This reusable paper has some uses but I think it's overrated. If I'm going to print something out it's usually so I can give someone a copy. I hardly ever print stuff out otherwise. You think I'm going to give 100 pages of expensive reusable paper to someone, just because they don't want to read the doc on screen, or I can't hand them the "electronic" version?
What people should work on is a cheap (energy+resources), nontoxic and safe way of producing paper from renewable trees/plants.
Then when you see people who are accumulating stacks of paper, you can thank them for helping to keep CO2 out of the air.
Well if it's to stuff like an interesting research paper, why not? It'll make people go to their site more often, in hope to find more such papers or research. Because not all research papers at those "research paper" sites are that interesting.
But of course they shouldn't link to another site doing the same thing they do, only better...
"They just do whatever strikes their fancy, with absolutely no thought to the consequences"
I disagree. Many do consider the consequences a lot. Not all of them are stupid. And that's how they get into positions of great power.
In fact most would learn to change their behaviour in places where they'd get whacked by Dad for doing the wrong thing just too many times. Pain and fear is usually a good motivator for change[1]. Doesn't matter if they are sociopaths or not - if they learn at an early age that pain follows grave misdeeds (like intentionally hitting someone to cause hurt or harm when repeatedly told not to), they'd avoid doing stuff like that AND that tends to prevent them from ending up in jail (or dead). Basically they have a better chance of surviving long enough to learn how to fit in the system like "normals".
So yeah, maybe whacking a kid is bad after all. Parents should let their ignorant sociopaths self-destruct at an earlier age, rather than giving them a chance to learn more about the fun things they could actually do.
Chance for more than a few to become powerful CEOs and politicians.
Then instead of bashing up and killing just one homeless man, they could actually bash up entire countries.
[1] Doesn't work for sociopaths who don't mind pain, but most do mind it. But many are able to _easily_ endure it to achieve their greater goals - and that's how they rise up the social and economic ladders.
Thanks for that information. That's something to keep in mind.
What do the hardware raid stuff do in that situation? So far I think some of them are no better and looking at the history of bugs for say Megaraid, makes me wonder whether RAID vendors really know what they are doing, and whether paying the extra money for their stuff improves availability or actually makes things _worse_. So far it seems 3ware could be the least crap;). Anyway the main reason I prefer Linux software RAID is it's easier to detect a drive failure and alert someone. Whereas there are many hardware RAID products don't support Linux well enough for the O/S to be alerted of problems - sure the controller starts beeping like crazy, but often nobody is physically around to hear it[1].
I've been using FreeBSD for quite some years already, but in the office it's Linux. I quite like the FreeBSD approach to some things - but AFAIK stuff like vmware don't work on FreeBSD (without excessive tinkering anyway).
[1] I've wondered if it would be a good idea to wire up LEDs of switches, routers, servers and other stuff to speakers, so that they make some activity noise. So that a admin could just walk into the server room and know that "something's different...", or even put in some microphones and then stream the sound to the admin as a background. If you hear a buzz from the webserver and switch maybe there's a slashdotting in progress;). And if the airconditioning fails, you'd probably hear it before the temperatures go up.
Or at least it should be splitting itself up so that the module that grabs all traffic is separate from the module that does significant processing of the traffic (which hopefully then gets locked down),
Snort has had a pretty poor track record for this (for that matter tcpdump has also had similar problems).
Well "HPC1 compute nodes" seem to have infant mortality. Strangely the others don't.
As for RAID, I'm biased towards software RAID because most hardware RAID cards seem to have either poor performance or poor reliability. Also I'm biased towards RAID1 and RAID10.
Sure I have to bet on Linus and gang not screwing up software RAID, but for software if the kernel passes decent "infant mortality" tests it's likely to keep working till at least the next kernel patch;).
Well if Sales is also in charge of actually _collecting_ the money, then yeah.
Otherwise, I'd say the department ensuring that money actually enters the company is pretty important too. No point selling a million dollars of stuff if the buyer never pays - in fact it's worse than not selling in many cases.
quote: "Sorta. Again, real world vs theory. Try banging the hell out of an off the shelf consumer drive 24/7/365 and see how long it holds up"
Uh the paper is based on _real_world_ stats (which part of "empirical evidence" + "she looked at 100,000 drives" don't you understand?).
