I do not believe that ECC crypto is being added to XP SP3. If you want ECC crypto support, it is available in Vista.
XP SP3 is adding support for the SHA-2 hash family (SHA256, SHA384, and SHA512).
FIPS functionality is posted.
Microsoft's standard for symmetric encryption is AES 128 in CBC mode. 3 key 3 DES in CBC mode is an allowed alternative if AES is not availble.
Microsoft has some very competent cryptographers on its payroll and it does pay attention to progress in the field and the needs of security-critical customers.
Why do you call Google the good guys? Judge them by their actions, not by their words. Judge everybody by their actions, not by their words.
While it has been 30+ years since I met Brian, he is really really really bright. One of the biggest problems in the computer / software space is that most of the practicioners tend to dismiss the highly experienced people as old fogeys. As a consequence, they keep repeating the mistakes of earlier generations of developers in different guises.
I have experience if a few disciplines beyond SW. SW is more subject to snake-oil miricale claims than any other engineering / (hard) scientific field I know and it shows in the results. The amazing thing is how thoroughly they believe it.
The information presented in the article suggests that Google is probably guilty of age discrimination, which is a federal offense. I have no sympathy for them. Other SW businesses should review their internal biases as well.
I would not call Kerberos outdated. Kerberos is based upon the Needham-Schroeder (NS) secret key approach and provides a rather comparable functionality to public key approaches. NS needs key distribution servers and the associated ticket granting servers, but these are in a security sense equivalent to the CA's and RA's of the PKI world.You can build authentication architectures upon either. The NS approach is computationally more efficient than the RSA math typically used by PKI.
Kerberos is used extensively within Microsoft enterprise scenarios and is used in other non-Microsoft environments as well.
Both Kerberos and PKI present management difficulties as you try to expand across large numbers of domains / forests with diverse security policies.
If quantum computing ever truly breaks classic PKI approaches, the alternatives will be to develop PKI approaches that are more resistant to quantum attacks (problems are known that are believed to be resistant) and/or to use NS / Kerberos with doubled key length (quantum search attacks roughly square root the effective key size).
The LM hash is a old legacy security technology, ~ 20 years old, and like the crypto of its day, single key DES and 384 bit RSA, is weak. It is off by default in modern Microsoft products, where the more secure NTLMv2 is preferred. If you don't know what your policy is, simply use 15 character or larger passwords. The larger passwords disable the LM hash functionality, forcing movement to NTLM. If you use mixed case and add in numbers and special characters, the resulting large passwords are quite resistant to rainbow tables. My passwords are typically ~ 18 characters long. Cracking them with a cracker is goign to be rather expensive.
I haven't had any problems with superfetch, but I run Vista on desktop systems with only 1 GByte of memory. I go into system advanced properties and optimize for performance. Among other things, this turns off the glass transparency functionality and frees up a fair amount of RAM. I also turn off sidebar. I have an old Dell D610 notebook with 2 GBytes of RAM and a 2 GHz processor that runs Vista Ultimate quite well when configured that way.
If you can get one of the beta releases of server 2008, you will find that an enormous number of services have been turned off. Server runs well on minimal HW and makes a nice desktop as long as you don't want any media functionality.
The outside world knows that different majors have different requirements and makes the appropriate adjustments. Indeed, in many of the scientific and applied scientific fields, there is essentially an international standard of what is expected of students from an undergraduate, masters, or doctoral program. Reducing the expectation of the student unduly will degrade the institution's reputation. Getting such a degree shows that you have mastered a certain body of material to a recognized level as well as put up with organizational BS for the requisite time. This has value that is generally recognized.
After I passed my orals for my undergraduate honors exam in Physics, one of the examiners told me that they were looking to see if we "thought like physicists" far more than for the knowledge of any particular fact. I understand that some professors would issue "fact sheets" with their exams. These sheets contained all the constants, equations, etc that would be needed for the exam (and then some). The students needed to understand the material to solve the problems. Memorization had rather little value. The test then was on their understanding, command, and integration of the material.
It is an interesting approach. It certainly nailed the students who tried to get through on raw memorization or crib sheets. By the end of the symester, the more involved students were much more engaged and interested.
