If so, then I applaud him. However, a 30-car garage and a huge mansion is not indicitave of it. His foundation is one thing (and, incidentally, isn't entirely his money, from what I understand).
A good question, though, is how much benefit or cost the world would have if Microsoft didn't have a monopoly in their various areas while BillG didn't have as much money free to give away.
Do you have more info on that "on track to give away the vast majority of his wealth" bit? I have a vague recollection now that you mention it, but I don't have a solid lead.
Based upon what evidence, aside from your own prejudice?! You counter my providing evidence of one thing that most of you want that he does, and you counter with your own supposition that, well, he doesn't really do it, with no supporting evidence other than your own prior beliefs about the man!
You know, attacking someone without evidence is indicative of something called "having a closed mind". If you actually do have evidence of him slacking in his protective duties, I'd be glad to review it and maybe change my position.
Please note that I am a hypocrite; I do not give nearly enough to charity. That said, I'm working hard on improving myself in this respect. That, and by my own measure, I don't fully respect myself either.:/
Yep. Look at those poor people in rags fighting over that last scrap of bread! How pathetic! They should really share more with each other and make do with the tenth-slice they'd each get if they would just be nice to each other!
Why can't those poor people be more like that rich man, who never fails to instruct his butler to give a dollar to every homeless person he sees as he drives by in his Rolls Royce of the Day?!
Proportionality, friend. Yes, people should be nice to each other and share, but those who live high on the hog are burndened all the more, and seldom live up to that burden as well. They just have all the more freedom to share resources, since they have no need of them.
It sounds callous, but call me when Bill Gates is living in a 3- or 4-bedroom home and has two cars because he's giving the excess to charity. Then I'll have full respect for the man.
Great, you're correct, but US-Visit does nothing of the sort. You do realise that none of the September 11th hijackers used false documents to enter the US, right? They all used their own passports issued in their own names.
Not quite correct. There are multiple ways to render a foreign name into the native Latin character set, leading to a huge headache when verifying the identity of a person entering or exiting the country. This very much solves that problem, as their identity is something more straightforward--there is only one fingerprint "character set".
Additionally, it goes a good ways to verifying the identity of the person entering/exiting the country. If they've ever been through before, they're on record with name, photo, and fingerprint. If they try to go through with any of these parameters changed (e.g. false name or new passport), they're gonna have to answer some questions. Not a panacaea certainly (since it wouldn't catch terrorists never having entered the system), but it'll help catch more ordinary criminals, and put a degree of pressure on the career terrorists.
Actually, I'm pretty sure most of you here would appreciate him working to protect abortion providers and track down anti-abortion killers. It was discussed in a profile of Ashcroft that Newsweek published back last year.
A quick icon in the status bar can indicate how far a user appears to trust a site. This is judged by various factors including, but not limited to (is your research, after all, and I merely an armchair CS research pundit;)
Number of times a page is visited. Directly will always count for more, indirectly will count for less based on number of clicks away from typed-in site.
User may rate a page's trustworthiness directly
User may query a server which collects information voluntarily disclosed by others and factor in other people's trust of the site (i.e. two options: one factors in the servers' trust info into the page's trustworthiness, the other gives permission to periodically send the user's updated trust database to a (user-selected?) trust server.)
A built-in Trust List
Trust list may then be used to do various things. Simplest is to change the image in the toolbar based on the (floating-point) trust level, rounded to some value (likely integer). User may also incorporate trust level into cookies, saved passwords, and other policies. Finally, for the paranoid, this can also function as a collective, adaptive parental control. User may opt to require that pages must have a trust level at or above x in order to be displayed [otherwise, a stock Untrusted page comes up]. More uses are probably fairly readily apparent.
Nobody forces anyone to buy or use a Windows computer. They do it because they're cheap and easy.
A terrible gross simplification. People buy windows for those reasons, along with:
They don't know anything else
They're afraid of trying out something new
They're uncomfortable if they're not with what they know best
They fear losing data in the change
Everyone else is sending them Microsoft-specific files and they fear losing compatibility (e.g. Mac Office vs Doze Office, all those cute IE plugins)
They fear losing application availability, since so much software is Windows-only or works best with Windows
They fear losing hardware compatibility because their hardware or hardware they want is Windows-only
The people who give them tech advice only know Windows
That's what the businesses use, so that's what others taught them (schools, home)
That is what their business uses, so they want to stay fluent or that's what the company told them to buy (it sometimes happens that the company gives you money to buy a PC, with such strings attached)
They can't find a good, reliable PC with another OS (e.g. it's not a Trusted Name Brand they're familiar with or they can't find a PC that suits their needs and runs something else.
