Chancellor Merkel is right: the Internet works best when predictable quality standards are available.

Chancellor Merkel is very carefully wrong. Predictable quality standards are orthogonal to net neutrality, but most people don't know that, so she gets away with claiming net neutrality conflicts with quality.

We'll take the quality standards. Codify uptime, packet loss, and latency requirements for residential Internet service. The providers are perfectly capable of achieving reasonable requirements in all of those categories. They will fight tooth and nail to avoid having any regulation of those categories though, because they want the option to let poor/low density/undesirable service areas go begging. An option they exercise daily right now.

Of course, they will never voluntarily offer such guarantees, at any price, so the market will never be able to express a desire to have those guarantees by choosing them. And of course, they will never be forced by law to provide those guarantees either, because they have money. Lots of money. Which is speech. And so the world turns, and what eventually gets passed into law with the name of Net Neutrality stamped on it will be the polar opposite of net neutrality, as these things always are.

I would say enjoy your free and open Internet while it lasts, but it's already too late for that for many of us.

I believe all Troll mods of roman_mir posts are automatically justified. He can't be doing anything but trolling, at this point.

That depends on the rating. If it's rated R, you get gallons of blood. If it's rated PG-13, even a wound from a .45 won't bleed appreciably, let alone have any sort of torn flesh. Obviously you, as a Rambo Tribble, only watch movies rated R, so you couldn't be expected to know this.

You are forgetting the Jamie Thomas case. Juries are apparently trivially simple to first select and then manipulate into awarding multi-million dollar infringement fines over 5 songs. Twice.

And this time the defendant is not in the least bit sympathetic. Rightscorp thinks they can ride anti-corporate and anti-ISP sentiment into a multi-billion dollar fine.

The Fucking Summary.

*woooosh*

*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.