Making the details vague, especially by not telling which card to avoid using, makes the users unable to do anything to prevent being victims. That very much GIVES the attackers the upper hand.
For those attackers that can replicate the exploit, yes, it does. However, in some cases, it can be considered ethical to not release the information.
For example, I took a wireless security class led by Joshua Wright, who some may know as the creator of several wireless attack tools such as asleap and lorcon (the latter was used by these researchers). During the class and in a presentation during the week, he demonstrated several tools that he refused to release due to their ability to cause mischief. Some of them had clear legal liability -- a tool designed for use at for-pay hotspots, for example. Some of them he simply deemed too dangerous to be released, such as the Bluetooth PIN cracker that he demonstrated in the presentation. He did provide some information on each tool and vaguely how they worked, but not enough to recreate the exploits.
What he did do is present some mitigating steps, such as using IPSEC VPNs at hotspots, or using Bluetooth PINs of at least eight (and preferably 12 or more) digits in length (but since many device PINs cannot be set by their owners, people should at least be aware of the issue). The presenters did the same thing here, providing a work-around that mitigates the problem for the moment until the situation can be solved at a larger scale.
It was the diseases from the Europeans filthy way of life that did them in
It may be that it was simply lucky timing on the part of the Spaniards in at least the case of the Aztecs. Discover Magazine talked about the possibility that the Aztecs already dealt with smallpox, and that a series of smallpox and other outbreaks in 1520, 1531, 1546, and 1576.
It's retrospective diagnosis, and such diagnoses are always subject to debate, but may be worth considering. Its value may be questioned insofar as it doesn't deal with the South American conquests which were handled almost as easily, and which also had a great disease toll.
Matt Damon is quite capable of playing very different roles. Jason Bourne (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy), Linus Caldwell (Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve), Pvt James Ryan (Saving Private Ryan), Rannulph Junuh (The Legend of Bagger Vance), and Mike McDermott (Rounders) were all sufficiently different as to give Damon credit as a good actor.
There are some similar roles -- every actor has them. But he has a range. Affleck, OTOH, has had only one role which I've been able to handle for very long, and that was as AJ in Armageddon (I've not seen most of the post-Clerks Kevin Smith movies, so there may be more on the list that I could handle). Apparently, he was also in Shakespeare in Love, which I also enjoyed, but I do not have any memory of him in the movie.
Jani was contributing to an Israeli company. Probably for free. Helping an Israeli company helps the Israeli government. Helping the Israeli government helps the Isreali Defense Foces which in turn kills hundreds of civilians. Also realise that companies have both the ability and the right to critizise its government. Zend Technologies have not done so and therefore their inaction makes responsible.
I worked for an American company, though not for free. Working for that company helped the United States government. Helping the US government helps the UN, which in turn instituted pointless economic and diplomatic sanctions on Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. My company did not protest this course of action. Should I have quit the company?
OK, I know that the various testing levels have had updated software for a while, but pushing this volume of changes to the mainstream distribution does seem like something of a shock. Debian's historic reliance on "tried and true" versions seems to be giving way (at least partially) to the realization that many people don't want to use it because it lacks significant feature updates.
Remedy is powerful, but its database schema sucks. Trying to troubleshoot it is a nightmare, since they don't use viable names for most of their tables (at least that's how it is for us).
Because he's amusing. He is the ultimate fanboy, and is useful at least to show other fanboys what happens to them when they not only drink the Kool-Aid, but insert the IV needle directly through their eyes to completely blind them.
For that matter, what old SUV gets that? My dad has a 1990 Sierra 3500 Dually with the camper, trailer, and off-road packages, and it's admittedly a fuel hog, but even it gets about 10 MPG, and when he had an over-cab camper on it, it still got about eight.
A lot of people would do well to learn these basics. I have a Camaro that, when I drive in the city, I tend to keep below 2000 RPM. It moves along in normal traffic just fine, and my mileage doesn't suffer too terribly much. The occasional teen in an overdone Civic does get put in his place, but generally speaking, I'm fairly easy on the gas. This changes when getting on the freeway, as I tend to open up during acceleration, but since most of my freeway runs are fairly lengthy and run using cruise control while in sixth gear, and I did buy the car to enjoy it, I don't feel very guilty about it.:)
Rental contracts almost always specifically state that you may not take the vehicle off-road. While they are often willing to overlook things if you're on a dirt road that is maintained or at least well-used, if you do any damage to it, they may see it as damage while violating the contract, and hence insurance may not cover it.
