doing the same for a vinyl disc would be a stretch at present, but probably not ten years from now.
You might be interested in this, which is about seven years old and details someone scanning and (somewhat) successfully retrieving sound from vinyl. The quality is poor, but he did it in a few nights and without any info on the technical specs of the media; obviously a future archaeologist may well be without the datasheets for DVD technology, but there's every chance they'll also spend more time on the project.
Waking up naturally is far better for your health.
Why, in that case, do I revert to a 11-13 hour sleep schedule if I'm left to it?
I get plenty of sleep anyway, so it's not my body trying desperately to catch up, and even if I keep sleeping that much for a week I won't start naturally easing up to a 'normal' schedule unless I use some kind of alarm or other outside influence.
I have a 2007WFP (the widescreen variant of the same monitor) which I use for graphics work - I'm assuming it's the same S-IPS panel tech in there. The colour reproduction is extremely good compared to the TN panels you see more often, but the response is slow enough to give noticeable 'smearing' in motion graphics, especially at sharply defined high-contrast edges. That said, I have noticed no input lag (which is a sometimes problem with PVA panels) and the fact that most games use relatively small colour and contrast ranges means that the actual visible impact of the response time is probably going to be reduced for your uses.
To add another voice of agreement: for all the times I've seen "national security" thrown about in order to censor something that has nothing to do with the subject, this is one of the first times I would say that it absolutely could be a matter pertaining to the security of the nation (and in this case they didn't even use the term!). It is a shame, but it's also very much understandable.
The problem is that the two often are exclusive. Games cost a lot to make and it's easy to blow the entire budget making something look spectacular and then realise there's nothing left to actually make it fun. Similarly, when you're restricted on the graphics front by less powerful hardware, you're forced into making games with selling points other than how they look.
Obviously it's not always the case, there are exceptions to both rules and I would never be one to argue against better looking games as long as they are still fun to play, but there is a somewhat sensible reason behind the 'bad graphics' argument.
In my experience PC games make up a small percentage of the resale market due to all the DRM they tend to come with. Many big chains simply refuse to take a lot of PC games now because of things like limited reinstallations. I'm guessing that if the shops were forced to stop reselling PC games altogether they wouldn't kick up too much of a fuss.
The argument that you posit that the publishers are using does not in any way, however, apply to console games and yet they're still trying to bully the resellers on that issue too.
That sounds like the most plausible option. If you read the BBC article from the older story it's very clear that they couldn't tell the difference between burned and pressed discs (which I found a little surprising, actually, with all the chemicals in the dye of DVD-Rs) and even if they have improved on their training since then, I wouldn't expect 35,000 discs to be burned anyway.
Like you said, I'm assuming they went sniffing around the warehouse marked "Completely Legal Food Co." and found that the crates of bananas smelled like a whole lot of polycarbonate.
I've found the UK chip cards are pretty well supported by modern equipment in foreign countries. The key word there, however, is modern - if the banks aren't doing a country-wide rollout like they did in the UK then there's little impetus to replace otherwise functional terminals, although when they do come to the end of their service lifetime they'll probably be replaced with chip terminals.
A couple of times I've actually had to show shop assistants why their machine was refusing my card. Some terminals won't accept a magstripe reading from a chip-capable card and the people operating them were clearly unfamiliar with this, implying that the chip cards are not at all commonplace there.
It's the problem of legacy support. Cards still have magstripes because on occasion you'll come across a situation where there isn't a chip reader, and ATMs (presumably) still have magstripe readers for the occasions that the card doesn't have a chip. If you've got access to the OS, as the criminals mentioned in the article do, you can presumably activate whatever reader you like.
There's also the fact that this is Eastern Europe - without wanting to perpetuate negative stereotypes, I think it is quite fair to comment that they are not the most developed economies, and as such large scale investment in upgraded technology may well be low down on the list of priorities.
