A judge said you are bad you must be broken up. M$ paid for a new legislature and president, then got rid of the judge.
Where did a slight shift in Congress and a new president lead to the the judge being removed? The Appeals Court accepted the findings of fact, but dismissed the remedies. The court system is independent enough of the rest of the political process that a new president and the remanding of the remedies have nothing to do with each other.
Personally, though I prefer the idea of a breakup, I can't disagree with the Appeals Court. The original judge (his name escapes me at the moment) was incredibly stupid in how he handled the case after the decision was handed down, and is lucky he wasn't reprimanded for it. Judge Kollar-Kotelly is handling things as a judge should, and while it seems very unlikely that MS will be broken up, she seems to have a good, fair head on her shoulders and will pick a fair set of remedies. I doubt that any side will be happy with it, and there will almost certainly be another round of appeals, perhaps even making it to the Supreme Court in a year or two.
This fight is no more ugly than any other monopoly case. IBM and AT&T had similar knock-down, drag-out fights with the government, and there are cases we don't see in the papers because the industries are so small that nobody except immediately interested parties notice. These are long, drawn-out processes. The consumer generally wins out, though, even in a case like Microsoft's. That it will never satisfy most Slashdotters until MS is forced to open-source every single piece of software they've ever written is beside the point.
The Taleban were routed in a few weeks by US-led forces. That's not the same as the mujahadeen that fought off the Soviets in the 80s.
With little more than rifles and a few anti-aircraft missiles supplied by outsiders like the United States and China, the mujahadeen inflicted losses on the Red Army as had not been seen since WW2. The Russians had used similar tactics to resist the Germans, but then grew complacent in their technology as the decades passed.
If you really want to see how low they went, look on Kazaa or a similar program for the keywords "Russian soldier" and watch as one gets executed. (WARNING: You'd better have a STRONG stomach to watch that film, and not have eaten anything in the prior half-hour.) Such simple, brutal deaths led to the complete demoralization of the Red Army and the resultant withdrawal. When your army doesn't want to fight anymore, it's hard to press them into battle. Technology was not a factor in those battles. The mujahadeen made themselves difficult to hit, and inflicted losses despite the changing tactics of the Russians.
As for the Palestinians, what you don't often see are the deaths and injuries on the Israeli side of the gun battles. With a well-planned ambush, Palestinian gunmen recently led Israeli troops into an ambush in which 13 soldiers were killed and a further seven wounded. Israeli soldiers have died in other engagements. The only limiting factor is the terrain, which is hard to hide in by the Palestinians.
In the United States, as in most countries, we have varied terrain in which to fight. They're STILL looking for Eric Rudolph for the bombing of an abortion clinic (or maybe two) and the Atlanta Olympics. He disappeared into the Appalachian forest, and the biggest manhunt in US history ensued. His knowledge of the terrain kept him from being found. The same could -- and does -- happen with small groups of rebels. Consider that it took a couple of thousand troops to dislodge/kill 800 al Qaeda forces in Operation Anaconda, even with air superiority, and the US side still lost at least nine soldiers. I haven't seen how many the Afghan allied forces lost.
If you people (Americans) honestly think that a bunch of suburbanites armed with rifles and handguns can overthrown the government in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen, you are even dumber than your reputation allows.
I submit to you Exhibit A: The Afghan mujahideen, who used rifles and a few light rockets to defeat an army of well-trained soldiers equipped with tanks, helicopters, and fighter-bombers.
I submit to you Exhibit B: Palestinians, who, with the exception of their abhorrent use of suicide bombers, have made a major pain of themselves using only light weapons and homemade explosives, managing to destroy two Merkava tanks -- arguably the best tanks in the world -- as well as successfully ambushing a number of Israeli patrols.
I submit to you Exhibit C: The Chechnyans, who used (and still use) small arms and homemade explosives almost exclusively to not only hold back the well-trained, well-equipped Russian army, but to also make Chechnya the most feared assignment for a soldier since Afghanistan.
A rifleman standing up to a tank is committing suicide. A coordinated team of private citizens, well motivated and using light weapons, can conduct a guerilla campaign to exploit the weaknesses inherent in a large, well-equipped force. Armor is meant for use against armor and fortified structures. Vehicles are inherently less mobile than people. Soldiers do not want to march into certain death. All are weaknesses that work well to a rebel's advantage.