How big a barrier is this censorship to most consumers? Walmart is not the only major store to restrict their merchandise to avoid offending major market sectors. Porn vendors have always prospered selling material that larger vendors choose not to carry. To the extent that artists try to offend cultural mores (or appeal to consumers who want to offend cultural mores), they restrict the venues that will carry their wares - but they may increase the demand, depending upon the balance. I have always gone to specialized vendors for specialized wares. Walmart if not going to provide primers and smokeless powder for reloading, kevlar and graphite fabric and associated resin systems for repair, or multi-system VCR-DVD combo's. They also don't carry much in the way of niche media products that don't offend their guidelines. My last music purchases were a few classical CD's that I bought at a sale and a number of CD's of traditional Eastern European folk music that I bought from a supplier in Eastern Europe for ~ $6/disc.
The interesting question to me is the fact that musical copyright only lasts 50 years in England and much of Europe. Thus, individuals and organizations should be able to put "public domain" music on the web without offending their local laws. Interested individuals in countries where the copyright law period is now much longer should be able to access this, despite these materials being under local copyright. It could be interesting, particularily for somebody like me who is quite happy with very good 50 year old recordings (really good PL's started comming out ~ 50 years ago).
Actually, this brings up the even older Inmos Transputer, which we looked at when I was at Siemens Research in the mid 80's. They killed themselves by insisting that everybody go out and program in Occam.
It will be interesting to see how this works out. In practice, the development tools seem to be primary. If I can't develop for it easily, people don't and the product fails. Hence, you need development / cross development tools.
While the overall usage of FF is relatively modest at this point in the US, the usage of FF in many markets in Europe and elsewhere is truly significant (30% and better). Eventually, blocking FF to try and block the FF users who block adds will be economically self limiting.
Lets see now. Let us assume a usage distribution of 70% IE, 25% FF, and 5% Opera.
Lets assume that 40% of FF users use add blocking and that IE and opera users do not block adds
Blocking FF reduces their viewer base and add revenue by 25%, all to try and block the 10% of add "free riders"
It does not look like a reasonable business proposition to me.
Good comment. I would expect that a primary differentiator may be media density -- adds tend to try and drive emotional reactions via media inclusions. If I am filtering media, I supress at least the emotional-rich content from the add. If I am watching media material though, I can't do such a filter.
Since cookies are needed to maintain state / session information, I allow them, but tend to blow them away after my browsing session ends. But I restrict cookies only to the destination server and do not take third party cookies. If I am in suspicious mode, I use Opera with all scripting, media, etc off and cache and cookies are cleared upon closing the browser. There is no persistent information that an advertiser can use to target me.
We have another of the RIAA-class advertising madman here. There is nowhere that I signed any contract to watch adds on TV, listen to adds on radio, or pay attention to adds on my browser. The broadcaster or web site made an agreement to display the adds with the advertiser, for which they were paid, in the expectation that some faction of the viewers would watch the adds and that some (much) smaller fraction of those watchers would have their shopping behavior influenced by the add. And contrary to what that fool thinks, IE is quite capable of blocking much of the advertising issues -- I run IE7 in enhanced security configuration - no Java, Javascript, Flash, etc. If I need to go to a website and use Javascript, I use FireFox with the no-script plugin -- and I do not grant running permission to add servers. And if I think that I am going to hostile site, I use opera with everything disabled, including images - in essence I am using Opera to render plaintext HTML on the grounds that it is probably kept more current than Lynx.
I do expect that they will try to force advertising by integrating content with the advertising in active snap-ins, such as Flash. To the extent they do that, they drop off my radar -- I will never see them nor their associated products.
Judge Learned Hand, a noted jurist of a century ago once had a new attorney arguing a case in his court. After listening a while to the argument, he broke in on the new advocate's delievery with a statment "Sir. This is a court of law. It is not a court of justice. You must address matters of law.", or close equivalent.
Now what is law? It starts with the law as written by the appropriate legislature -- but nobody is really sure about what the words on paper mean, not the judges, not the attorneys, and not the prossecutors. It is only until the appeals courts have ruled on the meaning, that the legal interpretation is reasonably strong.
Large amounts of injustice are done when traditional interpretations hit new situations, and judges are in general not technologically literate, let alone following the latest fads. It is highly likely that a number of innocent people well have their lives ruined for the possession of illegal content about which they knew nothing. When the problem gets pervasive enough, defenses will arise and rules and procedures will change, but it is highly unlikely that anything will be done about the earlier ruined victims.