I'm not sure why the US often seems to share in this kind of technological resistance. A combination of large size and historical mistrust for coordination from a central authority might make it difficult to get cooperation on new projects from everyone simultaneously, I guess, which greatly exacerbates the legacy tech issue.
Not directly related, but I still find it absolutely stunning that by giving a cheque to someone you are giving them enough information to empty your account. If that's their attitude to security, I get the impression it's going to be an uphill struggle for improvement.
Will they really force you to pay that, though? I don't doubt that they'll initially ask for thousands, but when it becomes clear that the potential buyer is completely unwilling to give them that much I wouldn't be surprised to see them willing to take a few hundred rather than nothing at all.
The amount they'll be making in advertising per domain is tiny, as far as I am aware. $500 (which is an irritation, certainly, but not a huge amount in the scheme of things) should be far more tempting than just sitting on the domain collecting a few dollars a year beyond the registration cost. Sure, $5000 is more tempting than $500, but any sensible business owner will realise quite quickly that they should take the $500 when there's no chance of them getting the $5000.
Can't speak for Finland, but in the UK (where, as another poster mentioned, we pay 15% VAT on pretty much everything we buy) income tax ranges from 10% to 50%. There's an allowance so that the first £5000 or so you earn in a year is not taxed, then the next £2000 or so is taxed at 10%, the following £32,000 is taxed at 22% (so that's the real rate for many average earners), the subsequent £110,000 is taxed at 40% and then anything above £150,000 is taxed at 50%.
Again, I agree with you (although I get the impression you weren't expecting me to). I wasn't planning to make a specific ranking of which countries I think are better or worse on a 'freedom plus quality of life' scale - it's subjective to an extent anyway - but I'm by no means arrogant enough to think the country where I was raised is the best, nor disdainful enough to place it lower than it sensibly deserves.
Since you specifically brought them up: from what I know Denmark and New Zealand are doing a better job than the UK in many ways and we could certainly stand to learn from them. If I were choosing to move away from where is currently 'home' I'd happily consider either of those places. Italy (again, to my somewhat limited knowledge) seems to have greater problems with corruption and entrenched bureaucracy, and the data from Transparency International agrees. Portugal is not somewhere I consider myself knowledgeable enough to comment on.
As it happens I'm not American, but you're absolutely right, people all over the world put up with a lot of things they don't approve of from their respective governments because life's 'good enough' for it to be more effort than its worth to bring about change.
Further evidence that the Chinese government are more fearful than they need to be, perhaps? Maybe not a sign that the current administration would survive open elections, but certainly further credit to the idea that the people are relatively content to allow the status quo.
That said, however, I personally think that if I were in China I'd choose to leave, as there are several more free countries out there with similar or better standards of living. As it stands in the UK (or the US), despite our many problems we still rank much nearer the top - there are not as many 'better options' out there. Even so the idea of moving away has crossed my mind numerous times; it's a damn shame it's near-impossible to start a new nation without massive bloodshed, actually - I'd be interested to see and participate a project to start a new state designed to be as transparent, democratic and above all as free as practically possible.
I share your surprise - considering all the backlash that the various Western pre-Olympic protests against China and/or their actions saw from regular Chinese people, I was beginning to get the impression that many of them are happy enough with the state of affairs to actively defend it, so they certainly wouldn't challenge it. In that context I wouldn't have thought that information like this was that much of a risk any more.
Obviously the protests may present a skewed perspective from both sides, but to me it looks like the government are sitting pretty solidly. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe they're just so used to suppressing speech that they either don't think to stop or don't want to risk it in view of the small amount of international praise they stand to gain.
I wonder what the people of China would choose, politically speaking, if the people were given the option?
No arguments about a full range (in terms of both price and specification) being the most customer-friendly solution to the issue, but from a business standpoint I can understand why they're unwilling to do it.
The lower priced hardware would cannibalise sales of their existing range. Margins on non-premium hardware are razor thin, so they'd have to sell an awful lot of machines to make up for the losses on the higher end numbers: suddenly they're competing with Dell while trying to maintain the image of a 'premium' brand. Not impossible, but certainly a difficult prospect.