Consider, also, that even with a peak army of two million personnel, the United States armed forces would have been facing a significant portion of 250 million guns, and you gotta get out of that tank sometime.
I prefer opening fewer applications not from the standpoint of inefficiency of the operating system but rather inefficiency of the UI. I'm slowly moving to Trillian (still have all four IM programs plus mIRC at home, but work uses this little wonder) because it's simpler. Outlook 2002 w/PGP installed handles connections to my two home e-mail addresses as well as work and Hotmail (I'd incorporate Yahoo web access if I could), as well as my address book and calendar, which sync to my Visor Deluxe. Central storage, fewer programs, fewer Alt-Tabs.
I've even taken to using the multiple desktop feature in nVidia's new drivers to do main apps (Office, etc) on one desktop, web surfing and design on a second, and programming on a third. Now, if the IM windows would just stay on Desktop #1....
Leahy was a co-sponsor and voted in favor of it, and also voted for the Shays-Meehan bill. He's been an advocate of campaign finance reform for at least the last couple of years.
It may well become pay-for-play. But the bandwidth costs out of decent datacenters is dropping rapidly. I work at a datacenter myself, and I see the difference between what a T1/DS1 costs from the phone company and what we charge for a T1-equivalent out of our own connections. I know of a couple of larger companies that are getting even sweeter deals than we are, and I expect the numbers to continue to drop. Bandwidth, assuming Valve gets a nice clean connection to a major backbone provider, will be a much smaller piece of the distribution costs than CDs now are.
Most UFO reports are easily explained by normal phenomena, and not classified government projects. Aircraft flying in careful formation (particularly at high altitudes), meteors, and ball lightning (rare in itself, but not classified nor extraterrestrial in nature) have all been mentioned as common causes of UFO reports, totaling around 85%, IIRC. Classified government projects and hoaxes probably make up the balance of them, with a tiny sliver of them truly unexplainable.
And I'm including covering up the affair with the mistress under 'hoax'.:)
Consider the cost of bandwidth now. This makes some sense, in a theoretical way, for a new method of delivering content. How long does it take to go to the store, get a game, come back, and install it? I would estimate around an hour. Many people with broadband can fairly easily download about 280MB (averaging 80KB/sec) in an hour. Additional sections of the game could be downloaded while playing faster than the player is likely to achieve such advancement.
Of course, broadband isn't available for everyone, and Sierra would still have a role publishing games on CD for those of us who do not have fast connections or who choose to have physical media in hand. What this does, though, is put some power back in Valve's hands, allowing them a much faster method of distributing patches and anti-cheats and cutting distribution costs. The only remaining issue is how much Sierra loses from this.
I agree. Consider how complex a nuclear explosion is, and we have just recently seen the first detailed three-dimensional computer model of such a blast. That is a complex system that affects a few square miles.
Clouds, ice, water (fresh and salt), soil of differing types, concrete, plants, animals, wind.... All have their contribution to the environment. Thinking we can properly model these right now is nearly a joke.
Calling the steps that led to Chernobyl a series of mistakes is not quite correct. IIRC, six *separate* safety mechanisms, any *one* of which would have prevented the disaster, were specifically disabled by the technicians in their efforts to finish their project. That's not a mistake: that's incompetence.
As for Three Mile Island.... Well, that's a different story. But keep in mind that it was averted because of the knowledge of the workers and the fact that the safety mechanisms, while not working perfectly, slowed the problem sufficiently to give time to end the crisis. The radiation release was negligible, and new procedures were put into place at every power plant in the United States to prevent a repeat.
I have a nuclear plant about 60 miles from me (San Onofre, CA). There is growing talk of shutting it down, and I would *gladly* have one built closer, but the damned NIMBYs populating the southern half of the county driving around in their SUVs don't want anything to take a few dollars off the value of their $700K homes.
As for storage and transportation, Yucca Mountain has been shown to be just fine in every study done. I'm sure there are other stable sites that can be picked in Colorado or any of a dozen other states, but because everyone is afraid of something happening, the current materials sit in poorly-secured, decaying facilities on-site. Transport the stuff in a convoy guarded by the military if you must; I'll deal with the road being shut down for a couple of hours per section. Taper the need for oil, gas, and coal, and put up the reactors until the rest of the renewable sources can be developed to a reasonable efficiency standard.