Your assumptions = theory. Paper = real world.
And that's why the paper was voted "Best Paper", because it seems lots of people had similar assumptions and this paper is very useful to at least get some people to revisit those assumptions.
It might still be proven wrong by a bigger/better study, or it could turn out that it was flawed in some way. But I'll give them the benefit of doubt - more than I'll trust the MTTF/MTBF figures from drive manufacturers.
Yeah. My opinion over the "cold fusion" thing has always been- even if it _isn't_ fusion it sure seems like there is something _interesting_ going on that's worth investigating.
Billions have been spent on less interesting thing stuff - like the expensive international space station for instance. Not really bang for buck for "interesting stuff done". Work on making space travel cheap and reliable _first_, then only do lots of work on space stations. Not the other way round. Doh.
Problem is who's going to pay for any countermeasures or workarounds?
That's why you might need more people worrying about it. Because in democracies, if the politicians aren't worried and the voters aren't worried, then the problem gets left to the "next bunch".
Refrigerator? I'd think for the average home in the USA it's either airconditioning or heating. Only in a few places is the temperature "just right" all the time.
Of course if you talk about the average home _globally_, then it's probably totally different. It'll be eating, cooking food and boiling water..
Yes. I think it's wrong to try juveniles as adults even for offenses like homicide - in practice significantly more juveniles have difficulty considering the long term consequences of their actions (there even appear to be some scientific studies that show that teenagers are significantly worse than adults at that).
But for violent offenses like homicide, even if society thinks it's not their fault, still better to protect people from them. Even if in a perfect world some juveniles could be treated as adults and not juveniles, I don't see it as a big problem (except the victims or their families don't get "justice" or erm vengeance/satisfaction) - treat them specially as dangerous juveniles (retraining etc etc) and if they live long enough, they'll hit the adult point eventually - and if they don't ever kill again, hey wow maybe something worked...
Plenty of inconsistencies around.
I think it was very wrong for Georgia to jail that 17 year old guy for 10 years for "aggravated child molestation" when he had _consensual_ sex with a 15 year old. Then there was some judge who punished someone who breached his probation (for robbery) by smoking a joint with _life_ in prison. Whereas same judge didn't punish some other guy who breached his probation (for _killing_ someone) by smoking cocaine.
Sure, I see plenty of inconsistencies (heck even the robbery _victim_ was astonished that the robber got life for smoking a joint!). Hopefully they get fixed ASAP.
All these probs are why I think it's worse to execute people instead of just giving them prison sentences. Even if you can't give back someone those years.
What practical purpose? Well if little Johnny has been going about murdering people, it'll be practical to take measures to reduce the odds of little Johnny doing it again, no matter whether the parents are to blame or little Johnny is or even it's actually the "system" which messed up little Johnny.
Whereas for stealing bubblegum, it's a lot easier for "Society" to say to little Johnny: "Bad boy, don't do it again!", and then tell the parents "Hey, you're supposed to stop little Johnny from stealing stuff!". And as far as I know, in many countries there are special places that little Johnny can get sent to (away from parents) if little Johnny doesn't stop stealing stuff AND it is still considered not "right" to send little Johnny to prison.
Like I said, a society will still have to draw arbitrary lines. Not saying they have to draw lines for everything (sure hope not!), but my point is, for practical reasons you are still going to have to draw a fair number of arbitrary lines, stupid as they may seem.
When does a embryo become a fetus, a baby, a child, an adult? When does a mix of water + flour + eggs + sugar + heat + etc become cake? When someone eats a small piece and says it's cake? When you stick a fork in it and nothing sticks to the fork when you pull it out? But what if you have 10000 different cakes made by different bakers, and you have to decide what can be legally called a cake?
There'll probably be lots of disagreement where that line is and people might get it badly wrong, but whatever it is, even if most people think it's "right" it'll still be pretty arbitrary - such is the world we live in.