It's a shame Apple are fighting these things - I certainly don't like it, I just see why they're doing it.
I don't quite understand the total abhorrence of transfer capping around here. The way it's done now is certainly an issue, with the level of the caps, the prices and (worst of all) the blatantly untrue attempts to label a capped connection as 'unlimited' all being major problems, but that doesn't mean the idea itself is inherently flawed. Since I'm feeling lazy, here's what I said last time it came up:
There is a logical, non-evil argument for transfer capping.
Bandwidth is oversold, and there's not an inherent problem with that: for the couple of hours per day (at most) that a connection is actually saturated, there are many more when it is idle or nearly so. Obviously we want to be able to use a lot of bandwidth in short bursts (waiting for an iPlayer video to download, for example) but for most usage patterns it would be wasteful to have that amount of backbone bandwidth sitting 'reserved' with my name on it all day. By overselling, the costs for high-bandwidth connections are kept sensible and bandwidth capacity 'waste' is minimised.
Marketing an oversold connection as unlimited, however, is rather dishonest and becomes more so as the extent of the overselling increases. If a connection is marked as unlimited then it should not be oversold, it should be bandwidth limited such that there will be enough backbone capacity to support 100% usage 24/7.
As mentioned above, however, that true unlimited connection is overkill for many people. Provision of that level of service would have us all being lied to and sold 'unlimited' connections that are anything but unlimited (sound familiar?) or paying through the nose for a few Mbps.
The imposition of a cap on data transfer allows the oversold bandwidth to be allocated more sensibly: take a hypothetical 100Mbps connection, oversold by a ratio of 50:1. If my calculations are accurate, 100Mbps is equivalent to approximately 30.9TB (note the capital B) per month. This means that for the same infrastructure cost as giving one person a truly unlimited 100Mbps connection, you can give 50 people a connection that can deliver burst speeds of up to 100Mbps and allow each one of them about 600GB/month of data transfer. Assuming you want the cheaper, oversold connection rather than the truly unlimited one, I don't see why being upfront about that overselling and giving everyone a 'portion' of the total capacity is problematic. It's the same as having an unlimited 2Mbps connection, except it can deliver burst rates of 50 times that when you need them.
As I said in another post, the problems come because caps are made for reasons of profiteering not network management, and that leads to all kinds of consumer-unfriendly behaviour.
Someone did mention that it doesn't alleviate the issue of peak-time overuse, which is true, but I see that as a different problem. Congestion at peak times can only be alleviated with increased resources; once the resources are at an adequate level, the bandwidth caps then keep the average overall usage fairly split between users.
I would think hardware horsepower is less of an issue than build quality, aesthetic appeal, flaky drivers and bundled crapware. Product design is a significant part of the overall branding, and it doesn't surprise me that they'd be unhappy to put that in others hands. I guess some kind of franchise-like model where Apple retains some say in what ultimately leaves the production line could work, but then you just get back to the point that they can make more money doing it themselves.
I think the branding really is something to do with it, but as the GP said, clones that don't sully the brand would only serve to take revenue from Apple and they have no intention in letting that happen either.
If the people of N. Korea didn't approve of their government, one would see demonstrations, if not coup d'état attempts.
If you actually believe that I would suggest you read up a little on the actual state of the country and their laws before joining the debate. The Wikipedia article on the government's human rights record is very well cited and gives an idea of how hard it would be to make any resistance attempt. The fact that many people are not happy with the regime can be reasonably sensibly inferred from the fact that several hundred thousand of them were starved to death in a situation exacerbated by poor leadership, or the fact that thousands who do dare to voice their criticisms are held and tortured in a number of prison camps. Those who have managed to escape to other countries took great risks to do so and tell stories of extreme suffering of those who were left behind.
