So basically the only way to hack them is either raid a workstation on the network
Doable if you have an agent inside. Aren't those workstations tamper-proof, though?
splice some fiber
That's not a big problem. Send a clumsy contractor, tear the cable, and then send some other contractor to repair the damage. The link will be better than new:-)
or hijack a satellite
If you are routing your ciphertext over a satellite link then Chinese military only needs to point an antenna at it to intercept everything. Then crack the encryption. It might be difficult, but it would be even harder without the ciphertext:-)
Those are awfully dangerous and scary things. Underestimating an opponent may prompt a war that will be expected to be brief but in reality will drag for years (Iraq). Overestimating an opponent may cause the feeling of an imminent threat where none exists, and you can be attacked over that presumed threat. Giving them ideas? And what if they succeed? Finally, pushing the opponent into a certain direction also reveals your intentions, and the player can be played in return.
But this would be fortunately useless because countries do not act on a single piece of information unless there is no other source. History knows a few examples of such single-source deceptions, but they are mostly wartime tricks, where the opponent is forced to decide here and now. In peace time it's far more likely to have hundreds of agents dispatched to check on the information, and you can not be sure that they won't find any of your real secrets...
IMO, full awareness of other side's intentions and capabilities, provided that they are matched well, was the best guarantee of peace in 20th century. I do not know if this will remain so in this century.
You could be right, and none of/.ters can say for sure (if anyone can they won't.) But here is one catch in what you said:
What I can tell you is that either way, it will cost the Russians and Chinese this much money and take them this long to figure it out.
That can be also seen as this:
"What I can tell you is that either way, we awakened the previously sleeping dogs, and the intelligence services of two largest countries on the planet will not rest until they find out for sure if we were fooling them or not. To that end they may even steal propellers from our subs on missions, but since it's not my department I don't care, even if on this quest they accidentally stumble onto something else that we'd like to keep hidden."
I think all this can be translated as "Bring it on!" and I heard it not that long ago already. Meanwhile intelligence bosses of several countries are probably singing and dancing, expecting new budgets for this project (they don't care if it is a wild goose chase or not.)
Satellites do not offer sufficient resolution, and that could be the reason for ignoring them. For example, an AC posted the link to a Chinese sub base. Even if we assume that the military photos are of better resolution, still you won't see the details.
This photo, however, was apparently taken from an airplane. A different question is then what the said airplane was doing near a supposedly secret site? Or what the [no longer] secret site is doing in the middle of a densely populated area? Or how good a camera can you fit onto an RC plane?
In any case, the whole business is strange. But if I have to choose between a security oversight by the dock workers and the ingenious plan to fool foreign spies, Occam's Razor suggests to pick the oversight.
I'm so much not a lawyer I don't understand something here. You assert that "Violation of the Fourth Amendment is not a crime. It's a procedural violation." But then I started thinking:
The Constitution is a law in this country. Some even say that it's The Supreme Law.
Breaking a law is called "crime".
Therefore if you violate the Constitution you are committing a crime.
What makes the teacher think that one minute after he stopped talking everyone has captured and memorized everything? I was never subjected to such quick polls, and if I were I'd say "what do you want from me, I haven't had a chance to review my notes and to reflect upon what I just heard."
Understanding of a lecture is not equal to memorizing it, and even the understanding is not guaranteed to occur instantly; some things you just circle and write on the margins "Where did this come from? Check with the book." instead of interrupting the lecture for everyone else. The teacher won't disappear in any case, so you can always ask separately, but in my experience it is plain impossible that nobody else in your class knows the answer to whatever confuses me.
Well, you packed two different messages into one statement, allow me to separate them.
The photo would confirm the design. This is mildly important because the data stolen or bought or otherwise procured can always be intentionally planted. If you get an independent confirmation it's helpful - not much, but a little.
Another, more important and not disclosed until now fact - which you also mentioned - is that the USA still uses this design of the propeller, and not invented something better. 30-year old drawings can't tell you that, but a spy (or a photo) can.
The latter revelation is something that the USA's competitors in the sub business would like to know. The former they indeed know already.