Plain soap got commoditized and the profit margin dropped. Hence, the manufacturers went looking for some new "improvement" that they could add that would allow them to command a price premium. Of course, once they saw incremental increases in sales for the "improved" competitive product, the other manufacturers followed. Now they all have the same situation with somewhat higher costs and we are worse off -- there is massive exposure to the chemical agents and the bugs are being selected for resistance. As for me, I have taken to buying my soap from a "organic" company just to avoid all the "extras". I have no problem using synthetic agents where apporpriate, but generic use is not appropriate.
As for germ phobia, I have a short, but relevant, observation.
When you are a first-time mother of a new-born, when the pacifier hits the ground you wash it off and sterilize it before it goes into the child's mouth again.
When your newborn second child drops their pacifier onto the ground, you wipe it off and stick it back in their mouth. After all, eating dirt didn't appear to hurt #1.
When your newborn third child drops their pacifier onto the ground, "Fido, fetch". Then you wipe the worst of the dog slobber off the pacifier and stick it back into their mouth. You have observed that dog germs and dirt didn't hurt numbers 1 and 2.
The craplets are installed by the hardware vendors because they are paid to install them. Indeed, it is likely that the payment for craplets is the profit margin for the PC's. I would expect that if and when vendors ship Linux distro's in large volume, you will see craplets installed by default also.
The vendors don't want you to have a clean OS disc. That is why they don't offer it.
Gutman's claim about home high resolution content restrictions in Vista is inaccurate. I have a friend who is handling home High defnition video on his Vista system without problems. I like DRM no more than you, but this claim is inaccurate.
Aside from driver issues (which will improve with time), the performance of Vista is not too bad -- there is a lot of pretty GUI that loads slower and lower memory machines down. Set the system to optimize for performance (which turns off aeroglas, among over things) and turning off sidebar, and you have reasonable performance.
I don't undersand the comment about XP SP3. To the best of my knowledge, it is in beta test release. I would expect that it should release to the market in 6 months or so. People running XP SP2 should update.
While the listed retail price for Windows is ~ $200, I rather expect that the incremental price from a hardwave vendor in the US is $50. In China and third world areas, it will probably be much loser.
The use of profanity as a rare emphasis allows it to convey emphasiis and deep feeling. In routine use, the information content of profanity approaches null. After being stuck with a bunch of teenagers revelling in the use of profanity on a camping trip 30 years ago, I burned out on its usage.
So, if the information transferred with use of profanity is approximately null and the side effect of the usage is needlessly offending others, it is wise to desist. If you are attempting to upset others and antagonize everybody around you, particularily in person, you start running into the relatively minor offense of "disturbing the peace". Of course I would not recommend trying such behavior in areas where the government does believe it should enforce moral behavior, there you find Governmentally backed morality police, such as we see in Saudia Arabia or Iran.
More seriously, I doubt that the government is too concerned about inappropriate language. I would expect them to go after corner cases in the pornography world. The problem here is that we should expect such content to be served by compromised servers and end user systems, where the machine owners know nothing about the illicit content. At the most recent DefCon in Las Vegas, there was a discussion about how to host improper content on web-based e-mail providers with specific discussions of Google and Yahoo mail usage.
It is not at all clear that govenments have any idea about how to deal with such malicious hosting and distribution mechanisms.
Actually, there was a mass shooting in Tasmania perhaps 20 years ago where the shooter killed something like 20 people before killing himself. The Australian government banned all semi-automatic rifles as a consequence and had a forced buy-back program. I would not be surprised if ownership of pistols is tightly controlled as well. I would note that our friends to the North in Canada also ban semi-automatic rifles as well as pistols. There was even a case in Ontario a few years ago where a on-duty American policeman in the Toronto area had his Glock seized and the local prosecutor wanted to try him for possession of a banned firearm -- a case of a combination of a stupidly worded law and pig-headedness.
I have to agree. I just returned from BlackHat and DefCon. Before I went I had tended to view "Web 2.0" as "Cross Site Scripting as a Feature". My view is now more negative and bleak. The combination of cross site scripting, cross site request forgery, DNS poisioning / anti pinning, and active content on the user's browser's is exceptionally powerful. There were a number of attacks discussed that were very serious. Since these vulnerabilities are server driven, there is essentially nothing that the user can do to protect themselves other than to block the functionality. Unfortunately, the state of the art in server deployments is very bad, not only do web masters deploy a lot of vulnerable web apps, but lots of web servers are compromised by attackers for the purpose of spreading their malware.