Basically I can't see any way in which you could make a legitimate claim that the North Korean people, as a whole, are happy with their leadership. I suppose you could argue that it's "the government that they deserve", even though not the one the want, because they're not willing to attempt a suicidal coup against a powerful and ruthless military, but that's a fairly harsh line to take by pretty much anyone's standards.
The rest of your post hinges on that first assumption, and I can't really understand how you could draw that conclusion from the facts available. If you're not just misinformed, I'd actually like to hear why you think the North Korean people are satisfied with the system they're forced to live in.
Actually Coca-Cola does still contain real coca leaf flavouring. It has the cocaine extracted by Stepan Company before the leaves are passed on to Coca-Cola.
I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the process is less than 100% effective, either. When you're looking at amounts on the order of 10^-9 grams per litre, it's quite possible that any cola with real coca leaves in (don't know how common they are) has always contained traces and nobody's noticed or cared.
I'm not sure I get your point - I said that Iran's ideology is vastly different to our own, but that they run a functional government nonetheless.
My point was that while reasoned criticism and argument may well lead to fair comments about why Iran could be a potential risk to America and Europe, a simple "they're crazy" is not justifiable. While many of them hold a strong hatred for America, the leaders are competent enough to understand the consequences of their actions on an international stage. Basically I think Iran (and the vast, vast majority of the rest of the world) have demonstrated that they are to afforded the basic respect of equals among the other major governments. That's not to say that their ideas are to be accepted in any way, just that they deserve to be debated rather than dismissed out of hand.
North Korea, on the other hand, has far less claim to be a "functional but different" country, and it would be much more reasonable to treat them as a child running with scissors.
While I'm not sure exactly where I stand on the overall issue of nuclear wepons - it's a lot more complex than the soundbites in the news like to make out, after all - I do think it's worth saying that characterising Kim Jong Il as insane is at least somewhat fair.
Were we talking about Iran, for example, I'd agree with you - although their leaders hold a vastly different ideology to many of our own, writing them off with simplistic statements is totally unfair. Their country works in its own way and while legitimate criticism could be levelled at them for failing to represent the wishes of their people, that would not negate the fact that the decisions they do make often work to achieve the desired outcome.
North Korea, on the other hand, is not running as a functional country in any sense of the word. The competence of the leadership is very much in question, and many of their past actions suggest a level of delusion that could potentially lead to very destructive behaviour.
While we have no absolute reference point, and thus can only make claims from our personal and cultural point of view, it is much easier to make an argument based on pure logic against a practise like this than it is to debate the relative merits of a lot of other cultural issues.
Which is still solved by a quick look at the logs. Any account with multiple login attempts from multiple IP addresses in rapid succession should be a huge red flag. Even without human review it's trivial to make the block on the account, not on the party that's trying to log in.
The real problem is striking a balance between complexity and usability. You don't need a botnet if you can grab the passwords using any number of social engineering techniques, many of which are made much easier when people are pushed into habits like writing their login details on post-it notes.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be interested in this, which is about seven years old and details someone scanning and (somewhat) successfully retrieving sound from vinyl. The quality is poor, but he did it in a few nights and without any info on the technical specs of the media; obviously a future archaeologist may well be without the datasheets for DVD technology, but there's every chance they'll also spend more time on the project.
Why, in that case, do I revert to a 11-13 hour sleep schedule if I'm left to it?
I get plenty of sleep anyway, so it's not my body trying desperately to catch up, and even if I keep sleeping that much for a week I won't start naturally easing up to a 'normal' schedule unless I use some kind of alarm or other outside influence.
I have a 2007WFP (the widescreen variant of the same monitor) which I use for graphics work - I'm assuming it's the same S-IPS panel tech in there. The colour reproduction is extremely good compared to the TN panels you see more often, but the response is slow enough to give noticeable 'smearing' in motion graphics, especially at sharply defined high-contrast edges. That said, I have noticed no input lag (which is a sometimes problem with PVA panels) and the fact that most games use relatively small colour and contrast ranges means that the actual visible impact of the response time is probably going to be reduced for your uses.
