*whooooosh*

Easy. By being targeted, Stuxnet style. They knew what IP blocks Sony Pictures uses, and it's quite easy to find machines on a local LAN and stay within it, and Sony is no doubt like most large corporations and links their offices via VPN, so machines at every location also look like the local LAN, so the worm can spread itself to everything it sees. And it can do so quietly. It doesn't have to make a lot of noise to do it. No excessive CPU usage, no excessive network traffic, no nonfunctioning services. It can grow and grow and grow, just as long as it doesn't disturb anything. Most Windows users never look at their process list, and even those who do could miss something with an innocuous sounding name.

And when it determines that it has infected everything it can reach, it contacts its command & control servers, again with innocuous traffic to innocuous looking IP addresses/domain names, and informs its creator that it's ready. The creator picks the time and hits the button, and it triggers its payload. And Sony is shut down for days. Now the worm is in aggressive mode, since it's out from under cover, so it will use all resources at its disposal (Sony's entire network) to keep itself intact and maintain control of the systems. It will aggressively scan for new systems coming online and aggressively try to take them over as quickly as possible. Hence the total shutdown. They're trying to scrape it out of their systems, so they have to disable its ability to reinfect. If they miss even one live instance, odds are good it will promptly reinvade all the freshly installed machines. It's a war. Sony should eventually win it, since it's their home ground and they therefore have physical control of the machines, but that's the only reason. Depending on which cloud services they're using and how, it could come right back in again. It could be a long war.

So in other words, give them an orgasm? Why is nobody volunteering to pay me off that way for my code??

No, you're not the only one. I thought that's what he's talking about. Of course, I was playing MechWarrior Online last night, so maybe that's why.

You are wanting to be commenting here.

Those few left who are inclined to mock my tinfoil hat...

There's no Cowboy Neal choice anymore because Dice is selling the Slashdot poll to the highest bidder. Whichever advertising/polling corporation buys access to it gets to put whatever options they want in it, and professional pollsters conducting srs bsns don't put in a Cowboy Neal option. They don't know what it means.

Is it the humorous option? Is it dissatisfaction with the other choices? Is it the correct choice? Is it none of the above? Is it all of the above? Is it both? Is it Cowboy Neal's choice?

They're trying to calibrate a model of how the Slashdot "audience" responds after they discovered the whole SOPA backlash has a significant stronghold here. (And the programmer who implemented Wikipedia's SOPA protest probably reads Slashdot.) They've found out that the Slashdot population doesn't fit the model, gets lost in the noise of the model, yet wields influence disproportionate to its numbers in certain narrow circumstances. The Cowboy Neal option just fouls up the modeling.

Those few left who are inclined to my my tinfoil hat are welcome to do so, but only after you answer this question: what did you have for breakfast this morning?

Even if you manage to find the resources, it will still be self-limiting. The singularity supposes that the first AIs will be designing the next generation of AIs. I think it's far more likely that they'll be trying to come up with new fart jokes, and channel surfing. People who want to design and build AIs are already rare. Why would artificial people designed to be like people be any more likely than people to want to design and build new people?

Now if only the dog had been writing the code, maybe Beta wouldn't suck so hard.

You're new here, aren't you? And by "here", I mean the Internet...

And the UHaul truck will self drive. Really, that was difficult to come up with? Rental agencies for both cars and trucks will be some of the first and most enthusiastic adopters, once the technology is proven. It reduces accidents, and therefore damage to their cars, and therefore improves the bottom line quite directly.

Such an overreach it's not even legal in the US, let alone most other places in the English-speaking world.

You can tell from their terms that the site was founded by some recent lawyer graduates and their scummy MBA friends. The recent lawyer graduates think they can write any terms they like and just because it's written down, it's legal. Their scummy MBA friends think wildly lopsided terms is a great way to make money. They got their MBAs from the Comcast School of Monopolistic Practices. They don't realize that you have to actually be the monopoly first before you can behave like one.

Whatever they paid Dice for this pathetic slashvertisement, it was too much. Unlike much of the world, Slashdot commenters can read.

That's not to say they won't make money with this scam. They're bottom feeding scum-sucking algae eaters, but it's a big ocean. There's plenty of bottom out of which to suck money. And who knows. Maybe one of their scummy users tweeting about Helpful (whatever the fuck that is) will hit it big. Kind of like a Kardashian. Doesn't seem likely to do well off of Slashdot though.

I'd bet money that buried in that 1000 pages is the justification White House lawyers can pull out to say that what he did is completely legal. Congress DID make the law. The Executive took advantage of some discretion clause somewhere. That's how 90% of the edifice that is the Executive Branch came into being. This is undoubtedly more of the same.

Judging by history, the poor and downtrodden are trivial to manipulate into completely discarding all thought of self preservation. "For king and country!" A rallying cry that worked for centuries. Nowadays it's "For God and country!" since kings are out of fashion. And I include recent history in that assessment. 407,000 American men died fighting World War II. Just how many oligarchs do you think were in those ranks? Zero. And how many sons of oligarchs? A few. A handful. Hundreds? Not likely. The American oligarchy is only 400 right now. It was even less then. Not a lot of sons available. You're claiming they fought because they were better off. I say they had forgotten how bad off they had been. The Great Depression was already a generation gone by the time World War II rolled around. Their parents remembered it, but those who fought and died were children in its aftermath, and unaware of their plight. No, they fought for the same old wheeze that worked before: "For king and country!"

Hydroelectric dams I'll give you. Insofar as there is anything to give. All useful rivers that can be dammed for power already have been, on this continent. There will be no more hydroelectric dams built in North America.

But solar panels? Solar panels are not high impact, despite being low density. There are 100 million roofs in the US. Factor in all the deficits and that's still a monstrous amount of power. We just have to use it. And the roofs are already there, so the deployment impact is zero. Manufacturing impact isn't zero, but it's basically the same as all those electronic toys people love so much, and Intel's chip fabs operate in the US, under US environmental regulations, and there's no big disaster happening there. They're primarily made out of sand. We've got lots of sand. Silicon is the second most abundant element the Earth is made of, after oxygen. Nobody will notice the bulldozing required to get enough of it. It's a very tiny drop in a very large bucket.