I think what happened most likely was, NK officials went to China, hired "internet baddies", and paid them to fuck Sony Pictures in the ass with their biggest internet broomstick.

No technical expertise or infrastructure needed.

That's what happens when you reliquish control of your digital life for the sake of the superficial convenience of not having to maintain your own hardware and perform your own backups: when the third party you entrust your data to decides you can't have it anymore, all you can do is bitch and moan and ask politely to get back what's rightfully yours. But *you* don't decide: your comfortable and convenient digital jailer does.

At the end of the day, Apple customers only have themselves to blame for what Apple does to them. And the same goes for Google, Microsoft and all the others, when they decide to shaft their own userbase without warning.

I think there may be some merit to this.

First, it makes the tax structure for companies a lot simpler. The amount of paperwork for tracking all of your expenses is silly (I _hate_ saving and tracking receipts) and you don't know how much your tax will be until you know how much your profit is. If it's a percentage of revenues you can just figure it in to your costs and be done.

Second, the tax on income penalized businesses saving. So, if you need to make a big investment that you can't finance out of revenues in a single tax year it makes more sense to borrow for it than it does to save profits for a few years. When times are good, borrowing is fairly easy. However, as soon as a recession hits, banks start to trim credit lines and refuse to make new loans. This decreases investment and makes the recession worse. If more businesses were financing themselves out saved profits the business cycle would probably not be as much of a boom/bust as it.

The difference is that for a corporation almost everything is a business expense whereas for an individual you can't deduct things like food, clothing and other things not directly related to the business.

Scoring high on intelligence tests only proves you know how to answer intelligence tests. Everybody knows IQ scores are no indication of intelligence.

Also, IQ tests often favors those who have received a good education: for instance, if you ask a math question to someone who doesn't know math, they're bound to score low. Does that mean that person is stupid? No, it just means they don't have the means to answer the test.

And of course, conveniently, which section of the population chronically receives the worst levels education? People of color of course. It's a self-perpetuating myth...

But I'll grant you this: whites and blacks *are* different: the former produce less melanin than the latter. That's as much as you can say with 100% certainty about the two.

"Cyanogenmod is in many was less customized and more like stock Android"

So not stock Android, eh? What was your point again? I'm consistently impressed by the amount of whining that happens here these days. Years ago, we used to whine about things that were actually significant to professional developers, not whiny users whining about their phones.

Isn't it the big two? Android or iPhone? So why not just get a Nexus 4 or 5, unlocked, nice and cheap? Root it, and you're done.

The definition of gaming as a hobby is not, "Gaming where ever, whenever you like, however you like."

I remember hearing that back in the mid-80's. May I introduce you to bubble memory?

Hmmm...here in Tokyo a lot of the power is coming in through overhead lines. Our building gets fed off a pole and we haven't had an outage in years. That includes during the multiple typhoons that come through every year. They tend to insulate the wires and wrap them with steel cable here, though, so maybe that's a big difference.

Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. At 1:35 A.M. Eastern time it runs out of disk space and crashes horribly

Most of the answers to your questions are "it depends" I don't understand what you mean by a "software shop" - is this a consulting company, a company that produces a large scale product, a company that produces a small product, an online service or what?

Your ratio of junior to senior developers depends on the kind of product you're producing. If you have an application that has a big, overarching architecture and then lots of relatively simple modules for specific cases, you want many junior developers to pound out those simple modules (e.g. different types of data entry screens).

Coding standards and standardization are always good. For a small shop you're best off looking around for one that you like and adopting it rather than trying to make your own from scratch because it is not a revenue producer and you can burn endless hours in meetings arguing about spacing, comment style, etc. Make an executive decision and move forward.

Tools and languages, again, it depends. Use the right tool for the job.

Since you don't know any of these things or how to make the tradeoffs, what you need is to hire a director of engineering who does because if you try to hire some developers and apply the vast depth of wisdom that you've acquired from this thread on Slashdot you're probably going to fail miserably.

And there's nothing in North America except trees and savages. What a short-sighted view you have.

There's a lot of value in having humans along. Currently, launch costs are so high that the costs of bringing along the life support for humans is prohibitive, but if it got cheaper many things would work better.

Consider Philae - if it had landed a few meters in another direction it would still be working. If it had been a manned expedition, that wouldn't have been an issue.

Or look at the Mars rovers. Great stuff, but there's little ability to improvise. Think up a different experiment you want done? Well, it'll have to wait for the next rover because that one can't do it.

Uh no, the Linux kernel is monolithic because it runs the drivers as if they were a part of the kernel rather than running the drivers as separate processes.