Microsoft isn't "HUGE" by any stretch of the imagination.
You couldn't be more wrong. Microsoft is worth $334 billion. They are the second biggest company in America. Only General Electric is bigger -- and MS even overtook them for a bit back in '98.
I live in fear that @Home Seattle will kill 80 and 25. I have become totally dependent on my servers, run in violation of the AUP.
As a matter of fact, I am switching to Speakeasy DSL. Did the research, talked to the (clueful) sales guy for 20 minutes today... calling back soon and setting it up. Slower download, faster upload, and servers explicitly OK. Cool.
Virtually no one today will understand that argument. Everyone of every age "gets" the phone. Internet connectivity is too new. In a generation or two, people will "get" it, but it will be too late. They'll probably be conditioned by then, narcing on each other for trading compressed music files, and expecting every byte they move to be monitored. Hell, they'll probably demand it for their own "safety."
Every Sony CD-R I have used has been a total POS. I hope yours works out! Based on my experience I'd quickly pay 2x as much for a Yamaha. Maybe even for a shiny rock. Didn't care for those Sony drives, nope...
I'm actually pretty Libertarian at heart. And I admit this is a far-out scheme.
But I think you can argue that an operating system is a vital commodity. It's infrastructure. It's like a road. And the government throws all kinds of money at those things, for the greater good. I'm a very pro-freedom kind of guy, but I do NOT want roads privatized.
But putting all that aside, you might be able to justify it from a simple cost savings angle. The gov't has a zillion copies of Windows and MS Office. If they developed their own software to their own standards, they might save money in the long run. And if that software became freely available... well, cool. Options are good.
An OS is something the private sector can handle.
Considering the current Microsoft trial, I would say it has been handled badly.
I think the Feds should fund the development of an operating system and office suite. The software would be released to the public, including source code.
Sounds crazy at first, yes. But bear with me.
My reasoning is this: simply put, an OS and office suite is IMPORTANT. Damn important, like roads, and telephone service. Like those other infrastructure elements, it makes sense to have some kind of government supported offering. We already rely on Federally-funded roads... the Post Office gets Fed subsidies and tax breaks... Why not get some support for them from the gov't for the computers on our desks?
The idea is not to give the government control of OS technology though... the goal is to give US something WE can use, for nothing more than a couple bucks each in taxes. GovOS would give people a way to write a paper for school, or look at the web without being FORCED into buying an OS from some other big company. It would be an ideal solution for basic gov't employees -- those people who do nothing but prepare documents and send email all day.
Of course, we would ALWAYS have the choice to go with MS or Apple or whoever, but GovOS would be ideal for poor people, or for schools that otherwise would have to lay out a fortune in OS licenses.
The GovOS should be made compatible with as much hardware as possible. Its office suite should be made as inter-operable as possible with all the current document standards. Businesses that want to do work with the government would be required to submit files in GovOS-compatible format.
Before y'all flip out, this really isn't any different that the current Free Software philosophy that permeates this site. I'm just saying, let's go a step further and throw some tax money at the problem. How much could it *possibly* cost to start with Linux or FreeBSD, and create a dirt-easy-to-install OS and office suite? A few hundred million? Like, the price of a few warplanes? It's nothin'. We're paying for far less useful things already. And the gov't pays Microsoft alone a hell of a lot in license fees. Imagine what could be developed if a small fraction of that money was used to hire decent programmers?
GovOS isn't about restricting freedom. It's about increasing it, by providing a tax-funded public domain desktop computing infrastructure. OS plus office suite, with some well-paid professional developers behind it, in the public domain... It sounds good to me.
I know a lot of you are going to say, "we don't need GovOS. We have Mandrake and Debian." To that I say those are fine products, but they *clearly* have not passed the ease-of-use test the mainstream demands. So let's throw a bomber's worth of money at one of them and produce something that anyone can install and use -- and rob Microsoft of a ton of money in the process.
40k upload cap? Luxury. Here in Seattle (@Home) I get about 12k.
