Yeah, I had read that, too. By took control I meant literally "took control". They infiltrated it (and there are rumors there was an insider to help with that) but then they activated everything very quickly, without warning, and basically stole data and destroyed the servers before anyone had a chance to do anything.

My point was the overall attack was way WAY beyond some simple trojan worm getting an admin password...

Really? Apparently they quickly took control of almost every one one of Sony's servers and workstations. Literally took entire control, stole all of the useful data, wiped out all of their servers, and then owned all of the workstations so that they were useless but able to broadcast any message they wanted to them.

That's a *bit* more coordinated than "your average trojan worm". Unless you really think based on extremely limited information you know more than all of the security researchers and government investigators looking into it... (hint: sorry, you don't).

Not samba, SMB. Samba is just the name of the open source Windows SMB server implementation. Most likely they were targeting Windows machines (though I admit I haven't seen anything on that either way).

Also, it's highly unlikely (but also possible I guess) they had SMB open to the Internet. But they just needed to compromise one internal machine (almost trivial these days) to attack SMB...

Umm, I think you answered that question already. You don't think North Korea's cyberterrorism military unit just might be part of those "privileged few"?

Maybe because their Supreme Leader is a total loon? This is the same guy who has among hundreds of other insane actions decreed that anyone with his name needed to change it immediately. He lives for drama and vanity and wants his citizens to think of him as a demigod. He's a fucking international drama queen of the highest level...

Science, technology, engineering, and math. You are 25 years old, have a bachelors, and are beyond that. You can probably change fields if you have the aptitude, but you are way beyond "STEM". Those are basic education areas, not careers.

Not just risky in CA - impossible. Because everyone knows the drought *will* end in less than 20 years, so if there is enough rainwater to cover usage the plants will be shutdown and not profitable. The technological solution will be something that has a relatively low initial capital investment but a possibly high recurring cost.

Whoosh!

Oh bullshit.

The US government obviously secretly spies on citizens just like Russia and most other countries. Yeah, it's annoying but you are naive if you think it's not ubiquitous.

But the US does not imprison journalists and artists for things like speaking badly of the government or singing an "offensive" song in a church.

Google was worried their employees in Russia would be held criminally accountable for draconian spying and censorship laws, and so they decided it wasn't worth risking. They aren't worried their US employers will be held criminally accountable for not turning over data without a warrant or not censoring information, because those are not illegal.

Even more interesting related to this - a patent troll tried to sue ANY APP (yes, not just the hardware, but all apps) that used an auto-rotate feature. Even though their patent was granted 9 years after the Radius Pivot.

Luckily Backspace got pissed off when they were sued over it, and made sure it was invalidated...

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/...

You say that, but when I went to look for these fact-based, entirely rational posts this is the first one I found:

The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine nearly killed me when I was a child.

Take a look at vaccine adjuvants. Doctors are not scientists, they are business people, and use a lot of hocus-pocus for financial and other reasons. For a large part doctors and biologists have no clue what they are really doing.

I'd happily mode that down if I had mod points...

*I* wouldn't, but the fact is probably something like 20% of the population would (ok, percentage made up but you *know* it's double digits...)

And you know, it might just be the kind of culling we need. Sort of a reverse-Idiocracy initiative.

1. Who cares, it just took one case to invalidate it for everyone in that municipality.
2. We were talking about electricity, not water. But nonetheless, the water hookup was required because they *did* keep the sewer hookup, and they were part of the same package. The fact is the judge was reasonable. If they wanted to go completely off the grid they should move out to where they can use a septic tank and do whatever they want with their water.

Except those are all old and have been mostly dismissed by judges. Basically, the cities tried and the judges reasonably ruled the statutes were invalid. And if you look for other sources, you quickly realize these are the tiny minority, and most cities don't really care.

Actually already saw that one, and it's not a good example. It's from March, and if YOU had actually searched better (or found a less biased source), you'd have found that almost all (including the electricity requirement) was later dismissed by a judge.

I agree - so I looked it up and apparently they *were* doing this (via investments):

http://www.solarcity.com/newsr...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

But then their new CEO decided to abandon them:

http://www.bizjournals.com/san...

And then they changed their mind *again* and wanted to invest, but the PUC decided against it:

https://gigaom.com/2012/05/10/...

So, basically WTF. It's a complicated situation...