The smart web is the dangerous web -- the smarts are all too likely to be out to get you.
As for me, with a few exceptions, if a web site needs lots of scripting to make it work, I don't need it or use it.
Windows/Microsoft Update is in my trusted site zone
I use Firefox with noscript to enable only what I need for mapping functionality
Otherwise, Java, javascript, flash, multimedia, are all off.
I am old enough to remember the editor wars. I still use microemacs for some functionality, so you now know what my prefered editor religion was, but I was never a fanatic about it (emacs was big and vi was always there). People get needlessly pasionate about their tools, but tools are what the open souce movement is largely about. Space is different. The nerds vs. jocks angle is closer to correct than is comfortable. Human space flight, particularily to mars, is an entertainment mission. It is not science oriented, nor does it provide useful engineering development. I would never drop people down the martian gravity well. If you want people in space, look at the earth crossing asteroids. The energetics are not worse than the moon and you have enough available mass for reasonable radiation shielding.
Please note that while I work at Microsoft, I know no more than other industry workers who follow the news about the details. I am a security geek, not one of the marketing managers. China is not the only customer with source code access. A rather large number of large customers (both governments and large commercial customers) have access to the source code. Some 4+ years ago when I was working at a security startup, I was with a team that made a security pitch at a large NY financial company. During the course of the presentation I found out that the potential customer had a local copy of the source code in a secure lab that they used for bug hunting.
Many products other than Microsoft products have different pricing in different countries. Prescription drugs come to mind. This is not inappropriate or illegal. Indeed it is good business. It does provide an opportunity for grey market businessmen, but that is an issue for the manufacturer to deal with, not the legal system. If the R&D costs are paid by customers in the developed world, the manufacturer can still profit in much poorer markets as long as the they recover income above the marginal cost for manufacture, marketing, and distribution. Microsoft appears to be doing this. In the process, they increase the size and value of the Windows eccosystem and reduce the potential size of the Linux eccosystem. They also appear to tolerate a rather massive amount of piracy, which yields them no income now, but which clearly limits the scope of the Linux desktop. As Business Week recently pointed out, this is a good strategy.
Also note that Microsoft has gotten very clever in its bundling. If you can use the basic or starter packages from them, the price is not high. You pay a lot more for the luxury packages and you get neat UI and media features. But the core functionality and value is in the basic package. I bought a Vista Home Basic copy recently for an old XP system. I may have to boost the memory a bit, but my experience suggests that it should run adequately.
The claim of temperature tolerance for nano-mechanical devices is rather theoretical. As a former materials scientist, I would be cautious here. I would think that micro-planar vacuum tubes would be far more feasible. There were reports a decade ago about the feasibility of such devices. I don't think that research money was ever granted, as the need for digital electronics that could work at ~ 1000C is rather modest.
My observation is that desktops are far more reliable and easier to maintain than notebooks. I depend upon my notebook, but I have observed that the desktop systems have a far longer life than the notebooks -- after all, the desktop systems aren't being carried around and dropped all the time. I can easily replace a damaged keyboard that didn't like the cola or coffee that it got in the morning. My notebook wouldn't be quite so cheap to repair (we don't use MIL spec toughbooks). But I think that the analyst missed something important.
I am seeing an increasing number of people switch most of their activity to their smart phones / PDA's. These can sync up with their e-mail and schedule SW (in our case, Exchange) and enable the user to perform basic office productivity functionality. By term-serving to backend servers, they get access to large data stores and multiple processors. The small size makes them hard to use (but easy to carry), but if they become more open systems so that the user can load software of their choice and are coupled with cradles that provide full sized keyboards, displays, etc, I could easily see a massive switch. In this case, the home "desktop" system could migrate to a home "server" role for those people who do not want to trust everything to the cloud (I am one of these untrusting paranoid people).
I suspect that the lines in the parachute would be vaporized upon entry. The cone provides a heat-shield type environment that is reasonably stable until the velocity drops to a reasonable level.