The list goes on and on. To believe that people choose windows just because it's "cheap" and "easy" (many would dispute both; indeed the reasoning behind the reasons above is contentious while the reasons are real) is to be naiive in the extreme.
The list of scenarios you provided is by no means exhaustive. How about OEMs and MS Windows sellers are able to rip out all of IE and insert another browser without losing any functionality (due to complete, published, royalty-free standards) and include it on the Windows CD Not everything need be handed out from Microsoft On High.
if I know that there a companies A, B, C I'll at least ask about them. If company A says B and C are worse, well... if I don't have time to go and see more, I'll trust them (just a consumers behavious), but if I stumble on B and C and see their good sides, I'll choose no matter lock-in and else.
While true, the point is that Organization D has phones, accessories, and text-messaging/mailboxes that can potentially work with A, B, and C. That should be considered more. That was what the parent was saying--that people need to consider vendor lock-in and (lack of) extra-system interoperability (e.g. how well does WinNT interop with Solaris; versus how well does Solaris interop with Linux? Who's doing the interoperability and how do they obtain it (e.g. open, fully-documented specs or reverse-engineering the protocols used?)). It's a very important question.
Personally, I'd give D many points, knowing that I can readily switch to A, B, and C and not have to invest in a new phone (i.e. documents). Sure, the features-list of each platform matters greatlybut interoperability is undervalued and underexamined in current IT practices, imho.
Now, I completely agree about the advertising. It's something that I'd like to see much, much more of. Heck, I'd doneate a small sum of money to help make it happen (hear me, FSF?) IMHO, SuSE and RedHat and others should be advertising more. I barely see ads for anything Linux, outside of Linux journals. And even then, they're few and far between. (Seen Novell's? It kicks butt!)
Some americans are as rude as some french persons. "Frog" is a derogatory term for French people, due to, iirc, eating frog legs. Same as 'Kraut' for a German.
Pardonnez-nous, s'il vous plais. [Je ne parl pas francaise, so please forgive my horrible spelling and writing and grammar and such.;]
Both sides of the hate are getting annoying. Sorry this person is such a danged unevolved monkey. Sorry you had to see this side of the 'states. We're not all butt-munches!:)
Heh. Maybe as punishment for being a jerk to another country in a public forum, maybe the penalty should be having to read opposite-leaning media from and live in the other country....;)
Where is this $99 Windows? I can see $99 XP Home upgrades and maybe XP Home OEM, or Academic but retail XP Home is $200, and XP Pro for $300 (last time I checked Amazon).
Which is quite a rip, since, say, SuSE 9.1 will cost you $30, Academic Pro will run you $60, and Pro will run you $90. And you get all of the above-mentioned benefits from Windows plus boatloads more games and productivity software (including OpenOffice!). Only real downside is the lack of the "90% of software" bit; but we linux zealots are working on it.:)
This is neglecting Mandrake which is Free or Cheap (donations), and then the horde of other Linux distros which are free and/or Cheap.
FWIW, most College's and Universities have agreements with Microsoft where enrolled students can purchse Office xp/2k3 and Windows xp for $20.00 per copy.
Some, maybe most. It's debatable. I know my Uni does, because Microsoft sued them and then promised to drop the suit & expensive audit if they'd just sign up for this agreement. Sounds like extortion to me.
Anyway, the core of what I wanted to say was that The notion that Microsoft Campus Agreements Give You Free/Cheap Microsoft Software Is Complete Fallacy! Actually, you end up paying $10-$20/item in addition to the $50-$100 you pay to the university per semester explicitly for the program. It truly is a craptastic "deal", but what are you going to do when a company with extremely, extremely deep pockets wants to make your life painful? Check your local tuition/fee gathering unit for more information on how badly that program sucks.
You are entirely correct in the purpose of QKD. However,
Second, QKD is unconditionally secure, and that includes man-in-the-middle
is quite incorrect.