I've occasionally rented SUVs when going out to the desert for recreational purposes, but when I do, we're pretty well stuck in one spot. If you want to do something like follow the Mojave Trail, or general four-by fun, a rental just isn't going to cut it.
If they did release an update that trashed 1 or 2 % or Windows installs, they'd release another patch and the public would keep lapping it up.
Take off the FUD hat and re-read what you wrote there. Do you really think that trashing 1%-2% of the install base would be smoothed over with a patch?
Back in 2004, when SP2 was released, the estimated installation base for XP was more than 250 million systems. Throw in Windows 2000, plus growth since then, and I would think that a conservative estimate of 400 million 2000/XP/2003 systems wouldn't be out of line. The suggestion that four to eight million systems -- servers included -- could lose data and that Microsoft could just release a few new bytes to handle it is ludicrous at best. Microsoft would be hit with a class-action suit -- and deserve it -- for taking out so many systems.
You can break drivers. You can break compatibility. You can even break mainboard hardware. In each case, people will move on. But when you break people's data, forgiveness is often impossible to find.
But, keep in mind that NTFS remains proprietary and Microsoft can break it for newly written files any time it suits their business purposes to do so. All it takes is one update.
Hypothetically, yes. However, there are few things that they -- or any OS developer -- are more paranoid about altering than the filesystem. You can recover from a bad driver, or a bad patch for most functions; recovering fully from a bad filesystem alteration may be nigh-on impossible, and Microsoft is going to think really, really hard before they go and do something that may result in lost data.
I find normal consumers have a great deal of difficulty figuring out what the performance level of a given Intel chip is compared to others given how their model numbers jump around. AMD's numbers are more straightforward, though they still don't always tell the right story.
I didn't say it was a hard thing to do. I said it wasn't easy. You are overestimating the ease.
First, you have to track down viable missiles (Stingers from the Soviet-Afghanistan War are not viable). That means figuring out who is a legitimate seller of the missiles, and who is a sting operation.
Then you have to buy it, which means transferring money either through shell accounts or by large cash transactions.
Then you need to import it, and by "import" I mean get it into the country whether through a shipping company or by smuggler.
You then have to move the missiles to the launch locations and set them up. Even a Stinger requires a couple of minutes of setup time.
Then you have to fire them. Of all of the steps, this is the easiest and the least likely to fail before the firers can be taken down.
In the midst of all of this, you have to make sure that no one in your group of at least 20 people breaks the silence says something to the authorities.
At every step of the way, there are occasions where someone may discover the plot and shut it down.
That depends on the assumptions going in. Consider the following immediate costs, excluding consequential economic damages:
Cost of one THEL: $25 million (down the line, anyway) Cost of one downed airliner: $100 million for the airliner, unknown damages to ground structures
Admittedly, this is just one scenario looking at a MANPADS as opposed to mortar attacks, and is focused on a single airport. How many airports would get such a system? At $25 million, providing each international airport with one (there are about 75-80 in the US, IIRC) would probably cost in the range of $2 billion, plus some more in charges for training and of course the ongoing maintenance. The question is whether that $2 billion is well-spent, and that depends on perspective. If it shoots down a missile, it's probably money well-spent. If it fails to shoot down a missile, it's money poorly spent. If no missile is ever fired, it becomes much more subjective, because then one has to ascertain whether this is because it forced the attacker consider other methods, or because no attacker even considered using such a missile.
Tracking down, buying, importing, moving, setting up, and firing 20 missiles all without getting caught is not as easy as it sounds, or it would have been done already. Doing this with one missile (such as a MANPADS) is easier, and is the kind of thing that a THEL system is designed to handle. In addition, the THEL is designed to handle swarms and has demonstrated such by taking out multiple mortar and Katyusha rounds fired in volley, suggesting a rapid cycling rate, though I don't know whether it can handle 20 inbound at a time. Design capacity is, IIRC, for 60 shots before reloading is required.
You might get that man to give over his money, but when you get down to it, rich people aren't the footsoldier types.
Osama bin Laden was born into wealth, and yet chose to go and fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. He is known to have gone into actual battle, including getting shot at with a number of near-misses. And yet he kept going back.
Wealth has little to do with bravery or cowardice about being on the front lines.
There is no technology that is going to protect against all threats. THEL removes certain opportunities, forcing would-be terrorists to deal with a smaller attack profile. Just because the THEL concept doesn't work on all threats doesn't mean that it's an invalid concept.