Personally, I think this is a waste of money and time. Use probes. Why do we want to drop down a gravity well anyway? If we are going into space, go for the smaller bodies (asteroids / pseudo-comets, etc). The energetics for the earth crossing asteroids are definitely favorable and they have available mass that can be used for radition shielding, solving the fatal problem of high energy cosmics for the martian trip.
Please note that I know nothing whatsoever about Microsoft's activity in this area.
The libertarian definition of government is an organization that claims a legal monopoly on violence in a region. No company or organization is going to long survive direct and focused government duress - its assets will be seized and its staff find themselves contemplating uncomfortable surroundings. That said, everyone should expect that organizations will comply with court orders / security directives (at lease once they have exhaused their appeals processes, if any). Privacy does not trump law.
Judge Learned Hand once admonished a new attorney with something along the following lines "Sir, this is a court of law. It is not a court of justice." Do not attempt to extrapolate your values to the law.
All nations have a need to conduct covert survelience. This may involve software, hardware, human intelligence, etc. It is reasonable to assume that they will make reasonable efforts to preserve these capabilities. Draw your own conclusions. Officials with a court warrant can covertly plant HW monitoring systems in target systems. Such attacks will compromise the system regardless of the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
XP SP3 is adding support for the SHA-2 hash family (SHA256, SHA384, and SHA512).
FIPS functionality is posted.
Microsoft's standard for symmetric encryption is AES 128 in CBC mode. 3 key 3 DES in CBC mode is an allowed alternative if AES is not availble.
Microsoft has some very competent cryptographers on its payroll and it does pay attention to progress in the field and the needs of security-critical customers.
It is also good business.
But the federal law carried real penalties and it should be enforced far more vigorously.
Why do you call Google the good guys? Judge them by their actions, not by their words. Judge everybody by their actions, not by their words. While it has been 30+ years since I met Brian, he is really really really bright. One of the biggest problems in the computer / software space is that most of the practicioners tend to dismiss the highly experienced people as old fogeys. As a consequence, they keep repeating the mistakes of earlier generations of developers in different guises. I have experience if a few disciplines beyond SW. SW is more subject to snake-oil miricale claims than any other engineering / (hard) scientific field I know and it shows in the results. The amazing thing is how thoroughly they believe it. The information presented in the article suggests that Google is probably guilty of age discrimination, which is a federal offense. I have no sympathy for them. Other SW businesses should review their internal biases as well.
Kerberos is used extensively within Microsoft enterprise scenarios and is used in other non-Microsoft environments as well.
Both Kerberos and PKI present management difficulties as you try to expand across large numbers of domains / forests with diverse security policies.
If quantum computing ever truly breaks classic PKI approaches, the alternatives will be to develop PKI approaches that are more resistant to quantum attacks (problems are known that are believed to be resistant) and/or to use NS / Kerberos with doubled key length (quantum search attacks roughly square root the effective key size).
The LM hash is a old legacy security technology, ~ 20 years old, and like the crypto of its day, single key DES and 384 bit RSA, is weak. It is off by default in modern Microsoft products, where the more secure NTLMv2 is preferred. If you don't know what your policy is, simply use 15 character or larger passwords. The larger passwords disable the LM hash functionality, forcing movement to NTLM. If you use mixed case and add in numbers and special characters, the resulting large passwords are quite resistant to rainbow tables. My passwords are typically ~ 18 characters long. Cracking them with a cracker is goign to be rather expensive.
If you can get one of the beta releases of server 2008, you will find that an enormous number of services have been turned off. Server runs well on minimal HW and makes a nice desktop as long as you don't want any media functionality.
The outside world knows that different majors have different requirements and makes the appropriate adjustments. Indeed, in many of the scientific and applied scientific fields, there is essentially an international standard of what is expected of students from an undergraduate, masters, or doctoral program. Reducing the expectation of the student unduly will degrade the institution's reputation. Getting such a degree shows that you have mastered a certain body of material to a recognized level as well as put up with organizational BS for the requisite time. This has value that is generally recognized.
It is an interesting approach. It certainly nailed the students who tried to get through on raw memorization or crib sheets. By the end of the symester, the more involved students were much more engaged and interested.
The interesting question to me is the fact that musical copyright only lasts 50 years in England and much of Europe. Thus, individuals and organizations should be able to put "public domain" music on the web without offending their local laws. Interested individuals in countries where the copyright law period is now much longer should be able to access this, despite these materials being under local copyright. It could be interesting, particularily for somebody like me who is quite happy with very good 50 year old recordings (really good PL's started comming out ~ 50 years ago).