It's cool but not always educational. For example, at work I use a tool sometimes that is called Microwave Office (it's an expensive RF design CAD.) It has this feature. You can change the value of any component in the circuit and see how various graphs are affected. However to get anything useful out of this function you need to know in theory why this happens and how. Just seeing peaks and valleys appearing and disappearing is not very exciting.
Besides, most of engineering work involves far more than two or three dimensions; if you for example want to model the effect of tolerances of 100 components then you are looking right there at a 101-dimensional problem (and likely more.) Plotting of such a surface would be impossible. Engineers usually minimize the effort by disregarding minor effects and focusing on major factors, followed by numeric simulation of the circuit around sensitive points in, say, 100-dimensional space.
his examples, or whatever else he'd write on the board
He'd write the question first, then some approaches to solution, and then maybe a solution, step by step, explaining everything as he writes it. If you dump a screenful of formulas onto students they'd be just confused. Even when mathematicians and physicists write in magazines for their peers they take care to explain everything that is not obvious (and by that I mean "obvious to professionals working in the field for years".)
As I recall my school years I do not really believe that technology would have improved the teaching of theoretical matters. In many engineering disciplines the "physical meaning" of equations exists only as the input and the output, but everything in between is pure math and abstract operators, of which you just know what they do.
And another note here - "saving time" is not what the teacher is for. If he were to save time, he'd just read a textbook aloud, while students are following him in their own copies of the same textbook. The teacher explains things that the book really means but doesn't say. Some people do not require a teacher, they are fine with a book. But most people study better when a teacher explains and they write it down because that involves a different, active kind of memory. Myself, I remember writing comments on "why and how" where the textbook just said "applying obvious transformations to (3.171) and solving for $foo we get (3.172) which is..." - but the teacher actually went through the motions of reduction and solution so that we also could do it. This way if you studied how a two-port adding circuit works you can design an any-number-of-ports adding circuit, for a simple example. And when someone asks "what will happen if the values of R1, R7 and R13 drift due to the temperature rise from 25C to 125C" you know what to do, and not just stand there like a proverbial deer staring into oncoming headlights.
A "group" of enemy submarines would have to be very lucky indeed to get close enough to score a hit on a carrier.
This missile can be launched from undersea position 290 km away from the target:
The missile is in service with the Indian Navy. The missile is fitted on the Rajput class of destroyers. The submarine launched version of the missile is ready for testing. The missile will be either tested on a Kilo class submarine of the Indian Navy or will be tested in Russia.
I would not call 200 miles a close range. A WWII torpedo was a close range weapon; a Shkval torpedo is a close range weapon. I have no idea what is the protected area around the group, but it can't be that large, and even one such missile can give a heart attack to the carrier group commander, if it misses or is shot down. If it doesn't miss then forget the heart attack, there wouldn't be enough time left for that.
Of course, the attack does not have to occur in the air - a common 30 yr old 65-76 torpedo (designed in 1976) has range of about 62 miles - if a CG can protect even that circle it is doing better than good. Officially China and Russia have those.
f you have a carrier group, you own the ocean [...] for the simple reason that you know where you are, and the enemy doesn't.
This is applicable to submarines which may be a part of CG, but the whole group is hard to fail to notice in, say, Persian Gulf. You may not even need binoculars. The attackers found USS Cole with their eyes tightly shut. And that's one of the reasons why Iran seemingly has the following:
In early 2000 it was reported that North Korea and Iran were jointly developing an advanced version of the C-802 missile. The missiles initially acquired by Iran from China were rather outdated, and Iran turned to North Korea for missile system technology. The two countries are jointly developing an upgraded version with improved accuracy.
(quoted from the linked Wikipedia article.)
And of course we should not forget about the older hardware, Iraq has some, and Iran probably also has:
It is based on Shang You (SY), meaning Upstream anti-ship missile, which in turn, was based on the Russian SS-N-2 Styx missile. The missile looks almost identical to the Shang You (SY) anti-ship missile, and has similar performance. It has a maximum range of 95 km, with a 513 kilogram payload. Silkworm missiles are 7.36 metres long, and weigh 2988 kg. They can be launched from semi-mobile (towed) launchers or from ships.