Doesn't matter if they grow up or not. For practical purposes the law has to draw a line somewhere - where if they are past that line - they are fully responsible, if they are not, they aren't. If there are exceptional cases not covered properly by the law then that's what we have judges (and juries in some places) for (some judges think their only responsibility is to "enforce the law" rather than make sure there's justice).
Bush probably thinks that Canada is a state of the USA.
Just like Australia is the southernmost US state.
Anyway, by their laws the Canadians already pay an unfair media levy, so if some US group doesn't like that the Canadians are copying whatever they like, too bad - they've already paid for it whether or not they wanted to.
The Canadians should extend the middle finger of friendship to the USA.
After all, that's what real friends would do in this case.
Friendly Canada: "You want to do what? Yeah right, you see this? (extends middle finger). F**k off man. Oh yeah, don't forget to collect your oil tomorrow".
The existing Windows, Mac, Linux security is actually crap in my opinion. Primitive and crap.
Whether you are using Windows, Mac or Linux, if you don't run your browser using a different user account (like I do at work), if your browser gets exploited, anything your normal account can do, the attacker can do.
Just because I run something, doesn't mean it should automatically have read/write rights to my entire home directory and every file and drive my account has access to. Nor should it have full network access.
It is pretty troublesome for a normal user to setup different user accounts for different apps, and set up the ACLs to allow the proper flow of data from one app to the other.
So it would be safer to have "role based" restrictions AND have it in a way that's easy for users to handle. Just throwing SELinux and RBAC stuff at Joe Average isn't going to work.
If something claims to be a flash game for fun, when you run it, it shouldn't even be allowed to read from your home directory or even have network access (unless it claims to need network access to submit high scores or something).
It should not require the same privileges that Microsoft Word would need e.g. "Trusted Desktop Application" privileges.
It should not require the same privileges that installing an antivirus software would require e.g. "Full System Privileges".
Say you are sent something that claims to be a simple screensaver. To install it, you should only need "screensaver install" privileges, and it should automatically set up the privileges for the screensaver so that it only run with even more restricted privileges - no access to the keyboard and mouse, no network access. The O/S does the username/password checking thank you. seti@home is not a "simple screensaver" so it will require more privileges.
It's not easy to do this tho (pretty difficult esp if you want to maintain some backward compatibility). But I think this would be a genuine improvement.
Even if it seems unwieldy, it's more scalable and safer then clicking through 20 dialogs. You should only have to do it once per app.
You only keep getting dialog boxes if an app keeps trying to do something fishy.
You have to remember: these programs are likely to be broken in the first place.
This is just letting a user have an easy way of _attempting_ to install and run a broken program.
There are tons of programs out there that ask for admin privs when they don't actually need admin privs. Most of that is not Microsoft's fault.
Vista still sucks tho, and the UAC is still broken. Linux, Mac etc aren't much better either.
What you should have is "roles based access control". If you are running a flash/java game it should only be able to do a few things - sound, graphics, read keyboard/mouse only when in focus, no writes to disk, possibly no network access.
Then you get the developer to say what sort of role their app requires. That way the user sees what sort of role-access is requested by the app/installer, and the user can approve it. You should be very suspicious if an "animated greeting card" needs read/write access to the file system at all, or network access or "stay resident and continue running even if window is closed".
It would be easier to teach people that installing Microsoft Office requires "Full System Privileges", and running MS Word requires "Trusted Desktop App Privileges". And to avoid screensavers that require "Full System Privileges" instead of "Screensaver Privileges", stuff like seti@home would require extra privileges, but the nerds and geeks running it would understand.
If you are paranoid, your web browser only needs to save files in a "Downloads folder", so it doesn't even need read/write access to anything except the bookmarks and other browser specific directories. It should not have any access to any other files.
I'm not claiming that the following is how AACS works because it isn't.
But all they need to do is encrypt a random media specific secret with the public keys of the various players and stick the result on the media. Each player then uses its own private key to access the media specific secret. The player then decrypts the media with that secret.
To aid with the detection of which player was compromised they could have potentially different scenes/frames encrypted with different media keys, and players are to skip/ignore scenes which they can't decrypt.