It will be interesting to see how this works out. In practice, the development tools seem to be primary. If I can't develop for it easily, people don't and the product fails. Hence, you need development / cross development tools.
Lets see now. Let us assume a usage distribution of 70% IE, 25% FF, and 5% Opera.
Lets assume that 40% of FF users use add blocking and that IE and opera users do not block adds
Blocking FF reduces their viewer base and add revenue by 25%, all to try and block the 10% of add "free riders"
It does not look like a reasonable business proposition to me.
Since cookies are needed to maintain state / session information, I allow them, but tend to blow them away after my browsing session ends. But I restrict cookies only to the destination server and do not take third party cookies. If I am in suspicious mode, I use Opera with all scripting, media, etc off and cache and cookies are cleared upon closing the browser. There is no persistent information that an advertiser can use to target me.
I do expect that they will try to force advertising by integrating content with the advertising in active snap-ins, such as Flash. To the extent they do that, they drop off my radar -- I will never see them nor their associated products.
Now what is law? It starts with the law as written by the appropriate legislature -- but nobody is really sure about what the words on paper mean, not the judges, not the attorneys, and not the prossecutors. It is only until the appeals courts have ruled on the meaning, that the legal interpretation is reasonably strong.
Large amounts of injustice are done when traditional interpretations hit new situations, and judges are in general not technologically literate, let alone following the latest fads. It is highly likely that a number of innocent people well have their lives ruined for the possession of illegal content about which they knew nothing. When the problem gets pervasive enough, defenses will arise and rules and procedures will change, but it is highly unlikely that anything will be done about the earlier ruined victims.
As for germ phobia, I have a short, but relevant, observation.
When you are a first-time mother of a new-born, when the pacifier hits the ground you wash it off and sterilize it before it goes into the child's mouth again.
When your newborn second child drops their pacifier onto the ground, you wipe it off and stick it back in their mouth. After all, eating dirt didn't appear to hurt #1.
When your newborn third child drops their pacifier onto the ground, "Fido, fetch". Then you wipe the worst of the dog slobber off the pacifier and stick it back into their mouth. You have observed that dog germs and dirt didn't hurt numbers 1 and 2.
The vendors don't want you to have a clean OS disc. That is why they don't offer it.
Gutman's claim about home high resolution content restrictions in Vista is inaccurate. I have a friend who is handling home High defnition video on his Vista system without problems. I like DRM no more than you, but this claim is inaccurate.
Aside from driver issues (which will improve with time), the performance of Vista is not too bad -- there is a lot of pretty GUI that loads slower and lower memory machines down. Set the system to optimize for performance (which turns off aeroglas, among over things) and turning off sidebar, and you have reasonable performance.
I don't undersand the comment about XP SP3. To the best of my knowledge, it is in beta test release. I would expect that it should release to the market in 6 months or so. People running XP SP2 should update.
While the listed retail price for Windows is ~ $200, I rather expect that the incremental price from a hardwave vendor in the US is $50. In China and third world areas, it will probably be much loser.
So, if the information transferred with use of profanity is approximately null and the side effect of the usage is needlessly offending others, it is wise to desist. If you are attempting to upset others and antagonize everybody around you, particularily in person, you start running into the relatively minor offense of "disturbing the peace". Of course I would not recommend trying such behavior in areas where the government does believe it should enforce moral behavior, there you find Governmentally backed morality police, such as we see in Saudia Arabia or Iran.
More seriously, I doubt that the government is too concerned about inappropriate language. I would expect them to go after corner cases in the pornography world. The problem here is that we should expect such content to be served by compromised servers and end user systems, where the machine owners know nothing about the illicit content. At the most recent DefCon in Las Vegas, there was a discussion about how to host improper content on web-based e-mail providers with specific discussions of Google and Yahoo mail usage.
It is not at all clear that govenments have any idea about how to deal with such malicious hosting and distribution mechanisms.
Actually, there was a mass shooting in Tasmania perhaps 20 years ago where the shooter killed something like 20 people before killing himself. The Australian government banned all semi-automatic rifles as a consequence and had a forced buy-back program. I would not be surprised if ownership of pistols is tightly controlled as well. I would note that our friends to the North in Canada also ban semi-automatic rifles as well as pistols. There was even a case in Ontario a few years ago where a on-duty American policeman in the Toronto area had his Glock seized and the local prosecutor wanted to try him for possession of a banned firearm -- a case of a combination of a stupidly worded law and pig-headedness.