I paid for a static IP address too. However, they are attempting to move their entire userbase to dynamic IPs via DHCP. Whenever I call tech support about an outage in my area, they threaten to take away my static IP. They are phasing them out now. Scary. DSL time.
I had a competent lesbian technician dispatched from ATT@Home one time. She did a great job.
My friend down the street had an @Home horror story... weeks of intermittent service interruptions that they couldn't fix. They couldn't even TELL him APPROXIMATELY when a service guy would be out. Their system, in Seattle at least, is not capable of that. Weeks? Months? Hours? They could tell him nothing. he'll be there when he's there. Hope you're home.
Eventually he went up to a cable company van he saw on the street and talked to the tech, who came by the next day on his OWN time and gave him a cable amp that fixed his problem.
I have stupid fast downloads, but that is the ONLY good thing I can say about ATT@Home. Looking forward to going with Speakeasy DSL for the benefit of my servers.
In the end, PC hardware is just FUNKY. I have used and owned many systems, and they all have personalities, like chimps at the zoo. When something just doesn't work on a PC, I shrug and try it on another PC.
If you only have one PC, that attitude doesn't help, I know.
I don't want to call the previous-precious poster cheap or ill-informed, but I have learned over the years that quality components make ALL the difference in the Wintel hardware world. There is no such thing as a bargain motherboard: you pay more in the end, even if the sticker price was cheap. I bet the Mandrake install trouble was caused by 1 or 2 "bargain" parts. No flames please, just stating my experience -- learned the hard way, I assure you.
Recently I helped a Mac-using friend build an Athlon system for games. It's reliable enough that Mr. PC Hating Mac Man is able to use it and not hate it, or himself.
(BTW, I am a self-loathing PC user. I have a Mac too, but I am on the PC when I am not doing layout. And I feel guilty about it.)
Heh, I just got a funny idea for an adblocker. Instead of replacing banners with blank space or broken images, replace them with the slogans from They Live [imdb.com], such as "Obey", "Marry and Reproduce", etc.
I don't think that law is needed. I don't see any reason why people informing trojaned lusers cannot do that safely.
Of course it isn't safe to communicate -- if the only route open to you is to exploit the compromised system. That is the situation many Code Red haters are in. I believe it should be permissable to get a message to the victim, even if it involves using an exploit, especially when their unsecured box is causing you grief.
The problem with your statement "(...) so long as no harm was done" is hard to objectively maintain.
Well, of course it is. If a law was passed it would have to take an extremely narrow definition. See below.
Informing people is fine and totally legal.
Sometimes. I was thinking specifically of Code Red. There are compromised boxen on my cable modem subnet. They attack me daily. There is NO WAY for me to inform those people WITHOUT exploiting the trojan they already have. You can use the Code Red root exploit to pop up a message saying "Fix your system, idiot" but it would be illegal to do so, since you are compromising their system.
That's the kind of communication I would like to see protected by some kind of law.
As it is, we have a 110% crazy system. People with compromised computers are all over the place... the ISPs can't or won't contact them directly, and we by law can't contact them either as individuals, because the required communication method makes use of a security hole. Only if the compromised computer has a domain name can you try to email the admin.
(I called ATT @Home and said, "I have a big list of Code Red infected computers in my area. Where shall I send it? After many minutes on hold the tech guy said I could try to send to to abuse@home.com, but it was *clear* they had no standing policy about this. I got a form email back from abuse@home.com saying thanks for the Code Red related email, steps are being taken. That makes me feel real good... The attacks are not slowing fast enough.)
Bottom line, I don't want you or ANYONE regardless of their intentions modifying my computer.
And if your computer is like a runaway train, screwing things up for everyone else? And if you are a clueless Win2k PC owner who has been 0wned for weeks and still hasn't read about Code Red or applied patches? And your PC is attacking everyone else around you, repeatedly? I such a situation, I think you should lose just a bit of protection.
An infected computer is sort of a "public health" issue. It's like having the house next door on fire... I think you should be able to throw water on it. Or at *least* go tell the owner what's up.