Having grown up around Los Angeles, I remember all the Stage I and the occasional Stage II smog alerts. We used to get held inside during recess, and most of the kids hated it. Now, I don't think we've had a smog alert in three years. I can see for miles now from Brea to downtown Santa Ana and clearly make out buildings (about 12 miles for those of you not here), whereas a few years ago, seeing more that two or three miles was a rarity.
The United States has made considerable progress. We're not done by a long shot, but new requirements for environmental friendliness have to be phased in, not dictated like some would have.
Re:The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated.
on
Larsen Ice Shelf Collapses
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Unfortunately, the fluctuation we're seeing now is more massive and happening more quickly than ever before.
Forgive me if I am wrong, but I think we've only been really studying the environment to a significant degree for a few hundred years, if that, and have detailed ice cores going back, with some exceptions, only a few thousand years. That seems to me, in comparison to the 4.5 billion or so times the Earth has circled the sun to be a bit of a stretch in terms of extrapolation.
I wish I could find the link, but I read an article a few months ago that suggested that evidence has been found showing the Earth does periodically go through warming stages where the global temperature rose significantly (10C comes to mind) in the course of a mere thousand years.
I'm not on either side of the fence on this one. I don't think that we should be doing anything to push the issue, to be on the safe side, but I also don't think that we should rush into snap judgements on something that ten years from now may be chuckled at as just another silly fad. I'm in favor of increased mileage for all vehicles, decreased emissions for diesel engines, more reliance on wind, solar, tidal, and nuclear energy and decreased reliance on hydroelectrics (I don't care for the damage done by dams); at the same time, I also think that we need to be careful to balance the economic considerations. Further unbalancing the already unstable economies of a number of small countries could lead to wars, disease epidemics, and massive unrest. Lead them into the light by helping them with their prosperity, and show them the benefits of working with the environment instead of abusing it. Don't coddle them as the Kyoto Treaty did, and don't try to bully the larger nations. Piss people off, and you'll never get their cooperation. Work with them, help them along, allow them to be successful on their own, and they'll be far more likely to follow your lead.
Welcome to NSA Hacking Techniques, Part III
on
Cracking the Smartcards
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you can't guess it, brute force it. If you can't brute force it, hand the best team you have a blank check and say, "Enjoy."
One of the interesting things I saw recently at the NSA career website was a mention that many of their engineers get their own, individual, custom hardware. If they have the budget and facilities for that, you better believe that they have what NDS has and more.
Not really. When I worked at a small games shop about nine years ago, we stocked these. They were tremendous fun, and we made some sales when we started playing with them on slow days and people would walk in and see us. We had repeat customers, too, as people who decided that they craved revenge.:)
IIRC, they sold for $10-$25, the quality of the wood and ammunition capacity being primary deciding factors.
A check of the foxnews.com and of the Google newgroup archives mentions nothing about that. Do you have anything more specific to add which we could use to nail down the specifics?
Keep in mind that this solution could increase the overall file fragmentation significantly more than even the old way of doing things. As it is, I've found myself defragging my hard drive probably three times as often as before, and Morpheus-derived files (well, before last week) were responsible for inordinately huge amounts of fragmentation.
Perhaps using this idea to go to a temp file, then copying the file while deleting the original temp file would help to minimize such problems.
Nixon had a group working for him leading up the the 1972 election called CREEP -- Committee to Re-Elect the President. Kind of ominous, considering the context.
That's a different case. Drugs and bullets are a pretty clear indication that something is amiss, and that a crime likely occured. While a shooting can be accidental, it usually isn't, and so usually hospitals are legally required to notify the police.
However, notifying the police is different from answering a police inquiry.
Early version of Windows 95 also had really crappy IPv4 support. Microsoft went and released a new version which fixed 99% of the problems.
With the possible exception of Win95 (which is no longer officially supported), there's little technical reason that MS could not release an implementation of IPv6 for Win9x. Someone earlier mentioned that WinXP has built-in support for IPv6 (I don't have such a box, so I can't verify), and I know that they've been playing with a W2K implementation for some time now. There's just not much reason for them to push it right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did a slight shift in Congress and a new president lead to the the judge being removed? The Appeals Court accepted the findings of fact, but dismissed the remedies. The court system is independent enough of the rest of the political process that a new president and the remanding of the remedies have nothing to do with each other.