The 95 km range is more than enough to cover the whole area of interest. So the carriers are vulnerable if the incoming missiles are arriving faster, closer to the sea, or in larger quantities than the Aegis can protect against. Wikipedia lists its tracking capacity of 100+ targets (with no mentioning on how many targets can be fired upon, which may be classified, or just dependent on how many ships are available, or both.) So if an opponent initiates a land-based attack they can launch 200 missiles, or 300, all at once - and a few of them will make it through.
I was specifically mentioning pointers to large, complex data structures that often contain pointers to other, even more complex data structures. You can find those everywhere, for example look for LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES and follow the pointers and the methods that manipulate them. It's a lot of work to code it all correctly, and it's a lot of time to run it. If you code WDM drivers then such structures are everywhere, even to convert one ASCII string into one UNICODE string. You can see some code here.
With regard to 17 ways to do something, it's easy. Look at ReadFile vs. ReadFileEx, OpenFile vs. CreateFile vs. CreateFileTransacted - they are all generally doing the same thing. This was caused by freezing the API at various points in time, and when it was discovered that this and that function can't be implemented in existing API then a new method was concocted, with just the parameters for that new function, and so on.
But there are even more fundamental differences, when the whole API gets deprecated. For example, the Waveform API - you still can use it, but it's not nice and does not always offer you the best results. DirectX / DirectSound is more appropriate these days, though XAudio2 is also interesting, though you'd better know about X3DAudio if you are making games, though DirectSound3D could replace it for you. Fortunately, on Vista there is WASAPI in between the stack and the hardware, which only adds fun to the scope of your testing:-)
An interface is slow when it commonly requires chains of arcane data structures as parameters, and many Win32 API calls do just that. An interface is buggy when there are 17 ways to do something, each producing a slightly different result. Windows API developed both of these traits over the years, and I only pity Microsoft for that, not blame them. But here they are, with a junk Win32 API and with a newer.NET layer built on top of that.
I tend to agree just because otherwise it would presume a really complicated hoax with a low chance of success (such as fooling a foreign government.) You'd have to replace the propeller, then make Microsoft or whoever takes pictures to take them, then you'd have to activate your agent to post the photos on a blog, and even then you'd still not know if the photo fooled anyone or not, since your adversary wouldn't be a complete idiot, so the fake must be realistic and mostly working.
With regard to the photo, what you have there is effectively one blade photographed from seven different angles. This allows the "other side" (whatever that is) to combine them to get a higher resolution.
But the main issue here is there are not too many countries in the world that would even care about such things. NATO countries probably don't need this photo, they have the real stuff. Russia is rumored to have procured such propeller designs about 25 years ago, and likely has enough computing power to improve on them as needed. China probably has many agents everywhere as well, you can't possibly keep such large things secret for long. What other countries then would want to know how to design a silent propeller, considering that even milling machines required to build the blades are not sold over the counter to anyone who asks, and they are not cheap either, and you have to have a solid manufacturing base to even produce the metal for the blades. So it's an expensive, high-tech business that only a handful of countries have the need and the money to get into. Not all major countries build submarines, many prefer to buy.
Self-replicating robots could build you a Moon or Mars base before you even land. Or would you prefer to haul rocks yourself, in a spacesuit, for 12 hours per day, just a year away from Earth in case if you break a leg?
Self-replicating function here is essential because it covers repairs, and those will be essential. Besides, it might be difficult to send more than a handful of robots ahead of time, and definitely not thousands.
the post office stamped ink across the seams of the envelope - presumably to ensure that it wasn't opened.
The postal worker - if it is a human and not a machine - is not likely to notice or care that there is very little glue on the envelope, just as you intended. Besides, everyone knows that an envelope sealed with a standard water-soluble glue can be easily opened with steam.
One still can try this method, of course, but your multi-million dollar wealth will be wholly dependent on a lowly paid postal worker who may or may not testify that 20 years ago you paid him to stamp an empty envelope - regardless of whether it is true. It's much more difficult to purchase a false testimony from a lawyer, he has far more to lose, and he is far more likely to keep legally reliable records of everything he does.