If it is detected that a player is compromised, publishers/creators are to not use that player's public key to encrypt the media key in future media, or they alter/degrade content for that player.
The problem with this approach is that it involves a lot more work and cooperation from the creators and publishers, and it also requires players to have enough grunt to do public key crypto for scenes.
And it doesn't stop the problem of what happens if thousands of players have their keys revoked. Sure you could in theory reissue new keys and update the affected legitimate players, but who pays and would it be practical? Having thousands of people return their hardware players is a problem. If it really saves/makes the Industry more money then they should be able to afford to pay for it all and throw in sweeteners. But I bet that won't happen. You can do the same thing for TPM, you have the same problem though when it comes to revocation time.
Finally, it'll still be fairly easy for people to crack the video and audio output bit (does HDCP have stuff that makes it easy to detect which device was used?). All the attacker needs do is keep buying players and returning them for a refund or a different player (by that time the shop may have got used to complaints of "This player plays Movie X, but not Movie Y").
So strong encryption can be used on DRM.
It's more like people _paying_extra_ for a safe that's designed to only allow them to watch their movie through a thick bulletproof glass window in that safe. They aren't allowed to open that safe or tamper with it in anyway.
Why should people pay extra for all that?
If DRM really was effective AND those piracy losses are real, the movie industry should be confident enough to subsidize players.
As it is, most people will be happily and obliviously buying Vista etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I see some synergies. If the 3 depts are working together it'll be no surprise they are well known for their parties ;).
This reusable paper has some uses but I think it's overrated. If I'm going to print something out it's usually so I can give someone a copy. I hardly ever print stuff out otherwise. You think I'm going to give 100 pages of expensive reusable paper to someone, just because they don't want to read the doc on screen, or I can't hand them the "electronic" version?
What people should work on is a cheap (energy+resources), nontoxic and safe way of producing paper from renewable trees/plants.
Then when you see people who are accumulating stacks of paper, you can thank them for helping to keep CO2 out of the air.
Well if it's to stuff like an interesting research paper, why not? It'll make people go to their site more often, in hope to find more such papers or research. Because not all research papers at those "research paper" sites are that interesting.
But of course they shouldn't link to another site doing the same thing they do, only better...
"They just do whatever strikes their fancy, with absolutely no thought to the consequences"
I disagree. Many do consider the consequences a lot. Not all of them are stupid. And that's how they get into positions of great power.
In fact most would learn to change their behaviour in places where they'd get whacked by Dad for doing the wrong thing just too many times. Pain and fear is usually a good motivator for change[1]. Doesn't matter if they are sociopaths or not - if they learn at an early age that pain follows grave misdeeds (like intentionally hitting someone to cause hurt or harm when repeatedly told not to), they'd avoid doing stuff like that AND that tends to prevent them from ending up in jail (or dead). Basically they have a better chance of surviving long enough to learn how to fit in the system like "normals".
So yeah, maybe whacking a kid is bad after all. Parents should let their ignorant sociopaths self-destruct at an earlier age, rather than giving them a chance to learn more about the fun things they could actually do.
Chance for more than a few to become powerful CEOs and politicians.
Then instead of bashing up and killing just one homeless man, they could actually bash up entire countries.
[1] Doesn't work for sociopaths who don't mind pain, but most do mind it. But many are able to _easily_ endure it to achieve their greater goals - and that's how they rise up the social and economic ladders.
Coz she hates him?
:).
Still, I was wondering whether the "stepmom story" really is true.
The email could just be from a sociopath messing with everyone for fun
Thanks for that information. That's something to keep in mind.
;). Anyway the main reason I prefer Linux software RAID is it's easier to detect a drive failure and alert someone. Whereas there are many hardware RAID products don't support Linux well enough for the O/S to be alerted of problems - sure the controller starts beeping like crazy, but often nobody is physically around to hear it[1].
;). And if the airconditioning fails, you'd probably hear it before the temperatures go up.