To add another voice of agreement: for all the times I've seen "national security" thrown about in order to censor something that has nothing to do with the subject, this is one of the first times I would say that it absolutely could be a matter pertaining to the security of the nation (and in this case they didn't even use the term!). It is a shame, but it's also very much understandable.
The problem is that the two often are exclusive. Games cost a lot to make and it's easy to blow the entire budget making something look spectacular and then realise there's nothing left to actually make it fun. Similarly, when you're restricted on the graphics front by less powerful hardware, you're forced into making games with selling points other than how they look.
Obviously it's not always the case, there are exceptions to both rules and I would never be one to argue against better looking games as long as they are still fun to play, but there is a somewhat sensible reason behind the 'bad graphics' argument.
In my experience PC games make up a small percentage of the resale market due to all the DRM they tend to come with. Many big chains simply refuse to take a lot of PC games now because of things like limited reinstallations. I'm guessing that if the shops were forced to stop reselling PC games altogether they wouldn't kick up too much of a fuss.
The argument that you posit that the publishers are using does not in any way, however, apply to console games and yet they're still trying to bully the resellers on that issue too.
That sounds like the most plausible option. If you read the BBC article from the older story it's very clear that they couldn't tell the difference between burned and pressed discs (which I found a little surprising, actually, with all the chemicals in the dye of DVD-Rs) and even if they have improved on their training since then, I wouldn't expect 35,000 discs to be burned anyway.
Like you said, I'm assuming they went sniffing around the warehouse marked "Completely Legal Food Co." and found that the crates of bananas smelled like a whole lot of polycarbonate.
I've found the UK chip cards are pretty well supported by modern equipment in foreign countries. The key word there, however, is modern - if the banks aren't doing a country-wide rollout like they did in the UK then there's little impetus to replace otherwise functional terminals, although when they do come to the end of their service lifetime they'll probably be replaced with chip terminals.
A couple of times I've actually had to show shop assistants why their machine was refusing my card. Some terminals won't accept a magstripe reading from a chip-capable card and the people operating them were clearly unfamiliar with this, implying that the chip cards are not at all commonplace there.
It's the problem of legacy support. Cards still have magstripes because on occasion you'll come across a situation where there isn't a chip reader, and ATMs (presumably) still have magstripe readers for the occasions that the card doesn't have a chip. If you've got access to the OS, as the criminals mentioned in the article do, you can presumably activate whatever reader you like.
There's also the fact that this is Eastern Europe - without wanting to perpetuate negative stereotypes, I think it is quite fair to comment that they are not the most developed economies, and as such large scale investment in upgraded technology may well be low down on the list of priorities.
I'm not sure why the US often seems to share in this kind of technological resistance. A combination of large size and historical mistrust for coordination from a central authority might make it difficult to get cooperation on new projects from everyone simultaneously, I guess, which greatly exacerbates the legacy tech issue.
Not directly related, but I still find it absolutely stunning that by giving a cheque to someone you are giving them enough information to empty your account. If that's their attitude to security, I get the impression it's going to be an uphill struggle for improvement.
Will they really force you to pay that, though? I don't doubt that they'll initially ask for thousands, but when it becomes clear that the potential buyer is completely unwilling to give them that much I wouldn't be surprised to see them willing to take a few hundred rather than nothing at all.
The amount they'll be making in advertising per domain is tiny, as far as I am aware. $500 (which is an irritation, certainly, but not a huge amount in the scheme of things) should be far more tempting than just sitting on the domain collecting a few dollars a year beyond the registration cost. Sure, $5000 is more tempting than $500, but any sensible business owner will realise quite quickly that they should take the $500 when there's no chance of them getting the $5000.