Personally, though I prefer the idea of a breakup, I can't disagree with the Appeals Court. The original judge (his name escapes me at the moment) was incredibly stupid in how he handled the case after the decision was handed down, and is lucky he wasn't reprimanded for it. Judge Kollar-Kotelly is handling things as a judge should, and while it seems very unlikely that MS will be broken up, she seems to have a good, fair head on her shoulders and will pick a fair set of remedies. I doubt that any side will be happy with it, and there will almost certainly be another round of appeals, perhaps even making it to the Supreme Court in a year or two.
This fight is no more ugly than any other monopoly case. IBM and AT&T had similar knock-down, drag-out fights with the government, and there are cases we don't see in the papers because the industries are so small that nobody except immediately interested parties notice. These are long, drawn-out processes. The consumer generally wins out, though, even in a case like Microsoft's. That it will never satisfy most Slashdotters until MS is forced to open-source every single piece of software they've ever written is beside the point.
The Taleban were routed in a few weeks by US-led forces. That's not the same as the mujahadeen that fought off the Soviets in the 80s.
With little more than rifles and a few anti-aircraft missiles supplied by outsiders like the United States and China, the mujahadeen inflicted losses on the Red Army as had not been seen since WW2. The Russians had used similar tactics to resist the Germans, but then grew complacent in their technology as the decades passed.
If you really want to see how low they went, look on Kazaa or a similar program for the keywords "Russian soldier" and watch as one gets executed. (WARNING: You'd better have a STRONG stomach to watch that film, and not have eaten anything in the prior half-hour.) Such simple, brutal deaths led to the complete demoralization of the Red Army and the resultant withdrawal. When your army doesn't want to fight anymore, it's hard to press them into battle. Technology was not a factor in those battles. The mujahadeen made themselves difficult to hit, and inflicted losses despite the changing tactics of the Russians.
As for the Palestinians, what you don't often see are the deaths and injuries on the Israeli side of the gun battles. With a well-planned ambush, Palestinian gunmen recently led Israeli troops into an ambush in which 13 soldiers were killed and a further seven wounded. Israeli soldiers have died in other engagements. The only limiting factor is the terrain, which is hard to hide in by the Palestinians.
In the United States, as in most countries, we have varied terrain in which to fight. They're STILL looking for Eric Rudolph for the bombing of an abortion clinic (or maybe two) and the Atlanta Olympics. He disappeared into the Appalachian forest, and the biggest manhunt in US history ensued. His knowledge of the terrain kept him from being found. The same could -- and does -- happen with small groups of rebels. Consider that it took a couple of thousand troops to dislodge/kill 800 al Qaeda forces in Operation Anaconda, even with air superiority, and the US side still lost at least nine soldiers. I haven't seen how many the Afghan allied forces lost.
I submit to you Exhibit A: The Afghan mujahideen, who used rifles and a few light rockets to defeat an army of well-trained soldiers equipped with tanks, helicopters, and fighter-bombers.
I submit to you Exhibit B: Palestinians, who, with the exception of their abhorrent use of suicide bombers, have made a major pain of themselves using only light weapons and homemade explosives, managing to destroy two Merkava tanks -- arguably the best tanks in the world -- as well as successfully ambushing a number of Israeli patrols.
I submit to you Exhibit C: The Chechnyans, who used (and still use) small arms and homemade explosives almost exclusively to not only hold back the well-trained, well-equipped Russian army, but to also make Chechnya the most feared assignment for a soldier since Afghanistan.
A rifleman standing up to a tank is committing suicide. A coordinated team of private citizens, well motivated and using light weapons, can conduct a guerilla campaign to exploit the weaknesses inherent in a large, well-equipped force. Armor is meant for use against armor and fortified structures. Vehicles are inherently less mobile than people. Soldiers do not want to march into certain death. All are weaknesses that work well to a rebel's advantage.
Consider, also, that even with a peak army of two million personnel, the United States armed forces would have been facing a significant portion of 250 million guns, and you gotta get out of that tank sometime.
No one is modding his comments up. He's posting at +2 because of his karma level. He's got 25+ karms, so can post with an automatic +1 bonus.