Consider network security. We use firewalls to deal with certain connectivity threats. We use IDS/IPS to deal with certain threats that go through connectivity that must remain open. We use antivirus to deal with certain e-mail and file-based threats. We use logs to look for deviations from accepted activity within systems. None of those on its own will deal with all of those threats on its own.
Consider the threats faced out in the world. Whatever you think of the background reasons, Katyushas, RPGs, mortars, and even artillery shells are real risks to soldiers on the ground as well as to civilians near threat zones (think Israel, Iraq, and maybe Turkey). The ability to knock these down in flight, at least in the small quantities used by guerillas, saves lives and property. And to clarify for those that may not know, the Qassim and Katyusha rockets are not cruise missiles. They're simple rockets that can be constructed with the tools found in a basic machine shop. While THEL can knock down cruise missiles, that's not what they're intended for here.
Your mention of cars, light aircraft, and ships are another threat entirely, and much harder to deal with. Stolen ships are a less-likely vector, because a stolen ship is a lot harder to hide, especially when you're trying to get into port. It's more likely that it will be legitimately purchased by a shell company and then sailed under legal registration. In any case, THEL is not intended to deal with those threats. Those have to be dealt with largely by eyes. As a would-be pilot and an occasional commercial flier, I have the most concern with the light aircraft and the car bomb at the loading zones. I have no desire to deal with a plethora of additional FAA regulations to deal with just to rent a Cessna or a Piper, nor do I want to have to take a shuttle two miles from another drop-off point (which just moves the target) to the drop-off point.
Actually, THEL has been rather quietly developed by the US and Israel since it's a tactical system more than a strategic one. The Wikipedia article is horribly out of date, but its success ratio was very good, in that it was able to shoot down rockets, artillery shells, and mortar shells. One of the challenges has been to get the system shrunk down to a reasonable size. At some point, there was hope of getting it to a size suitable for mounting on a Bradley APC or perhaps even a Humvee, in hopes that it would provide small units protection against certain airborne threats. Whether they've managed to do that, I'm not sure.
If this is feasible, I wouldn't be surprised to see it mounted in places where mortars, Katyusha-style rockets, and RPGs are common -- places like the areas surrounding Israel, and in the cities of Iraq. Removing the major ability of insurgents to use such mobile weapons may reduce overall casualties and introduce a frustration factor strong enough to either get them to do something easier to do but less likely to succeed (roadside or suicide bombs), or even get some to give up altogether. (Yes, it's optimistic, but still possible.)
I don't believe that he was limited to a quasi-Newtonian view, and, of course, his work was critical to the foundations of quantum physics. What I meant was that it made him uncomfortable, or so I have come to believe based on my readings about him. I merely posited that this uncomfort may have been based in the classical world view that he grew up with.
There are things that make me uncomfortable when considering them, and yet in my mind I know that they're correct. I believe it to be a mark of intelligence and wisdom (and I do not mean this to sound egotistical, though it probably will come off that way) when a person can set aside a worldview based on new information in order to reconsider a new viewpoint, especially if that new viewpoint can then be accepted as better when shown to be so. It is a mark of human nature, however, to worry that perhaps the new viewpoint is not correct, at least not completely so, and to wonder if the old worldview may not be the better, simply because it fit so well for so long.
I stand corrected. It had been my understanding that Virtual Server was not free, and in looking around, it seems that I missed the change from back in April that removed the cost.
Edward Teller had a concern about atmospheric nitrogen undergoing fusion, essentially igniting the entire atmosphere. He got together with a couple of other Manhattan Project physicists and showed that it was not just unlikely, but impossible. With this concern laid to rest, they knew that it was safe (so to speak) to detonate the bomb.
It was one of the other physicists (not the ones with whom Teller collaborated on the above report) who kept talking about it afterward, and allowed the story to live on, much to the annoyance of a number of Manhattan Project researchers.
There is some correlation in an overall strategy, and there may be something more than coincidence to the timing of the releases. Microsoft is eager to make its presence known, especially in selling Virtual Server. Virtualization addiction on the desktop leads to virtualization addiction on the server (not that this is a bad thing). Microsoft is more interested in selling Virtual Server, so they make Virtual PC available for free to get their foot in a door on which VMWare Workstation is leaning heavily.
On a similar vein, knowing that Microsoft has a strong incentive and ability to get Virtual Server known and used, VMWare decided a few months ago to differentiate VMWare GSX from ESX (their enterprise server product), and to make it free as an enticement to play with server-level virtualization so they could upsell to enterprise-level virtualization.
