitator for trade.

As the very article linked by Slashdot put it:

"In the current conditions, any help is very welcome," Vladimir Miklashevsky, a strategist at Danske Bank A/S, said by e-mail. "Yet, it can't substitute the losses of the Russian banking system and economy from western sanctions."