I prefer opening fewer applications not from the standpoint of inefficiency of the operating system but rather inefficiency of the UI. I'm slowly moving to Trillian (still have all four IM programs plus mIRC at home, but work uses this little wonder) because it's simpler. Outlook 2002 w/PGP installed handles connections to my two home e-mail addresses as well as work and Hotmail (I'd incorporate Yahoo web access if I could), as well as my address book and calendar, which sync to my Visor Deluxe. Central storage, fewer programs, fewer Alt-Tabs.
I've even taken to using the multiple desktop feature in nVidia's new drivers to do main apps (Office, etc) on one desktop, web surfing and design on a second, and programming on a third. Now, if the IM windows would just stay on Desktop #1....
Leahy was a co-sponsor and voted in favor of it, and also voted for the Shays-Meehan bill. He's been an advocate of campaign finance reform for at least the last couple of years.
It may well become pay-for-play. But the bandwidth costs out of decent datacenters is dropping rapidly. I work at a datacenter myself, and I see the difference between what a T1/DS1 costs from the phone company and what we charge for a T1-equivalent out of our own connections. I know of a couple of larger companies that are getting even sweeter deals than we are, and I expect the numbers to continue to drop. Bandwidth, assuming Valve gets a nice clean connection to a major backbone provider, will be a much smaller piece of the distribution costs than CDs now are.
OK, you've got a point there. But having one's HR department semi-randomly hack up the rosters and being "gone" aren't the same thing.
Most UFO reports are easily explained by normal phenomena, and not classified government projects. Aircraft flying in careful formation (particularly at high altitudes), meteors, and ball lightning (rare in itself, but not classified nor extraterrestrial in nature) have all been mentioned as common causes of UFO reports, totaling around 85%, IIRC. Classified government projects and hoaxes probably make up the balance of them, with a tiny sliver of them truly unexplainable.
:)
And I'm including covering up the affair with the mistress under 'hoax'.
Because Sierra is one of the biggest game publishers on the planet. Consider:
Half-Life
Aliens vs. Predator 2
Tribes 2
Die Hard
No One Lives Forever
Arcanum
King's Quest 8
NASCAR Racing series
Empire Earth
Homeworld
Those are only a few selected games out of their much larger total list of software published. They're nowhere near gone.
Consider the cost of bandwidth now. This makes some sense, in a theoretical way, for a new method of delivering content. How long does it take to go to the store, get a game, come back, and install it? I would estimate around an hour. Many people with broadband can fairly easily download about 280MB (averaging 80KB/sec) in an hour. Additional sections of the game could be downloaded while playing faster than the player is likely to achieve such advancement.
Of course, broadband isn't available for everyone, and Sierra would still have a role publishing games on CD for those of us who do not have fast connections or who choose to have physical media in hand. What this does, though, is put some power back in Valve's hands, allowing them a much faster method of distributing patches and anti-cheats and cutting distribution costs. The only remaining issue is how much Sierra loses from this.
I agree. Consider how complex a nuclear explosion is, and we have just recently seen the first detailed three-dimensional computer model of such a blast. That is a complex system that affects a few square miles.
Clouds, ice, water (fresh and salt), soil of differing types, concrete, plants, animals, wind.... All have their contribution to the environment. Thinking we can properly model these right now is nearly a joke.
Calling the steps that led to Chernobyl a series of mistakes is not quite correct. IIRC, six *separate* safety mechanisms, any *one* of which would have prevented the disaster, were specifically disabled by the technicians in their efforts to finish their project. That's not a mistake: that's incompetence.
As for Three Mile Island.... Well, that's a different story. But keep in mind that it was averted because of the knowledge of the workers and the fact that the safety mechanisms, while not working perfectly, slowed the problem sufficiently to give time to end the crisis. The radiation release was negligible, and new procedures were put into place at every power plant in the United States to prevent a repeat.
I have a nuclear plant about 60 miles from me (San Onofre, CA). There is growing talk of shutting it down, and I would *gladly* have one built closer, but the damned NIMBYs populating the southern half of the county driving around in their SUVs don't want anything to take a few dollars off the value of their $700K homes.
As for storage and transportation, Yucca Mountain has been shown to be just fine in every study done. I'm sure there are other stable sites that can be picked in Colorado or any of a dozen other states, but because everyone is afraid of something happening, the current materials sit in poorly-secured, decaying facilities on-site. Transport the stuff in a convoy guarded by the military if you must; I'll deal with the road being shut down for a couple of hours per section. Taper the need for oil, gas, and coal, and put up the reactors until the rest of the renewable sources can be developed to a reasonable efficiency standard.