First off, nothing is unconditionally secure. If you believe something to be unconditionally secure, you should put your wallet back right now and cool off. And furthermore, without additional protocols in the classical channel, QKD is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The attacker must first snag both classical and quantum channels, but then [s]he can pretend to Bob to Alice and Alice to Bob. Nothing prevents this within a straight QKD system. Now, it's fairly obvious, and therefore has likely already been taken care of using classical crypto, but it's a problem of striaght QKD. Additionally, if there is ever more than one photon generated, then that bit can be undetectably eavesdropped.
The problem with conventional crypto methods is that they are breakable in the absolute
Again incorrect. The one-time pad has, iirc, been proven unbreakable; you just have a key management issue to be settled. That and many classical crypto systems aren't "breakable in the absolute," merely theoretically breakable if certain problems become Easy.
The Americans call the French crazy and make jokes about them to other Americans.
The French call the Americans crazy and make jokes about them to other French people.
Neither (admittedly grossly grouped) party is right, but they never actually talk to each other and inform themselves from sources other than those that agree with their position. The one side reads from sources that agree with their takes on life (well, majorly; there can be minor differences) and ignores the other side and always views the sources skeptically. The other side does the polar opposite.
Unfortunately, the only product of this is feeding the hate, not fostering international cooperation and understanding, regardless of what the individuals participating in the exercise believe their objectives to be!
Je suis american, mais je ne suis pas fou! Ich bin Amerikaner, aber ich bin ganz und gar nicht verrückt! Sono americano, ma no sono pazzesco!
any solution is better than a US one because the latter is certain not to be secure!
I remain unconvinced that an extra-US "solution" will be any less broken than a US one. Actually, I remain unconvinced that the US solution will be "certain" to be insecure.
Read further up on the thread for people discussing other countries' doing the same thing you decry the US of doing.
QC doesn't even prevent a man-in-the-middle attack. All you need to do is splice your tap in to the fibre (or whatever) and do QC with the two ends.
Sorta. You have to simultaneously break into the quantum and classical data transfer paths without them knowing.
Of course, in a complete system, both hosts would be known to each other and able to authenticate the other end over the classical channel.
Additionally, you have the problem of there not being exactly one photon every time, and thus detection probability goes down. Plus the system is pretty lossy to begin with (you can tell evesdroppers because the lossiness goes up quite a bit)
And then you have to trace all the components back to make sure there's none of that merrikin meddlin' going on at some other location!
All of this is iirc. I took the spintronics class last year.
$299 for the PC from Frys with Win XP installed. So did I get a PC for free and pay for Windows, or did I pay for a PC and get Windows for free?
Neither. You paid $50-$70 for Windows XP and paid $250-$230 for a computer. You were merely not getting ripped off nearly as much as you would buying a retail copy. (FWIW, mainstream commercial linux distros sell at retail for (at most) approximately the Windows Massively Discounted Super-Vendor Buddy-Buddy price. Food for thought.)
Of course, it's difficult to get the hardware you want at the price you want and not buy Windows; that's why we call it the Microsoft Tax.:)
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If so, then I applaud him. However, a 30-car garage and a huge mansion is not indicitave of it. His foundation is one thing (and, incidentally, isn't entirely his money, from what I understand).
A good question, though, is how much benefit or cost the world would have if Microsoft didn't have a monopoly in their various areas while BillG didn't have as much money free to give away.
Do you have more info on that "on track to give away the vast majority of his wealth" bit? I have a vague recollection now that you mention it, but I don't have a solid lead.
Based upon what evidence, aside from your own prejudice?! You counter my providing evidence of one thing that most of you want that he does, and you counter with your own supposition that, well, he doesn't really do it, with no supporting evidence other than your own prior beliefs about the man!
You know, attacking someone without evidence is indicative of something called "having a closed mind". If you actually do have evidence of him slacking in his protective duties, I'd be glad to review it and maybe change my position.
Please note that I am a hypocrite; I do not give nearly enough to charity. That said, I'm working hard on improving myself in this respect. That, and by my own measure, I don't fully respect myself either. :/
Full disclosure.
Yep. Look at those poor people in rags fighting over that last scrap of bread! How pathetic! They should really share more with each other and make do with the tenth-slice they'd each get if they would just be nice to each other!
Why can't those poor people be more like that rich man, who never fails to instruct his butler to give a dollar to every homeless person he sees as he drives by in his Rolls Royce of the Day?!
Proportionality, friend. Yes, people should be nice to each other and share, but those who live high on the hog are burndened all the more, and seldom live up to that burden as well. They just have all the more freedom to share resources, since they have no need of them.