Both companies made certain products free in an attempt to upsell to their respective primary product lines. Microsoft loses little for giving away Virtual PC because they have so little of the market as it stands. VMWare loses little for giving away Server because it made up a small portion of its own sales. Microsoft possibly gains sales of Virtual Server, while VMWare possibly gains sales of ESX.
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Once the addiction has transferred, you can then try using modafinil to break the cocaine addiction.
For those attackers that can replicate the exploit, yes, it does. However, in some cases, it can be considered ethical to not release the information.
For example, I took a wireless security class led by Joshua Wright, who some may know as the creator of several wireless attack tools such as asleap and lorcon (the latter was used by these researchers). During the class and in a presentation during the week, he demonstrated several tools that he refused to release due to their ability to cause mischief. Some of them had clear legal liability -- a tool designed for use at for-pay hotspots, for example. Some of them he simply deemed too dangerous to be released, such as the Bluetooth PIN cracker that he demonstrated in the presentation. He did provide some information on each tool and vaguely how they worked, but not enough to recreate the exploits.
What he did do is present some mitigating steps, such as using IPSEC VPNs at hotspots, or using Bluetooth PINs of at least eight (and preferably 12 or more) digits in length (but since many device PINs cannot be set by their owners, people should at least be aware of the issue). The presenters did the same thing here, providing a work-around that mitigates the problem for the moment until the situation can be solved at a larger scale.
It may be that it was simply lucky timing on the part of the Spaniards in at least the case of the Aztecs. Discover Magazine talked about the possibility that the Aztecs already dealt with smallpox, and that a series of smallpox and other outbreaks in 1520, 1531, 1546, and 1576.
It's retrospective diagnosis, and such diagnoses are always subject to debate, but may be worth considering. Its value may be questioned insofar as it doesn't deal with the South American conquests which were handled almost as easily, and which also had a great disease toll.
Matt Damon is quite capable of playing very different roles. Jason Bourne (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy), Linus Caldwell (Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve), Pvt James Ryan (Saving Private Ryan), Rannulph Junuh (The Legend of Bagger Vance), and Mike McDermott (Rounders) were all sufficiently different as to give Damon credit as a good actor.
There are some similar roles -- every actor has them. But he has a range. Affleck, OTOH, has had only one role which I've been able to handle for very long, and that was as AJ in Armageddon (I've not seen most of the post-Clerks Kevin Smith movies, so there may be more on the list that I could handle). Apparently, he was also in Shakespeare in Love, which I also enjoyed, but I do not have any memory of him in the movie.
I worked for an American company, though not for free. Working for that company helped the United States government. Helping the US government helps the UN, which in turn instituted pointless economic and diplomatic sanctions on Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. My company did not protest this course of action. Should I have quit the company?
OK, I know that the various testing levels have had updated software for a while, but pushing this volume of changes to the mainstream distribution does seem like something of a shock. Debian's historic reliance on "tried and true" versions seems to be giving way (at least partially) to the realization that many people don't want to use it because it lacks significant feature updates.
I'm impressed.
Remedy is powerful, but its database schema sucks. Trying to troubleshoot it is a nightmare, since they don't use viable names for most of their tables (at least that's how it is for us).
Because he's amusing. He is the ultimate fanboy, and is useful at least to show other fanboys what happens to them when they not only drink the Kool-Aid, but insert the IV needle directly through their eyes to completely blind them.
They did when I was a kid, but my parents never taught me the right spells to make it happen at my apartment.
For that matter, what old SUV gets that? My dad has a 1990 Sierra 3500 Dually with the camper, trailer, and off-road packages, and it's admittedly a fuel hog, but even it gets about 10 MPG, and when he had an over-cab camper on it, it still got about eight.
A lot of people would do well to learn these basics. I have a Camaro that, when I drive in the city, I tend to keep below 2000 RPM. It moves along in normal traffic just fine, and my mileage doesn't suffer too terribly much. The occasional teen in an overdone Civic does get put in his place, but generally speaking, I'm fairly easy on the gas. This changes when getting on the freeway, as I tend to open up during acceleration, but since most of my freeway runs are fairly lengthy and run using cruise control while in sixth gear, and I did buy the car to enjoy it, I don't feel very guilty about it. :)
Rental contracts almost always specifically state that you may not take the vehicle off-road. While they are often willing to overlook things if you're on a dirt road that is maintained or at least well-used, if you do any damage to it, they may see it as damage while violating the contract, and hence insurance may not cover it.