You forgot Mexico City.
Having grown up around Los Angeles, I remember all the Stage I and the occasional Stage II smog alerts. We used to get held inside during recess, and most of the kids hated it. Now, I don't think we've had a smog alert in three years. I can see for miles now from Brea to downtown Santa Ana and clearly make out buildings (about 12 miles for those of you not here), whereas a few years ago, seeing more that two or three miles was a rarity.
The United States has made considerable progress. We're not done by a long shot, but new requirements for environmental friendliness have to be phased in, not dictated like some would have.
Forgive me if I am wrong, but I think we've only been really studying the environment to a significant degree for a few hundred years, if that, and have detailed ice cores going back, with some exceptions, only a few thousand years. That seems to me, in comparison to the 4.5 billion or so times the Earth has circled the sun to be a bit of a stretch in terms of extrapolation.
I wish I could find the link, but I read an article a few months ago that suggested that evidence has been found showing the Earth does periodically go through warming stages where the global temperature rose significantly (10C comes to mind) in the course of a mere thousand years.
I'm not on either side of the fence on this one. I don't think that we should be doing anything to push the issue, to be on the safe side, but I also don't think that we should rush into snap judgements on something that ten years from now may be chuckled at as just another silly fad. I'm in favor of increased mileage for all vehicles, decreased emissions for diesel engines, more reliance on wind, solar, tidal, and nuclear energy and decreased reliance on hydroelectrics (I don't care for the damage done by dams); at the same time, I also think that we need to be careful to balance the economic considerations. Further unbalancing the already unstable economies of a number of small countries could lead to wars, disease epidemics, and massive unrest. Lead them into the light by helping them with their prosperity, and show them the benefits of working with the environment instead of abusing it. Don't coddle them as the Kyoto Treaty did, and don't try to bully the larger nations. Piss people off, and you'll never get their cooperation. Work with them, help them along, allow them to be successful on their own, and they'll be far more likely to follow your lead.
If you can't guess it, brute force it. If you can't brute force it, hand the best team you have a blank check and say, "Enjoy."
One of the interesting things I saw recently at the NSA career website was a mention that many of their engineers get their own, individual, custom hardware. If they have the budget and facilities for that, you better believe that they have what NDS has and more.
Not really. When I worked at a small games shop about nine years ago, we stocked these. They were tremendous fun, and we made some sales when we started playing with them on slow days and people would walk in and see us. We had repeat customers, too, as people who decided that they craved revenge. :)
IIRC, they sold for $10-$25, the quality of the wood and ammunition capacity being primary deciding factors.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that heard that. I had to think about it for a moment before it made sense.
A check of the foxnews.com and of the Google newgroup archives mentions nothing about that. Do you have anything more specific to add which we could use to nail down the specifics?
Keep in mind that this solution could increase the overall file fragmentation significantly more than even the old way of doing things. As it is, I've found myself defragging my hard drive probably three times as often as before, and Morpheus-derived files (well, before last week) were responsible for inordinately huge amounts of fragmentation.
Perhaps using this idea to go to a temp file, then copying the file while deleting the original temp file would help to minimize such problems.
The place I just left had a Network Access Request Form. I called the author Pinkie once when I had a question about it. He didn't get it.
Nixon had a group working for him leading up the the 1972 election called CREEP -- Committee to Re-Elect the President. Kind of ominous, considering the context.
What was the name of the third service that was using the Kazaa network? Is it still around and if so, is it packed with spyware like Kazaa is?
That's a different case. Drugs and bullets are a pretty clear indication that something is amiss, and that a crime likely occured. While a shooting can be accidental, it usually isn't, and so usually hospitals are legally required to notify the police.
However, notifying the police is different from answering a police inquiry.
Early version of Windows 95 also had really crappy IPv4 support. Microsoft went and released a new version which fixed 99% of the problems.
With the possible exception of Win95 (which is no longer officially supported), there's little technical reason that MS could not release an implementation of IPv6 for Win9x. Someone earlier mentioned that WinXP has built-in support for IPv6 (I don't have such a box, so I can't verify), and I know that they've been playing with a W2K implementation for some time now. There's just not much reason for them to push it right now.