It sounds callous, but call me when Bill Gates is living in a 3- or 4-bedroom home and has two cars because he's giving the excess to charity. Then I'll have full respect for the man.
Not quite correct. There are multiple ways to render a foreign name into the native Latin character set, leading to a huge headache when verifying the identity of a person entering or exiting the country. This very much solves that problem, as their identity is something more straightforward--there is only one fingerprint "character set".
Additionally, it goes a good ways to verifying the identity of the person entering/exiting the country. If they've ever been through before, they're on record with name, photo, and fingerprint. If they try to go through with any of these parameters changed (e.g. false name or new passport), they're gonna have to answer some questions. Not a panacaea certainly (since it wouldn't catch terrorists never having entered the system), but it'll help catch more ordinary criminals, and put a degree of pressure on the career terrorists.
Actually, I'm pretty sure most of you here would appreciate him working to protect abortion providers and track down anti-abortion killers. It was discussed in a profile of Ashcroft that Newsweek published back last year.
PDF is an open standard. You can buy a book on the format from Amazon and write your own PDF software.
What "standard" formats do the Microsoft programs export to 100%? Microsoft and....
Where can I find the complete documentation on these "standard" office formats?
(Alright, I'd assume that Imaging can export to JPEG and such. So can other programs that would work just as well.)
A quick icon in the status bar can indicate how far a user appears to trust a site. This is judged by various factors including, but not limited to (is your research, after all, and I merely an armchair CS research pundit ;)
Trust list may then be used to do various things. Simplest is to change the image in the toolbar based on the (floating-point) trust level, rounded to some value (likely integer). User may also incorporate trust level into cookies, saved passwords, and other policies. Finally, for the paranoid, this can also function as a collective, adaptive parental control. User may opt to require that pages must have a trust level at or above x in order to be displayed [otherwise, a stock Untrusted page comes up]. More uses are probably fairly readily apparent.
I should have also included "these are external factors forcing people to use Windows." That is what I was aiming at. Those are network effects.
I thought you meant "easier" as in "easier for the beginner to use". Yes, it is very easy to go with the raging torrent.
A terrible gross simplification. People buy windows for those reasons, along with:
The list goes on and on. To believe that people choose windows just because it's "cheap" and "easy" (many would dispute both; indeed the reasoning behind the reasons above is contentious while the reasons are real) is to be naiive in the extreme.
The list of scenarios you provided is by no means exhaustive. How about OEMs and MS Windows sellers are able to rip out all of IE and insert another browser without losing any functionality (due to complete, published, royalty-free standards) and include it on the Windows CD Not everything need be handed out from Microsoft On High.
Is this really GNOME? I know it's OSNews, but am not convinced it's necessarily gnome.
While true, the point is that Organization D has phones, accessories, and text-messaging/mailboxes that can potentially work with A, B, and C. That should be considered more. That was what the parent was saying--that people need to consider vendor lock-in and (lack of) extra-system interoperability (e.g. how well does WinNT interop with Solaris; versus how well does Solaris interop with Linux? Who's doing the interoperability and how do they obtain it (e.g. open, fully-documented specs or reverse-engineering the protocols used?)). It's a very important question.
Personally, I'd give D many points, knowing that I can readily switch to A, B, and C and not have to invest in a new phone (i.e. documents). Sure, the features-list of each platform matters greatly but interoperability is undervalued and underexamined in current IT practices, imho.
Now, I completely agree about the advertising. It's something that I'd like to see much, much more of. Heck, I'd doneate a small sum of money to help make it happen (hear me, FSF?) IMHO, SuSE and RedHat and others should be advertising more. I barely see ads for anything Linux, outside of Linux journals. And even then, they're few and far between. (Seen Novell's? It kicks butt!)
Now that's a little harsh, isn't it?
Some americans are as rude as some french persons. "Frog" is a derogatory term for French people, due to, iirc, eating frog legs. Same as 'Kraut' for a German.
;]
:)
;)
Pardonnez-nous, s'il vous plais. [Je ne parl pas francaise, so please forgive my horrible spelling and writing and grammar and such.
Both sides of the hate are getting annoying. Sorry this person is such a danged unevolved monkey. Sorry you had to see this side of the 'states. We're not all butt-munches!
Heh. Maybe as punishment for being a jerk to another country in a public forum, maybe the penalty should be having to read opposite-leaning media from and live in the other country....