I've occasionally rented SUVs when going out to the desert for recreational purposes, but when I do, we're pretty well stuck in one spot. If you want to do something like follow the Mojave Trail, or general four-by fun, a rental just isn't going to cut it.
Take off the FUD hat and re-read what you wrote there. Do you really think that trashing 1%-2% of the install base would be smoothed over with a patch?
Back in 2004, when SP2 was released, the estimated installation base for XP was more than 250 million systems. Throw in Windows 2000, plus growth since then, and I would think that a conservative estimate of 400 million 2000/XP/2003 systems wouldn't be out of line. The suggestion that four to eight million systems -- servers included -- could lose data and that Microsoft could just release a few new bytes to handle it is ludicrous at best. Microsoft would be hit with a class-action suit -- and deserve it -- for taking out so many systems.
You can break drivers. You can break compatibility. You can even break mainboard hardware. In each case, people will move on. But when you break people's data, forgiveness is often impossible to find.
Hypothetically, yes. However, there are few things that they -- or any OS developer -- are more paranoid about altering than the filesystem. You can recover from a bad driver, or a bad patch for most functions; recovering fully from a bad filesystem alteration may be nigh-on impossible, and Microsoft is going to think really, really hard before they go and do something that may result in lost data.
I find normal consumers have a great deal of difficulty figuring out what the performance level of a given Intel chip is compared to others given how their model numbers jump around. AMD's numbers are more straightforward, though they still don't always tell the right story.
I didn't say it was a hard thing to do. I said it wasn't easy. You are overestimating the ease.
First, you have to track down viable missiles (Stingers from the Soviet-Afghanistan War are not viable). That means figuring out who is a legitimate seller of the missiles, and who is a sting operation.
Then you have to buy it, which means transferring money either through shell accounts or by large cash transactions.
Then you need to import it, and by "import" I mean get it into the country whether through a shipping company or by smuggler.
You then have to move the missiles to the launch locations and set them up. Even a Stinger requires a couple of minutes of setup time.
Then you have to fire them. Of all of the steps, this is the easiest and the least likely to fail before the firers can be taken down.
In the midst of all of this, you have to make sure that no one in your group of at least 20 people breaks the silence says something to the authorities.
At every step of the way, there are occasions where someone may discover the plot and shut it down.
That depends on the assumptions going in. Consider the following immediate costs, excluding consequential economic damages:
Cost of one THEL: $25 million (down the line, anyway)
Cost of one downed airliner: $100 million for the airliner, unknown damages to ground structures
Admittedly, this is just one scenario looking at a MANPADS as opposed to mortar attacks, and is focused on a single airport. How many airports would get such a system? At $25 million, providing each international airport with one (there are about 75-80 in the US, IIRC) would probably cost in the range of $2 billion, plus some more in charges for training and of course the ongoing maintenance. The question is whether that $2 billion is well-spent, and that depends on perspective. If it shoots down a missile, it's probably money well-spent. If it fails to shoot down a missile, it's money poorly spent. If no missile is ever fired, it becomes much more subjective, because then one has to ascertain whether this is because it forced the attacker consider other methods, or because no attacker even considered using such a missile.
Tracking down, buying, importing, moving, setting up, and firing 20 missiles all without getting caught is not as easy as it sounds, or it would have been done already. Doing this with one missile (such as a MANPADS) is easier, and is the kind of thing that a THEL system is designed to handle. In addition, the THEL is designed to handle swarms and has demonstrated such by taking out multiple mortar and Katyusha rounds fired in volley, suggesting a rapid cycling rate, though I don't know whether it can handle 20 inbound at a time. Design capacity is, IIRC, for 60 shots before reloading is required.
Osama bin Laden was born into wealth, and yet chose to go and fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. He is known to have gone into actual battle, including getting shot at with a number of near-misses. And yet he kept going back.
Wealth has little to do with bravery or cowardice about being on the front lines.
There is no technology that is going to protect against all threats. THEL removes certain opportunities, forcing would-be terrorists to deal with a smaller attack profile. Just because the THEL concept doesn't work on all threats doesn't mean that it's an invalid concept.
Consider network security. We use firewalls to deal with certain connectivity threats. We use IDS/IPS to deal with certain threats that go through connectivity that must remain open. We use antivirus to deal with certain e-mail and file-based threats. We use logs to look for deviations from accepted activity within systems. None of those on its own will deal with all of those threats on its own.