Can't speak for Finland, but in the UK (where, as another poster mentioned, we pay 15% VAT on pretty much everything we buy) income tax ranges from 10% to 50%. There's an allowance so that the first £5000 or so you earn in a year is not taxed, then the next £2000 or so is taxed at 10%, the following £32,000 is taxed at 22% (so that's the real rate for many average earners), the subsequent £110,000 is taxed at 40% and then anything above £150,000 is taxed at 50%.
Again, I agree with you (although I get the impression you weren't expecting me to). I wasn't planning to make a specific ranking of which countries I think are better or worse on a 'freedom plus quality of life' scale - it's subjective to an extent anyway - but I'm by no means arrogant enough to think the country where I was raised is the best, nor disdainful enough to place it lower than it sensibly deserves.
Since you specifically brought them up: from what I know Denmark and New Zealand are doing a better job than the UK in many ways and we could certainly stand to learn from them. If I were choosing to move away from where is currently 'home' I'd happily consider either of those places. Italy (again, to my somewhat limited knowledge) seems to have greater problems with corruption and entrenched bureaucracy, and the data from Transparency International agrees. Portugal is not somewhere I consider myself knowledgeable enough to comment on.
As it happens I'm not American, but you're absolutely right, people all over the world put up with a lot of things they don't approve of from their respective governments because life's 'good enough' for it to be more effort than its worth to bring about change.
Further evidence that the Chinese government are more fearful than they need to be, perhaps? Maybe not a sign that the current administration would survive open elections, but certainly further credit to the idea that the people are relatively content to allow the status quo.
That said, however, I personally think that if I were in China I'd choose to leave, as there are several more free countries out there with similar or better standards of living. As it stands in the UK (or the US), despite our many problems we still rank much nearer the top - there are not as many 'better options' out there. Even so the idea of moving away has crossed my mind numerous times; it's a damn shame it's near-impossible to start a new nation without massive bloodshed, actually - I'd be interested to see and participate a project to start a new state designed to be as transparent, democratic and above all as free as practically possible.
I share your surprise - considering all the backlash that the various Western pre-Olympic protests against China and/or their actions saw from regular Chinese people, I was beginning to get the impression that many of them are happy enough with the state of affairs to actively defend it, so they certainly wouldn't challenge it. In that context I wouldn't have thought that information like this was that much of a risk any more.
Obviously the protests may present a skewed perspective from both sides, but to me it looks like the government are sitting pretty solidly. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe they're just so used to suppressing speech that they either don't think to stop or don't want to risk it in view of the small amount of international praise they stand to gain.
I wonder what the people of China would choose, politically speaking, if the people were given the option?
No arguments about a full range (in terms of both price and specification) being the most customer-friendly solution to the issue, but from a business standpoint I can understand why they're unwilling to do it.
The lower priced hardware would cannibalise sales of their existing range. Margins on non-premium hardware are razor thin, so they'd have to sell an awful lot of machines to make up for the losses on the higher end numbers: suddenly they're competing with Dell while trying to maintain the image of a 'premium' brand. Not impossible, but certainly a difficult prospect.
It's a shame Apple are fighting these things - I certainly don't like it, I just see why they're doing it.
I don't quite understand the total abhorrence of transfer capping around here. The way it's done now is certainly an issue, with the level of the caps, the prices and (worst of all) the blatantly untrue attempts to label a capped connection as 'unlimited' all being major problems, but that doesn't mean the idea itself is inherently flawed. Since I'm feeling lazy, here's what I said last time it came up:
Someone did mention that it doesn't alleviate the issue of peak-time overuse, which is true, but I see that as a different problem. Congestion at peak times can only be alleviated with increased resources; once the resources are at an adequate level, the bandwidth caps then keep the average overall usage fairly split between users.
I would think hardware horsepower is less of an issue than build quality, aesthetic appeal, flaky drivers and bundled crapware. Product design is a significant part of the overall branding, and it doesn't surprise me that they'd be unhappy to put that in others hands. I guess some kind of franchise-like model where Apple retains some say in what ultimately leaves the production line could work, but then you just get back to the point that they can make more money doing it themselves.