But the original question is so unnatural and contrived I don't even understand why I post this:-) If the OP is "an Open Source, free-to-the world sort of person" and "willing to share my knowledge to the world," then why isn't it the easiest to just send it to the USPTO a day before you start screaming all about your invention from the rooftops? USPTO will most definitely timestamp all the incoming correspondence, and it would be a challenge for anyone to attack that timestamp.
You do know, of course, that the Sixaxis controller has two (2) three-axis analog sticks (3rd axis is on-off), and two analog triggers (R2 and L2) ? This amounts to exactly six independent analog channels, as the name of the controller suggests. Aside from that it has twelve more on-off buttons. Also it has a built-in accelerometer to detect when you move the controller itself, this is used in Resistance, for example, to perform a specific defense move.
I do not want to say here that a controller is better (or worse) than a keyboard + mouse, I saw the flame wars on the subject and I myself was raised on the PC hardware. However it is clearly unfair to claim lack of control when the mouse has only two axes and keyboard has no analog channels at all. You do have a sea of keys, and I can imagine that some games may need them (to operate giant robots, for example.) That is all fine. But as you also probably know that the Unreal Tournament for PS3 will support the mouse and keyboard as well, so all camps should be perfectly happy, and I personally will try all the input devices, why not?
With regard to "complex, intelligent, thoughtful games" I have no comments because I am unsure what exactly you mean. Chess, for example, is all that but it is not demanding on input, and you can play chess with any input device and it won't affect your results. Thief, as another game, runs on PC and X-box, and I would call it complex and thoughtful, but I played it on a PC with one-axis mouse and WASD keys; the few inputs beyond that are to crouch, select weapons and throw bombs, that is easy to support with any console controller in existence.
You guessed right, I have several Autodesk products, and Autodesk completely enslaved themselves to MS. Autodesk Inventor 2008 even has all the icons and buttons redone to match Vista. Still sits in the box, it's a free upgrade and I haven't deployed it yet.
One trouble with those apps - and we have quite a few - it's that they are all expensive and many of them require extensive vendor support. Autodesk is not the worst, they are angels compared to couple of other vendors, and one of those horribly bad packages costs above $20K. It is unthinkable to run it on anything but the approved OS, or else you'd be kicked out of support in no time and with pleasure. And it's not Windows that crashes, it's the CAD software itself; it usually does not crash but just doesn't work right, and you have to open a support case and be on the remote desktop session with them until they figure out what workaround you need today. So with partners like that one has to stick to every requirement.
It is true that one has to weigh the availability of apps. For home use, though, a Mac is probably just fine, and for many people Linux is fine also. I can imagine if you depend on MS Money, for example, then you'd be in trouble, but Quicken for Mac is readily available for mere $70. What else would a typical home user need?
But at work, that's another story. Unless you are working in a Mac shop, or unless your duties are mere wordprocessing and email, you'd be often unable to fit a Mac into the process, and Linux would be similarly "against the grain." If your work depends on a Windows app then forget it; always use the right tool for the job.
Nevertheless what I meant is still true, and who cares what your employer wants you to run - it's not your personal computer, and not your worry. What you buy for your own use is your worry, and that's where you can vote with your money.
Well, you do lose PC games, since rare a game works under WINE. But I personally fixed this issue by just getting a console, and I am not sorry that I did - the thing just works, and I don't need to throw kilobucks at video cards. And in any case, games are first released for consoles, and only much later - maybe - rereleased for a PC.
They just stopped caring. And why not indeed - what is there to be afraid in squashing a little web site? The society is already in deep apathy (if not slumber,) and critical thought is about to send you to jail. Bloggers on/. will rage and fume for a few days, but nobody will notice that anyhow, and all that rage will dissipate in a week, but the good business remains.
MS is cynical and ruthless because it can and because it is profitable; and so it will stay. If you don't like that don't run Windows, it is that simple. With modern Linux distros it's not such a great loss. And if you don't want to fiddle with X settings, get a mac - Apple will charge you for that, but you get a sane system in return, not a buggy treadmill. [full disclosure: I do not own a modern Mac; all I have is an ancient PowerBook with 8.5.x MacOS, and I rarely even power it on, I keep it as a piece of history.]
I can read/. as much as I allow myself, as long as the work is done; if it means working 12-14 hours day, so be it. The computer sometimes needs 40 minutes to compile my current FPGA project, that is plenty of time to do other things.