What do the hardware raid stuff do in that situation? So far I think some of them are no better and looking at the history of bugs for say Megaraid, makes me wonder whether RAID vendors really know what they are doing, and whether paying the extra money for their stuff improves availability or actually makes things _worse_. So far it seems 3ware could be the least crap
I've been using FreeBSD for quite some years already, but in the office it's Linux. I quite like the FreeBSD approach to some things - but AFAIK stuff like vmware don't work on FreeBSD (without excessive tinkering anyway).
[1] I've wondered if it would be a good idea to wire up LEDs of switches, routers, servers and other stuff to speakers, so that they make some activity noise. So that a admin could just walk into the server room and know that "something's different...", or even put in some microphones and then stream the sound to the admin as a background. If you hear a buzz from the webserver and switch maybe there's a slashdotting in progress
Use amiga emulators?
Or at least it should be splitting itself up so that the module that grabs all traffic is separate from the module that does significant processing of the traffic (which hopefully then gets locked down),
Snort has had a pretty poor track record for this (for that matter tcpdump has also had similar problems).
Well "HPC1 compute nodes" seem to have infant mortality. Strangely the others don't.
;).
As for RAID, I'm biased towards software RAID because most hardware RAID cards seem to have either poor performance or poor reliability. Also I'm biased towards RAID1 and RAID10.
Sure I have to bet on Linus and gang not screwing up software RAID, but for software if the kernel passes decent "infant mortality" tests it's likely to keep working till at least the next kernel patch
Well if Sales is also in charge of actually _collecting_ the money, then yeah.
Otherwise, I'd say the department ensuring that money actually enters the company is pretty important too. No point selling a million dollars of stuff if the buyer never pays - in fact it's worse than not selling in many cases.
quote: "Sorta. Again, real world vs theory. Try banging the hell out of an off the shelf consumer drive 24/7/365 and see how long it holds up"
Uh the paper is based on _real_world_ stats (which part of "empirical evidence" + "she looked at 100,000 drives" don't you understand?).
Your assumptions = theory. Paper = real world.
And that's why the paper was voted "Best Paper", because it seems lots of people had similar assumptions and this paper is very useful to at least get some people to revisit those assumptions.
It might still be proven wrong by a bigger/better study, or it could turn out that it was flawed in some way. But I'll give them the benefit of doubt - more than I'll trust the MTTF/MTBF figures from drive manufacturers.
"No offence, but fuck you. Fuck you right in the face, asshole"
"Being disabled -- lacking the ability to do something completely -- is NOT a personality trait. It's a horrendous misfortune."
Maybe one day they'll find a cure for people like you too.
Yeah. My opinion over the "cold fusion" thing has always been- even if it _isn't_ fusion it sure seems like there is something _interesting_ going on that's worth investigating.
Billions have been spent on less interesting thing stuff - like the expensive international space station for instance. Not really bang for buck for "interesting stuff done". Work on making space travel cheap and reliable _first_, then only do lots of work on space stations. Not the other way round. Doh.
Problem is who's going to pay for any countermeasures or workarounds?
That's why you might need more people worrying about it. Because in democracies, if the politicians aren't worried and the voters aren't worried, then the problem gets left to the "next bunch".
To all those Gnome fans:
There are tons of things that can be configured/fixed in Windows just like Gnome.
With some configuration tool that's only suitable for an elite bunch to use.
So, I don't see Gnome as an improvement over Windows in terms of usability.
The problem with blades is in most server rooms or data centers you can't fill racks full of them anyway.
This is because there's just so much cooling and power the data center can provide per square metre of floor space.
So if less dense solutions are cheaper/performance you might as well use them instead of blades.
I guess data centers will be upgrading their power and cooling, but it may be cheaper to build more data centers than to make them more dense.
Refrigerator? I'd think for the average home in the USA it's either airconditioning or heating. Only in a few places is the temperature "just right" all the time.
Of course if you talk about the average home _globally_, then it's probably totally different. It'll be eating, cooking food and boiling water..
Well, maybe she doesn't know she's his fiancee yet[1].
;)
If that's the case then he could still be a true Slashdotter.
[1] just like all that "dark fiber"- not yet connected...
