This is what I came to ask. I imagine any system with a lot of sensors and measurements of success (like the subway uptime) would be the low hanging fruits.
If the idea of self driving cars becomes popular in the next 15 years, you could mitigate a lot of traffic issues with correct planning (assuming a majority of the drivers use it).

If Facebook really wanted to help reduce global bandwidth and was willing to play hardball, they would just switch their images to webP suddenly, and display a message to update your browser if you cant see them. Microsoft would have to fold if suddenly their browser didn't show images. Not sure if FB is large enough to survive the backlash, but if they are we could see new codecs in IE within the month.

Who's to say they don't have a few coders working on better video codecs? They seem at least to be hiring for video chat: https://www.facebook.com/caree... Every bit counts with a site their size. Google doesn't even close its tags.

That is a really shitty comparison, they cheat and try to make Java look a lot slower than it is.

The Java version they used was 5 years old, asked the system what the total memory and free memory used was during the loop multiple times per iteration (none of the other ones ask in the loop even once), and uses immutable Strings rather than a StringBuilder.

Java, using Spring Boot with an AngularJS frontend.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

- Socrates, 469-399 B.C.

Don't worry too much. The children will grow up, and invent some shit that we haven't even thought of yet. Sure they may seem dumb to us now, but a few will learn and lead the rest.

People who boast about their I.Q. are losers. - Stephen Hawking

Underlying dangers: the user?

What we should do is research safe alternatives for languages (http://www.rust-lang.org/), more sandboxing of who can access what (SELinux, AppArmor), and better and simpler libraries (LibreSSL). No plugin Auto-run for untrusted sites.

Antivirus is cool and all, but its not as good as fixing the bugs. Unfortunately it is more profitable.

Also programmers would start getting paid like doctors, so costs would rise. (doctors who's patients were undergoing targeted attacks)

They probably will use a big version of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Attempt no landing there.

But seriously, cool stuff.

How do they plan to send communications back to earth from under the ice? I assume they will have a rover on the surface that will communicate with the diver and possibly a satellite, that will communicate with us.

This is good. We should not pay to have our products secretly weakened.

This is why distributed version control is important (git/mercurial), even if you think SVN is easier. Sometimes your remote server will disappear, whether its hackers, fires, or someone forgot to pay the bill.

What if someone cuts the water or power to the hospitol and mixes suger in the gas of the generator? There is no reason this should specifically include computers and not other attacks.

Of course, the whole point of a Cyber Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret. Why didn't you tell the world, eh?