Slashdot Mirror
Doable if you have an agent inside. Aren't those workstations tamper-proof, though?
splice some fiber
That's not a big problem. Send a clumsy contractor, tear the cable, and then send some other contractor to repair the damage. The link will be better than new :-)
or hijack a satellite
If you are routing your ciphertext over a satellite link then Chinese military only needs to point an antenna at it to intercept everything. Then crack the encryption. It might be difficult, but it would be even harder without the ciphertext :-)
But this would be fortunately useless because countries do not act on a single piece of information unless there is no other source. History knows a few examples of such single-source deceptions, but they are mostly wartime tricks, where the opponent is forced to decide here and now. In peace time it's far more likely to have hundreds of agents dispatched to check on the information, and you can not be sure that they won't find any of your real secrets...
IMO, full awareness of other side's intentions and capabilities, provided that they are matched well, was the best guarantee of peace in 20th century. I do not know if this will remain so in this century.
What I can tell you is that either way, it will cost the Russians and Chinese this much money and take them this long to figure it out.
That can be also seen as this:
"What I can tell you is that either way, we awakened the previously sleeping dogs, and the intelligence services of two largest countries on the planet will not rest until they find out for sure if we were fooling them or not. To that end they may even steal propellers from our subs on missions, but since it's not my department I don't care, even if on this quest they accidentally stumble onto something else that we'd like to keep hidden."
I think all this can be translated as "Bring it on!" and I heard it not that long ago already. Meanwhile intelligence bosses of several countries are probably singing and dancing, expecting new budgets for this project (they don't care if it is a wild goose chase or not.)
This photo, however, was apparently taken from an airplane. A different question is then what the said airplane was doing near a supposedly secret site? Or what the [no longer] secret site is doing in the middle of a densely populated area? Or how good a camera can you fit onto an RC plane?
In any case, the whole business is strange. But if I have to choose between a security oversight by the dock workers and the ingenious plan to fool foreign spies, Occam's Razor suggests to pick the oversight.
Understanding of a lecture is not equal to memorizing it, and even the understanding is not guaranteed to occur instantly; some things you just circle and write on the margins "Where did this come from? Check with the book." instead of interrupting the lecture for everyone else. The teacher won't disappear in any case, so you can always ask separately, but in my experience it is plain impossible that nobody else in your class knows the answer to whatever confuses me.
The photo would confirm the design. This is mildly important because the data stolen or bought or otherwise procured can always be intentionally planted. If you get an independent confirmation it's helpful - not much, but a little.
Another, more important and not disclosed until now fact - which you also mentioned - is that the USA still uses this design of the propeller, and not invented something better. 30-year old drawings can't tell you that, but a spy (or a photo) can.
The latter revelation is something that the USA's competitors in the sub business would like to know. The former they indeed know already.
Besides, most of engineering work involves far more than two or three dimensions; if you for example want to model the effect of tolerances of 100 components then you are looking right there at a 101-dimensional problem (and likely more.) Plotting of such a surface would be impossible. Engineers usually minimize the effort by disregarding minor effects and focusing on major factors, followed by numeric simulation of the circuit around sensitive points in, say, 100-dimensional space.
He'd write the question first, then some approaches to solution, and then maybe a solution, step by step, explaining everything as he writes it. If you dump a screenful of formulas onto students they'd be just confused. Even when mathematicians and physicists write in magazines for their peers they take care to explain everything that is not obvious (and by that I mean "obvious to professionals working in the field for years".)
As I recall my school years I do not really believe that technology would have improved the teaching of theoretical matters. In many engineering disciplines the "physical meaning" of equations exists only as the input and the output, but everything in between is pure math and abstract operators, of which you just know what they do.
And another note here - "saving time" is not what the teacher is for. If he were to save time, he'd just read a textbook aloud, while students are following him in their own copies of the same textbook. The teacher explains things that the book really means but doesn't say. Some people do not require a teacher, they are fine with a book. But most people study better when a teacher explains and they write it down because that involves a different, active kind of memory. Myself, I remember writing comments on "why and how" where the textbook just said "applying obvious transformations to (3.171) and solving for $foo we get (3.172) which is..." - but the teacher actually went through the motions of reduction and solution so that we also could do it. This way if you studied how a two-port adding circuit works you can design an any-number-of-ports adding circuit, for a simple example. And when someone asks "what will happen if the values of R1, R7 and R13 drift due to the temperature rise from 25C to 125C" you know what to do, and not just stand there like a proverbial deer staring into oncoming headlights.