The smart web is the dangerous web -- the smarts are all too likely to be out to get you.
As for me, with a few exceptions, if a web site needs lots of scripting to make it work, I don't need it or use it.
Windows/Microsoft Update is in my trusted site zone
I use Firefox with noscript to enable only what I need for mapping functionality
Otherwise, Java, javascript, flash, multimedia, are all off.
I am old enough to remember the editor wars. I still use microemacs for some functionality, so you now know what my prefered editor religion was, but I was never a fanatic about it (emacs was big and vi was always there). People get needlessly pasionate about their tools, but tools are what the open souce movement is largely about. Space is different. The nerds vs. jocks angle is closer to correct than is comfortable. Human space flight, particularily to mars, is an entertainment mission. It is not science oriented, nor does it provide useful engineering development. I would never drop people down the martian gravity well. If you want people in space, look at the earth crossing asteroids. The energetics are not worse than the moon and you have enough available mass for reasonable radiation shielding.
Many products other than Microsoft products have different pricing in different countries. Prescription drugs come to mind. This is not inappropriate or illegal. Indeed it is good business. It does provide an opportunity for grey market businessmen, but that is an issue for the manufacturer to deal with, not the legal system. If the R&D costs are paid by customers in the developed world, the manufacturer can still profit in much poorer markets as long as the they recover income above the marginal cost for manufacture, marketing, and distribution. Microsoft appears to be doing this. In the process, they increase the size and value of the Windows eccosystem and reduce the potential size of the Linux eccosystem. They also appear to tolerate a rather massive amount of piracy, which yields them no income now, but which clearly limits the scope of the Linux desktop. As Business Week recently pointed out, this is a good strategy.
Also note that Microsoft has gotten very clever in its bundling. If you can use the basic or starter packages from them, the price is not high. You pay a lot more for the luxury packages and you get neat UI and media features. But the core functionality and value is in the basic package. I bought a Vista Home Basic copy recently for an old XP system. I may have to boost the memory a bit, but my experience suggests that it should run adequately.
The claim of temperature tolerance for nano-mechanical devices is rather theoretical. As a former materials scientist, I would be cautious here. I would think that micro-planar vacuum tubes would be far more feasible. There were reports a decade ago about the feasibility of such devices. I don't think that research money was ever granted, as the need for digital electronics that could work at ~ 1000C is rather modest.
I am seeing an increasing number of people switch most of their activity to their smart phones / PDA's. These can sync up with their e-mail and schedule SW (in our case, Exchange) and enable the user to perform basic office productivity functionality. By term-serving to backend servers, they get access to large data stores and multiple processors. The small size makes them hard to use (but easy to carry), but if they become more open systems so that the user can load software of their choice and are coupled with cradles that provide full sized keyboards, displays, etc, I could easily see a massive switch. In this case, the home "desktop" system could migrate to a home "server" role for those people who do not want to trust everything to the cloud (I am one of these untrusting paranoid people).
Personally, I think this is a waste of money and time. Use probes. Why do we want to drop down a gravity well anyway? If we are going into space, go for the smaller bodies (asteroids / pseudo-comets, etc). The energetics for the earth crossing asteroids are definitely favorable and they have available mass that can be used for radition shielding, solving the fatal problem of high energy cosmics for the martian trip.
The libertarian definition of government is an organization that claims a legal monopoly on violence in a region. No company or organization is going to long survive direct and focused government duress - its assets will be seized and its staff find themselves contemplating uncomfortable surroundings. That said, everyone should expect that organizations will comply with court orders / security directives (at lease once they have exhaused their appeals processes, if any). Privacy does not trump law.
Judge Learned Hand once admonished a new attorney with something along the following lines "Sir, this is a court of law. It is not a court of justice." Do not attempt to extrapolate your values to the law.
All nations have a need to conduct covert survelience. This may involve software, hardware, human intelligence, etc. It is reasonable to assume that they will make reasonable efforts to preserve these capabilities. Draw your own conclusions. Officials with a court warrant can covertly plant HW monitoring systems in target systems. Such attacks will compromise the system regardless of the OS.