Yes. I think it's wrong to try juveniles as adults even for offenses like homicide - in practice significantly more juveniles have difficulty considering the long term consequences of their actions (there even appear to be some scientific studies that show that teenagers are significantly worse than adults at that).
But for violent offenses like homicide, even if society thinks it's not their fault, still better to protect people from them. Even if in a perfect world some juveniles could be treated as adults and not juveniles, I don't see it as a big problem (except the victims or their families don't get "justice" or erm vengeance/satisfaction) - treat them specially as dangerous juveniles (retraining etc etc) and if they live long enough, they'll hit the adult point eventually - and if they don't ever kill again, hey wow maybe something worked...
Plenty of inconsistencies around.
I think it was very wrong for Georgia to jail that 17 year old guy for 10 years for "aggravated child molestation" when he had _consensual_ sex with a 15 year old. Then there was some judge who punished someone who breached his probation (for robbery) by smoking a joint with _life_ in prison. Whereas same judge didn't punish some other guy who breached his probation (for _killing_ someone) by smoking cocaine.
Sure, I see plenty of inconsistencies (heck even the robbery _victim_ was astonished that the robber got life for smoking a joint!). Hopefully they get fixed ASAP.
All these probs are why I think it's worse to execute people instead of just giving them prison sentences. Even if you can't give back someone those years.
What practical purpose? Well if little Johnny has been going about murdering people, it'll be practical to take measures to reduce the odds of little Johnny doing it again, no matter whether the parents are to blame or little Johnny is or even it's actually the "system" which messed up little Johnny.
Whereas for stealing bubblegum, it's a lot easier for "Society" to say to little Johnny: "Bad boy, don't do it again!", and then tell the parents "Hey, you're supposed to stop little Johnny from stealing stuff!". And as far as I know, in many countries there are special places that little Johnny can get sent to (away from parents) if little Johnny doesn't stop stealing stuff AND it is still considered not "right" to send little Johnny to prison.
Like I said, a society will still have to draw arbitrary lines. Not saying they have to draw lines for everything (sure hope not!), but my point is, for practical reasons you are still going to have to draw a fair number of arbitrary lines, stupid as they may seem.
When does a embryo become a fetus, a baby, a child, an adult? When does a mix of water + flour + eggs + sugar + heat + etc become cake? When someone eats a small piece and says it's cake? When you stick a fork in it and nothing sticks to the fork when you pull it out? But what if you have 10000 different cakes made by different bakers, and you have to decide what can be legally called a cake?
There'll probably be lots of disagreement where that line is and people might get it badly wrong, but whatever it is, even if most people think it's "right" it'll still be pretty arbitrary - such is the world we live in.
Doesn't matter if they grow up or not. For practical purposes the law has to draw a line somewhere - where if they are past that line - they are fully responsible, if they are not, they aren't. If there are exceptional cases not covered properly by the law then that's what we have judges (and juries in some places) for (some judges think their only responsibility is to "enforce the law" rather than make sure there's justice).
Bush probably thinks that Canada is a state of the USA.
Just like Australia is the southernmost US state.
Anyway, by their laws the Canadians already pay an unfair media levy, so if some US group doesn't like that the Canadians are copying whatever they like, too bad - they've already paid for it whether or not they wanted to.
The Canadians should extend the middle finger of friendship to the USA.
After all, that's what real friends would do in this case.
Friendly Canada: "You want to do what? Yeah right, you see this? (extends middle finger). F**k off man. Oh yeah, don't forget to collect your oil tomorrow".
The existing Windows, Mac, Linux security is actually crap in my opinion. Primitive and crap.
Whether you are using Windows, Mac or Linux, if you don't run your browser using a different user account (like I do at work), if your browser gets exploited, anything your normal account can do, the attacker can do.
Just because I run something, doesn't mean it should automatically have read/write rights to my entire home directory and every file and drive my account has access to. Nor should it have full network access.
It is pretty troublesome for a normal user to setup different user accounts for different apps, and set up the ACLs to allow the proper flow of data from one app to the other.
So it would be safer to have "role based" restrictions AND have it in a way that's easy for users to handle. Just throwing SELinux and RBAC stuff at Joe Average isn't going to work.