Consider the threats faced out in the world. Whatever you think of the background reasons, Katyushas, RPGs, mortars, and even artillery shells are real risks to soldiers on the ground as well as to civilians near threat zones (think Israel, Iraq, and maybe Turkey). The ability to knock these down in flight, at least in the small quantities used by guerillas, saves lives and property. And to clarify for those that may not know, the Qassim and Katyusha rockets are not cruise missiles. They're simple rockets that can be constructed with the tools found in a basic machine shop. While THEL can knock down cruise missiles, that's not what they're intended for here.
Your mention of cars, light aircraft, and ships are another threat entirely, and much harder to deal with. Stolen ships are a less-likely vector, because a stolen ship is a lot harder to hide, especially when you're trying to get into port. It's more likely that it will be legitimately purchased by a shell company and then sailed under legal registration. In any case, THEL is not intended to deal with those threats. Those have to be dealt with largely by eyes. As a would-be pilot and an occasional commercial flier, I have the most concern with the light aircraft and the car bomb at the loading zones. I have no desire to deal with a plethora of additional FAA regulations to deal with just to rent a Cessna or a Piper, nor do I want to have to take a shuttle two miles from another drop-off point (which just moves the target) to the drop-off point.
Actually, THEL has been rather quietly developed by the US and Israel since it's a tactical system more than a strategic one. The Wikipedia article is horribly out of date, but its success ratio was very good, in that it was able to shoot down rockets, artillery shells, and mortar shells. One of the challenges has been to get the system shrunk down to a reasonable size. At some point, there was hope of getting it to a size suitable for mounting on a Bradley APC or perhaps even a Humvee, in hopes that it would provide small units protection against certain airborne threats. Whether they've managed to do that, I'm not sure.
If this is feasible, I wouldn't be surprised to see it mounted in places where mortars, Katyusha-style rockets, and RPGs are common -- places like the areas surrounding Israel, and in the cities of Iraq. Removing the major ability of insurgents to use such mobile weapons may reduce overall casualties and introduce a frustration factor strong enough to either get them to do something easier to do but less likely to succeed (roadside or suicide bombs), or even get some to give up altogether. (Yes, it's optimistic, but still possible.)
I don't believe that he was limited to a quasi-Newtonian view, and, of course, his work was critical to the foundations of quantum physics. What I meant was that it made him uncomfortable, or so I have come to believe based on my readings about him. I merely posited that this uncomfort may have been based in the classical world view that he grew up with.
There are things that make me uncomfortable when considering them, and yet in my mind I know that they're correct. I believe it to be a mark of intelligence and wisdom (and I do not mean this to sound egotistical, though it probably will come off that way) when a person can set aside a worldview based on new information in order to reconsider a new viewpoint, especially if that new viewpoint can then be accepted as better when shown to be so. It is a mark of human nature, however, to worry that perhaps the new viewpoint is not correct, at least not completely so, and to wonder if the old worldview may not be the better, simply because it fit so well for so long.
I stand corrected. It had been my understanding that Virtual Server was not free, and in looking around, it seems that I missed the change from back in April that removed the cost.
Thank you for the information.
Edward Teller had a concern about atmospheric nitrogen undergoing fusion, essentially igniting the entire atmosphere. He got together with a couple of other Manhattan Project physicists and showed that it was not just unlikely, but impossible. With this concern laid to rest, they knew that it was safe (so to speak) to detonate the bomb.
It was one of the other physicists (not the ones with whom Teller collaborated on the above report) who kept talking about it afterward, and allowed the story to live on, much to the annoyance of a number of Manhattan Project researchers.
There is some correlation in an overall strategy, and there may be something more than coincidence to the timing of the releases. Microsoft is eager to make its presence known, especially in selling Virtual Server. Virtualization addiction on the desktop leads to virtualization addiction on the server (not that this is a bad thing). Microsoft is more interested in selling Virtual Server, so they make Virtual PC available for free to get their foot in a door on which VMWare Workstation is leaning heavily.
On a similar vein, knowing that Microsoft has a strong incentive and ability to get Virtual Server known and used, VMWare decided a few months ago to differentiate VMWare GSX from ESX (their enterprise server product), and to make it free as an enticement to play with server-level virtualization so they could upsell to enterprise-level virtualization.
Both companies made certain products free in an attempt to upsell to their respective primary product lines. Microsoft loses little for giving away Virtual PC because they have so little of the market as it stands. VMWare loses little for giving away Server because it made up a small portion of its own sales. Microsoft possibly gains sales of Virtual Server, while VMWare possibly gains sales of ESX.