Who cares, if there would be nobody left to observe?
This missile can be launched from undersea position 290 km away from the target:
(Additional link 1 and link 2.)
I would not call 200 miles a close range. A WWII torpedo was a close range weapon; a Shkval torpedo is a close range weapon. I have no idea what is the protected area around the group, but it can't be that large, and even one such missile can give a heart attack to the carrier group commander, if it misses or is shot down. If it doesn't miss then forget the heart attack, there wouldn't be enough time left for that.
Of course, the attack does not have to occur in the air - a common 30 yr old 65-76 torpedo (designed in 1976) has range of about 62 miles - if a CG can protect even that circle it is doing better than good. Officially China and Russia have those.
f you have a carrier group, you own the ocean [...] for the simple reason that you know where you are, and the enemy doesn't.
This is applicable to submarines which may be a part of CG, but the whole group is hard to fail to notice in, say, Persian Gulf. You may not even need binoculars. The attackers found USS Cole with their eyes tightly shut. And that's one of the reasons why Iran seemingly has the following:
(quoted from the linked Wikipedia article.)
And of course we should not forget about the older hardware, Iraq has some, and Iran probably also has:
The 95 km range is more than enough to cover the whole area of interest. So the carriers are vulnerable if the incoming missiles are arriving faster, closer to the sea, or in larger quantities than the Aegis can protect against. Wikipedia lists its tracking capacity of 100+ targets (with no mentioning on how many targets can be fired upon, which may be classified, or just dependent on how many ships are available, or both.) So if an opponent initiates a land-based attack they can launch 200 missiles, or 300, all at once - and a few of them will make it through.
With regard to 17 ways to do something, it's easy. Look at ReadFile vs. ReadFileEx, OpenFile vs. CreateFile vs. CreateFileTransacted - they are all generally doing the same thing. This was caused by freezing the API at various points in time, and when it was discovered that this and that function can't be implemented in existing API then a new method was concocted, with just the parameters for that new function, and so on.
But there are even more fundamental differences, when the whole API gets deprecated. For example, the Waveform API - you still can use it, but it's not nice and does not always offer you the best results. DirectX / DirectSound is more appropriate these days, though XAudio2 is also interesting, though you'd better know about X3DAudio if you are making games, though DirectSound3D could replace it for you. Fortunately, on Vista there is WASAPI in between the stack and the hardware, which only adds fun to the scope of your testing :-)
An interface is slow when it commonly requires chains of arcane data structures as parameters, and many Win32 API calls do just that. An interface is buggy when there are 17 ways to do something, each producing a slightly different result. Windows API developed both of these traits over the years, and I only pity Microsoft for that, not blame them. But here they are, with a junk Win32 API and with a newer .NET layer built on top of that.
I tend to agree just because otherwise it would presume a really complicated hoax with a low chance of success (such as fooling a foreign government.) You'd have to replace the propeller, then make Microsoft or whoever takes pictures to take them, then you'd have to activate your agent to post the photos on a blog, and even then you'd still not know if the photo fooled anyone or not, since your adversary wouldn't be a complete idiot, so the fake must be realistic and mostly working.
With regard to the photo, what you have there is effectively one blade photographed from seven different angles. This allows the "other side" (whatever that is) to combine them to get a higher resolution.
But the main issue here is there are not too many countries in the world that would even care about such things. NATO countries probably don't need this photo, they have the real stuff. Russia is rumored to have procured such propeller designs about 25 years ago, and likely has enough computing power to improve on them as needed. China probably has many agents everywhere as well, you can't possibly keep such large things secret for long. What other countries then would want to know how to design a silent propeller, considering that even milling machines required to build the blades are not sold over the counter to anyone who asks, and they are not cheap either, and you have to have a solid manufacturing base to even produce the metal for the blades. So it's an expensive, high-tech business that only a handful of countries have the need and the money to get into. Not all major countries build submarines, many prefer to buy.
