So inside a retail store are thousands and thousands of tiny little cost centers? Does that mean that the retail store is also thousands and thousands of tiny little profit centers?

Or would a rational person perhaps look at the store as a profit center because it makes money, despite having overhead costs like ... the screws that hold the front door to its hinges? Or is each of those screws a cost center, in your view?

How about the display cases that hold the jewelry in the store?

How about the cash registers?

How about the front door?

Is every last bit of overhead inside a profit center a tiny, microscopic cost center?

So, a company's money-making, walk-up retail storefront isn't a profit center?

So, all VPNs are "the internet?"

It wasn't "out there." It was "in there." They had the compromised credentials for a top-level system admin, and spent months on the internal network collecting goodies before laying waste to the system.

Nonsense. It only doesn't sit well with the fictional, cartoon-grade MBA types that IT people like to conjure up as straw men. Security IS a profit center, because it's part and parcel of actually doing everything that generates profit. Without it, the profitable activity is impossible, and so it is part of the profit-making activity. Period. Saying it's no is like saying the director of a Sony movie isn't part of their profitable activity of making movies because he has to be paid.

No, I'm focused DIRECTLY on your comment. Which is peppered with the pretentious and (in this context) meaningless word "externalities" - in an attempt to make it sound like you're constructing an argument, when you're actually not. When you're not saying anything, the only thing to focus on IS the blather and the blatherer.

So, again, the only time the knife becomes dangerous is when YOU pick it up, or someone else does. Only human action makes it dangerous. It's not inherently dangerous, it's human action that is dangerous. Otherwise the knife is inert, sitting there, and unable in any way to hurt you or someone else. Unless it's highly radioactive or something - but I'm guessing that's not what you're getting at.

Myself and my wife switched to the N900 in 2010 - we both ended up hating it, I switched back to my iPhone 3G within 3 months, while my wife stuck it out until she could renew the contract, by which time the keyboards on both our phones were dead (she had to switch to my phone after 9 months due to the fact her keyboard had lost all coating on the keys and several keys had stopped working).

The screen was terrible, the OS was bad, the keyboard was horrific.

Why do people love the N900 so much?

No, men who can't make up cartoon-quality villains they like to complain about. You know, sort of like you just did. Badly. So, I guess that makes you a man who can't, right?

So what you're taking great pains to say is that guns aren't inherently dangerous, people are. Because they kill themselves and each other all the time through careless acts. You've done nothing to show inherent danger in that hunk of metal, but you have shown an odd desire to absolve people of their own stupidity, shifting the blame to inanimate objects than cannot, by themselves, hurt you. It's a fundamentally irrational view of reality. Or, more likely, it's a thinly veiled agenda trying to hide behind a bit of fear mongering.

The whole question of "which direction is the causality" is misleading in the first place; pure, uni-directional causality in situations of interest to people is almost non-existent. What we should usually look for is stable configurations ("stable" not implying "good," as in poverty), and self-reinforcing cycles (whether virtuous or vicious). Even if manipulating A causes B to change, it may also be that manipulating B would cause A to change.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

But it sure does make you sound like an eager moral relativist.

Guys fron San Quentin once attempted an escape with a makeshift canoe painted with the legend "Rub a Dub Dub, Marin Yacht Club!". It sunk and they were re-imprisoned.

Then Sony should have stood their ground and let those theaters take the heat instead. Other smaller theaters would have probably stepped up and shown it, and the public probably would have responded by going out to see a movie that they wouldn't have otherwise seen just to give a big middle finger to the attackers.