If something claims to be a flash game for fun, when you run it, it shouldn't even be allowed to read from your home directory or even have network access (unless it claims to need network access to submit high scores or something).
It should not require the same privileges that Microsoft Word would need e.g. "Trusted Desktop Application" privileges.
It should not require the same privileges that installing an antivirus software would require e.g. "Full System Privileges".
Say you are sent something that claims to be a simple screensaver. To install it, you should only need "screensaver install" privileges, and it should automatically set up the privileges for the screensaver so that it only run with even more restricted privileges - no access to the keyboard and mouse, no network access. The O/S does the username/password checking thank you. seti@home is not a "simple screensaver" so it will require more privileges.
It's not easy to do this tho (pretty difficult esp if you want to maintain some backward compatibility). But I think this would be a genuine improvement.
Even if it seems unwieldy, it's more scalable and safer then clicking through 20 dialogs. You should only have to do it once per app.
You only keep getting dialog boxes if an app keeps trying to do something fishy.
You have to remember: these programs are likely to be broken in the first place.
This is just letting a user have an easy way of _attempting_ to install and run a broken program.
There are tons of programs out there that ask for admin privs when they don't actually need admin privs. Most of that is not Microsoft's fault.
Vista still sucks tho, and the UAC is still broken. Linux, Mac etc aren't much better either.
What you should have is "roles based access control". If you are running a flash/java game it should only be able to do a few things - sound, graphics, read keyboard/mouse only when in focus, no writes to disk, possibly no network access.
Then you get the developer to say what sort of role their app requires. That way the user sees what sort of role-access is requested by the app/installer, and the user can approve it. You should be very suspicious if an "animated greeting card" needs read/write access to the file system at all, or network access or "stay resident and continue running even if window is closed".
It would be easier to teach people that installing Microsoft Office requires "Full System Privileges", and running MS Word requires "Trusted Desktop App Privileges". And to avoid screensavers that require "Full System Privileges" instead of "Screensaver Privileges", stuff like seti@home would require extra privileges, but the nerds and geeks running it would understand.
If you are paranoid, your web browser only needs to save files in a "Downloads folder", so it doesn't even need read/write access to anything except the bookmarks and other browser specific directories. It should not have any access to any other files.
They don't have to give you the secret you know.
I'm not claiming that the following is how AACS works because it isn't.
But all they need to do is encrypt a random media specific secret with the public keys of the various players and stick the result on the media.
Each player then uses its own private key to access the media specific secret.
The player then decrypts the media with that secret.
To aid with the detection of which player was compromised they could have potentially different scenes/frames encrypted with different media keys, and players are to skip/ignore scenes which they can't decrypt.
If it is detected that a player is compromised, publishers/creators are to not use that player's public key to encrypt the media key in future media, or they alter/degrade content for that player.
The problem with this approach is that it involves a lot more work and cooperation from the creators and publishers, and it also requires players to have enough grunt to do public key crypto for scenes.
And it doesn't stop the problem of what happens if thousands of players have their keys revoked. Sure you could in theory reissue new keys and update the affected legitimate players, but who pays and would it be practical? Having thousands of people return their hardware players is a problem. If it really saves/makes the Industry more money then they should be able to afford to pay for it all and throw in sweeteners. But I bet that won't happen. You can do the same thing for TPM, you have the same problem though when it comes to revocation time.
Finally, it'll still be fairly easy for people to crack the video and audio output bit (does HDCP have stuff that makes it easy to detect which device was used?). All the attacker needs do is keep buying players and returning them for a refund or a different player (by that time the shop may have got used to complaints of "This player plays Movie X, but not Movie Y").
So strong encryption can be used on DRM.
It's more like people _paying_extra_ for a safe that's designed to only allow them to watch their movie through a thick bulletproof glass window in that safe. They aren't allowed to open that safe or tamper with it in anyway.
Why should people pay extra for all that?
If DRM really was effective AND those piracy losses are real, the movie industry should be confident enough to subsidize players.
As it is, most people will be happily and obliviously buying Vista etc.