The Linux Show! Live every Tuesday night, 20:00 Central Time (they're in Illinois, USA).
They also have archives (link on the front page), and an IRC channel.
Where is this $99 Windows? I can see $99 XP Home upgrades and maybe XP Home OEM, or Academic but retail XP Home is $200, and XP Pro for $300 (last time I checked Amazon).
Which is quite a rip, since, say, SuSE 9.1 will cost you $30, Academic Pro will run you $60, and Pro will run you $90. And you get all of the above-mentioned benefits from Windows plus boatloads more games and productivity software (including OpenOffice!) . Only real downside is the lack of the "90% of software" bit; but we linux zealots are working on it.
This is neglecting Mandrake which is Free or Cheap (donations), and then the horde of other Linux distros which are free and/or Cheap.
Some, maybe most. It's debatable. I know my Uni does, because Microsoft sued them and then promised to drop the suit & expensive audit if they'd just sign up for this agreement. Sounds like extortion to me.
Anyway, the core of what I wanted to say was that The notion that Microsoft Campus Agreements Give You Free/Cheap Microsoft Software Is Complete Fallacy! Actually, you end up paying $10-$20/item in addition to the $50-$100 you pay to the university per semester explicitly for the program . It truly is a craptastic "deal", but what are you going to do when a company with extremely, extremely deep pockets wants to make your life painful? Check your local tuition/fee gathering unit for more information on how badly that program sucks.
You are entirely correct in the purpose of QKD. However,
is quite incorrect.
First off, nothing is unconditionally secure. If you believe something to be unconditionally secure, you should put your wallet back right now and cool off. And furthermore, without additional protocols in the classical channel, QKD is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The attacker must first snag both classical and quantum channels, but then [s]he can pretend to Bob to Alice and Alice to Bob. Nothing prevents this within a straight QKD system. Now, it's fairly obvious, and therefore has likely already been taken care of using classical crypto, but it's a problem of striaght QKD. Additionally, if there is ever more than one photon generated, then that bit can be undetectably eavesdropped.
Again incorrect. The one-time pad has, iirc, been proven unbreakable; you just have a key management issue to be settled. That and many classical crypto systems aren't "breakable in the absolute," merely theoretically breakable if certain problems become Easy.
Despite claims from both sides to the contrary, both sides of the Atlantic are quite similar, imho.
The Americans call the French crazy and make jokes about them to other Americans.
The French call the Americans crazy and make jokes about them to other French people.
Neither (admittedly grossly grouped) party is right, but they never actually talk to each other and inform themselves from sources other than those that agree with their position. The one side reads from sources that agree with their takes on life (well, majorly; there can be minor differences) and ignores the other side and always views the sources skeptically. The other side does the polar opposite.
Unfortunately, the only product of this is feeding the hate, not fostering international cooperation and understanding, regardless of what the individuals participating in the exercise believe their objectives to be!
Je suis american, mais je ne suis pas fou! Ich bin Amerikaner, aber ich bin ganz und gar nicht verrückt! Sono americano, ma no sono pazzesco!
(geiler Asterix Anspielung, aber. ;)
I remain unconvinced that an extra-US "solution" will be any less broken than a US one. Actually, I remain unconvinced that the US solution will be "certain" to be insecure.
Read further up on the thread for people discussing other countries' doing the same thing you decry the US of doing.
Sorta. You have to simultaneously break into the quantum and classical data transfer paths without them knowing.
Of course, in a complete system, both hosts would be known to each other and able to authenticate the other end over the classical channel.
Additionally, you have the problem of there not being exactly one photon every time, and thus detection probability goes down. Plus the system is pretty lossy to begin with (you can tell evesdroppers because the lossiness goes up quite a bit)
And then you have to trace all the components back to make sure there's none of that merrikin meddlin' going on at some other location!
All of this is iirc. I took the spintronics class last year.
Neither. You paid $50-$70 for Windows XP and paid $250-$230 for a computer. You were merely not getting ripped off nearly as much as you would buying a retail copy. (FWIW, mainstream commercial linux distros sell at retail for (at most) approximately the Windows Massively Discounted Super-Vendor Buddy-Buddy price. Food for thought.)
Of course, it's difficult to get the hardware you want at the price you want and not buy Windows; that's why we call it the Microsoft Tax. :)
Incorrect. You can copy DVDs without ever breaking CSS. You just can't watch them or alter the content (editing, changing formats/bitrates, etc.).