Too busy doing what?
Self-replicating function here is essential because it covers repairs, and those will be essential. Besides, it might be difficult to send more than a handful of robots ahead of time, and definitely not thousands.
The postal worker - if it is a human and not a machine - is not likely to notice or care that there is very little glue on the envelope, just as you intended. Besides, everyone knows that an envelope sealed with a standard water-soluble glue can be easily opened with steam.
One still can try this method, of course, but your multi-million dollar wealth will be wholly dependent on a lowly paid postal worker who may or may not testify that 20 years ago you paid him to stamp an empty envelope - regardless of whether it is true. It's much more difficult to purchase a false testimony from a lawyer, he has far more to lose, and he is far more likely to keep legally reliable records of everything he does.
But the original question is so unnatural and contrived I don't even understand why I post this :-) If the OP is "an Open Source, free-to-the world sort of person" and "willing to share my knowledge to the world," then why isn't it the easiest to just send it to the USPTO a day before you start screaming all about your invention from the rooftops? USPTO will most definitely timestamp all the incoming correspondence, and it would be a challenge for anyone to attack that timestamp.
I do not want to say here that a controller is better (or worse) than a keyboard + mouse, I saw the flame wars on the subject and I myself was raised on the PC hardware. However it is clearly unfair to claim lack of control when the mouse has only two axes and keyboard has no analog channels at all. You do have a sea of keys, and I can imagine that some games may need them (to operate giant robots, for example.) That is all fine. But as you also probably know that the Unreal Tournament for PS3 will support the mouse and keyboard as well, so all camps should be perfectly happy, and I personally will try all the input devices, why not?
With regard to "complex, intelligent, thoughtful games" I have no comments because I am unsure what exactly you mean. Chess, for example, is all that but it is not demanding on input, and you can play chess with any input device and it won't affect your results. Thief, as another game, runs on PC and X-box, and I would call it complex and thoughtful, but I played it on a PC with one-axis mouse and WASD keys; the few inputs beyond that are to crouch, select weapons and throw bombs, that is easy to support with any console controller in existence.
One trouble with those apps - and we have quite a few - it's that they are all expensive and many of them require extensive vendor support. Autodesk is not the worst, they are angels compared to couple of other vendors, and one of those horribly bad packages costs above $20K. It is unthinkable to run it on anything but the approved OS, or else you'd be kicked out of support in no time and with pleasure. And it's not Windows that crashes, it's the CAD software itself; it usually does not crash but just doesn't work right, and you have to open a support case and be on the remote desktop session with them until they figure out what workaround you need today. So with partners like that one has to stick to every requirement.
But at work, that's another story. Unless you are working in a Mac shop, or unless your duties are mere wordprocessing and email, you'd be often unable to fit a Mac into the process, and Linux would be similarly "against the grain." If your work depends on a Windows app then forget it; always use the right tool for the job.
Nevertheless what I meant is still true, and who cares what your employer wants you to run - it's not your personal computer, and not your worry. What you buy for your own use is your worry, and that's where you can vote with your money.
It likely does now.
Well, you do lose PC games, since rare a game works under WINE. But I personally fixed this issue by just getting a console, and I am not sorry that I did - the thing just works, and I don't need to throw kilobucks at video cards. And in any case, games are first released for consoles, and only much later - maybe - rereleased for a PC.
Meet the new MS lawyer, not exactly the same as the old MS lawyer.
MS is cynical and ruthless because it can and because it is profitable; and so it will stay. If you don't like that don't run Windows, it is that simple. With modern Linux distros it's not such a great loss. And if you don't want to fiddle with X settings, get a mac - Apple will charge you for that, but you get a sane system in return, not a buggy treadmill. [full disclosure: I do not own a modern Mac; all I have is an ancient PowerBook with 8.5.x MacOS, and I rarely even power it on, I keep it as a piece of history.]
I can read /. as much as I allow myself, as long as the work is done; if it means working 12-14 hours day, so be it. The computer sometimes needs 40 minutes to compile my current FPGA project, that is plenty of time to do other things.