Yeah, I imagine they were going to hack AMC and rig the film projector to overheat and explode, setting off the thermonuclear warhead it was attached to by the secret CIA program to hide nukes under film projectors.

Well, they did specifically say they were going to blow up every theater, not hack them. Almost certainly an idle threat unless North Korea has planted thousands of sleeper agents and activates them to do such a strike.

As for having unencrypted docs all over, I've seen that, even at corp levels - once you're behind the firewall, everything is unencrypted unless sending between sites or sending a secure mail such as to HR (our HR system requires it).

Not to mention the stuff Obama is lifting is already so easy to circumvent it is relatively pointless. I've met numerous divers that have gone to Cuba via Mexico or Canada and Cozumel is filled with shops selling Cuban cigars, probably exclusively targeting Americans. Even during the Cold War I had a friend that visited Russia to study Russian architecture and brought back Cuban cigars (and they didn't bother to check where the cigars came from because he visited Russia... also they were much better back then - the subsidies helped immensely).

True - my uncle lives in Florida and says most of them vote republican on the abortion issue alone (i.e. Catholic church influence) even if their dirt poor and on food stamps and the republicans tend to take those programs away. He's glad they do, as well, because it lets him keep more money. For reference, this is a very rich uncle and he can probably afford significantly higher taxes (which are all on investments these days - he retired a multimillionaire when he was 54 or 55, so he could spend more time doing things he loves, like traveling the world).

GPLv2 has a lot of gray areas, though. It can be used internally by a company without releasing source, it seems to apply to plugins but I've been explicitly told by GPLv3 authors that it does not when GPLv3 was in review, etc. Honestly, I disagree with the GPLv3 authors - a plugin is still a dynamically linked library and I honestly believe that you could use it maliciously to try and infect GPLv3 in commercial software (but I also think it would be thrown out in court). Since GPLv2 is equally ambiguous on plugins, it may also apply to that one, as well.

That doesn't equate to great tasting coffees, though they are better than most (if not all) of the canned stuff.

And I'm far less of a snob with coffee than with beer - I will actually drink Keurig or canned coffee but I need to add cream. For black I prefer beans roasted 5 days or less before use and burr ground, with grind type as per the style of coffee (Turkish, espresso, french press, drip). Yes, home roasted. Unlike beer, home roasting has saved me a fortune after the initial expense, too ($~130 for 20# bags and $300 for the roaster offset the cost of buying beans at $14-18 a pop in 2 years).

The Steve Miller band stumped me for years with "big old jet airliner," though I had no idea what he was saying. My best guess was Jeb O'Brian, whoever that was.

In my 20s I spent a LOT of time listening to and writing down lyrics for my cover band and finally figured that one out (and no, I didn't have the album, in fact, I rarely had the albums, thank you very much - not really my favorite music, but I played it).

Not really - that is the actual lyrics, a record exec or something like that couldn't understand them and thus the song name.

They didn't specify the attack, but a DDoS attack (part of this group's MO) is notoriously difficult to counter because it relies on the lack of security of the user community rather than the company itself. They use, say, a half million computer bot network to flood the target servers with requests. While you can theoretically block request flooding, sheer numbers can still overwhelm systems.

Can't recall gameplay, but most major sports had games (football, baseball, basketball, hockey). I also remember the color overlays for the TV. My age was in the single digits when I played this console, so I don't remember much (and certainly don't remember when it came out - played it maybe mid-to-late 1970s).

Not to mention the forced prison labor market. Felons get to learn "valuable skills" (for third world countries) and make products to sell at full value while getting paid a pittance. Refuse to work? No problem, 3 months in solitary will cure that, or you'll just go nuts. Really, the prison system is just slavery by another name.

Most often I have heard of that with "three strikes" laws.

It may be possible to intern with a company first to prove you are a changed person, but yeah, hard to break in, especially with any established company. There is an effort to "ban the box," but until that takes root, employers will ask if you have a criminal past.

  Another option would be to try contracting. My brother's contracting company (electrical engineering) requires a proven skill set, but I doubt if they do any background checks. The hard part, of course, is proving you've got the skills (they hire extremely skilled workers in a very narrow category of electrical engineering). I know another company that does web design and they occasionally hire contractors, as well.

On the forums and from personal experience I can tell you there is a crash bug with Windows 8.1 64 bit with nVidia cards during cutscenes where framerates drop to near zero. Worst thing about it is it's random. I wasn't able to reproduce it with Windows 7 64 bit also with an nVidia card (albeit older laptop card).

Fortunately, I was reading the forums and there are fixes coming. They know about nVidia framerate problems, random sound dropouts (in fact, they are looking for 60+ hour saves that have this problem) and many of the crashes.

Yeah, Cs-137 is definitely something to worry about at least in the short-to-medium term, because it is water soluble and both a beta and gamma emitter (meaning exposure and ingestion are a factor), but risk depends on how much exposure you get. It also should be about half of what it initially was, since its half life is around 30 years. Some of the longer lived (miilions of years) particles are not something you really need to worry much about - you get worse stuff from natural gas (radon in particular) and probably higher concentrations from coal (fly ash contains lots of uranium and thorium in particulate form released into the air - in solid form these two are not particularly dangerous since the skin is a very good at absorbing alpha and beta).

In any case, radiation is a vague term, since it depends on type of emitter, half life, and type of exposure (i.e.skin, lungs, stomach) as for how dangerous it is. Generally, long half life=lower risk, which is why potassium isn't a big deal to have in our bodies despite being radioactive.

Highly radioactive usually has more to do with faster decay rate. As for how dangerous, it depends on the emitter and how it is absorbed. As for how much energy, it depends on substance, if it is fissile (at least for energy producing), and its neutron efficiency. Thorium, uranium, and plutonium generate more neutrons than they consume and thus can be used for a sustainable nuclear reaction. If it isn't one of those three, it probably isn't desirable - Protactinium, for example, has a huge cross section and absorbs neutrons slowing the reaction, so in a reactor it is usually desirable to pull it out, wait for it to decay to Uranium, and toss it back in (but this is a proliferation concern :P ).

Alpha - Ok for skin exposure, bad in stomach, lungs, or other tissues
Beta - relatively OK for skin exposure, bad in stomach lungs or other tissues (but not as bad as certain alpha emitters, I believe)
Gamma - pass through organics, bad for them.

For instance, Polonium is a fast alpha emitter. Skin is very good at protecting against alpha emitters, so you could wear gloves and handle it (to avoid any chance of dermal absorption). You, however, in no way want to ingest it - in the lungs and tissues it wreaks havoc and can kill in days (which is why Polonium was used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident). Beta emitters are mostly absorbed by the skin, but penetrate deeper than alpha emitters. Gamma emitters go through most everything except heavy metals like lead, so it is recommended that you get as little exposure to these as possible (either inside you or outside).