I think the branding really is something to do with it, but as the GP said, clones that don't sully the brand would only serve to take revenue from Apple and they have no intention in letting that happen either.
If you actually believe that I would suggest you read up a little on the actual state of the country and their laws before joining the debate. The Wikipedia article on the government's human rights record is very well cited and gives an idea of how hard it would be to make any resistance attempt. The fact that many people are not happy with the regime can be reasonably sensibly inferred from the fact that several hundred thousand of them were starved to death in a situation exacerbated by poor leadership, or the fact that thousands who do dare to voice their criticisms are held and tortured in a number of prison camps. Those who have managed to escape to other countries took great risks to do so and tell stories of extreme suffering of those who were left behind.
Basically I can't see any way in which you could make a legitimate claim that the North Korean people, as a whole, are happy with their leadership. I suppose you could argue that it's "the government that they deserve", even though not the one the want, because they're not willing to attempt a suicidal coup against a powerful and ruthless military, but that's a fairly harsh line to take by pretty much anyone's standards.
The rest of your post hinges on that first assumption, and I can't really understand how you could draw that conclusion from the facts available. If you're not just misinformed, I'd actually like to hear why you think the North Korean people are satisfied with the system they're forced to live in.
Actually Coca-Cola does still contain real coca leaf flavouring. It has the cocaine extracted by Stepan Company before the leaves are passed on to Coca-Cola.
I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the process is less than 100% effective, either. When you're looking at amounts on the order of 10^-9 grams per litre, it's quite possible that any cola with real coca leaves in (don't know how common they are) has always contained traces and nobody's noticed or cared.
I'm not sure I get your point - I said that Iran's ideology is vastly different to our own, but that they run a functional government nonetheless.
My point was that while reasoned criticism and argument may well lead to fair comments about why Iran could be a potential risk to America and Europe, a simple "they're crazy" is not justifiable. While many of them hold a strong hatred for America, the leaders are competent enough to understand the consequences of their actions on an international stage. Basically I think Iran (and the vast, vast majority of the rest of the world) have demonstrated that they are to afforded the basic respect of equals among the other major governments. That's not to say that their ideas are to be accepted in any way, just that they deserve to be debated rather than dismissed out of hand.
North Korea, on the other hand, has far less claim to be a "functional but different" country, and it would be much more reasonable to treat them as a child running with scissors.
While I'm not sure exactly where I stand on the overall issue of nuclear wepons - it's a lot more complex than the soundbites in the news like to make out, after all - I do think it's worth saying that characterising Kim Jong Il as insane is at least somewhat fair.
Were we talking about Iran, for example, I'd agree with you - although their leaders hold a vastly different ideology to many of our own, writing them off with simplistic statements is totally unfair. Their country works in its own way and while legitimate criticism could be levelled at them for failing to represent the wishes of their people, that would not negate the fact that the decisions they do make often work to achieve the desired outcome.
North Korea, on the other hand, is not running as a functional country in any sense of the word. The competence of the leadership is very much in question, and many of their past actions suggest a level of delusion that could potentially lead to very destructive behaviour.
While we have no absolute reference point, and thus can only make claims from our personal and cultural point of view, it is much easier to make an argument based on pure logic against a practise like this than it is to debate the relative merits of a lot of other cultural issues.
Which is still solved by a quick look at the logs. Any account with multiple login attempts from multiple IP addresses in rapid succession should be a huge red flag. Even without human review it's trivial to make the block on the account, not on the party that's trying to log in.
The real problem is striking a balance between complexity and usability. You don't need a botnet if you can grab the passwords using any number of social engineering techniques, many of which are made much easier when people are pushed into habits like writing their login details on post-it notes.
The Light of Other Days, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter would make a good addition to that list. It's a worthwhile read; the summary on Wikipedia really doesn't do it justice, IMO (and I'm too lazy to change it right now).