But I can't do even that. I can't email the chump at 65.3.142.xx because he doesn't have a domain name. And the ISP isn't doing anything, so how can we help this person to clean up their mess?
The "hacker ethic" that it's OK to break into people's property for "learning purposes" or "curiosity" must be put to cold, hard death.
Agreed. But...
It would be nice to have a law passed that explicitly made it okey-dokey for people to merely inform a Trojaned luser of their situation, so long as no harm was done.
Unfortunately, we will have to wait until today's Nintendo generation is in office before such laws have any chance of being introduced. If my mom is only now coming to grasp PPP connections, how can I expect people of similar age and experience in the legislature to understand things like the Code Red virus? All they know is "computers scary."
I think the Feds should fund the development of an operating system and office suite. The products, once done, would be released to the public, including source code.
It's a positively crazy idea, but bear with me.
My reasoning is this: simply put, an OS and office suite is IMPORTANT. Damn important, like roads, and telephone service. Like those other infrastructure elements, it makes sense to have some kind of government supported offering. We already rely on the Post Office to send out mail across Federally-funded roads... and nowadays computer documents are critical too. Why not get some support for them from the gov't?
The idea is not to give the government control of OS technology though... the goal is to give US something WE can use, for nothing more than a couple bucks each in taxes. GovOS would give people a way to write a paper for school, or look at the web without being FORCED into buying an OS from some other big company. It would be an ideal solution for basoc gov't employees -- those people who do nothing but prepare documents and send email all day.
Of course, we would ALWAYS have the choice to go with MS or Apple or whoever, but GovOS would be ideal for poor people, or for schools that otherwise would have to lay out a fortune in OS licenses.
The GovOS should be made compatible with as much hardware as possible. Its office suite should be made as interoperable as possible with all the current document standards. Businesses that want to do work with the government would be required to submit files in GovOS-compatible format.
Before y'all flip out, this really isn't any different that the current Free Software philosophy that permeates this site. I'm just saying, let's go a step further and throw some tax money at the problem. How much could it possibly cost to start with Linux, or FreeBSD, and create a decent OS and office suite? A few hundred million? Like, the price of a few warplanes? It's nothin'. We're paying for far less useful things already. And someone else posted that the gov't pays like a BILLION clams a year to MS for licenses. With just half that, couldn't they develop some software to replace a lot of the MS fees with?
GovOS isn't about restricting freedom. It's about incresing it, by providing a tax-funded public domain desktop computing infrastructure. OS plus office suite, with some well-paid professional developers behind it, in the public domain... It sounds good to me.
I think you are wrong. Corporations would still be making power grabs even if people didn't file ridiculous suits, just like they'd sneak their toxic waste into the water to save a buck.
We didn't bring it on ourselves; I think it's the natural evolution of business. Not that we shouldn't fight it.
Settle down, I admitted I could be off the mark. Frankly I'm GLAD that my creepy Fortran prof has probably had to adapt to the changing times. I am GENUINELY surprised that the web has become a useful academic tool though. I figured it would take a lot longer -- I thought the people I gradutated with would have to be the generation of profs that pushed those changes through.
I don't think you are thinking about the laser spot thought experiment the right way. Imagine a giant movie screen, or a giant screen of photodetectors. Wave the spot around on that. The "spot" could have data encoded in it, and it could travel from one end of screen to the other just as fast as you please. The only point of the thought experiment is to demonstrate that things can, in fact, move faster than light -- but in the end it's a "so what" situation.
Ask Dad about a giant rotating disk. As a thought experiment it is trivial to see that for a big enough disk, the edge will move faster than light. It's also trivial to demonstrate how even if such a thing could be built, it would be useless for communication. No free ride.
Gah! Show me who's built the gadget. Last I read up on this topic, the paper went on at great length about how it was not possible to exploit the phenomenon for purposes of communication. Now I have to go look for it because you have watched too much Star Trek.
"An important first result in quantum information is "no-cloning" first proposed by Wooters and Zurek (1982) and Dieks (1982). It states that:
It is impossible to clone an arbitrary unknown quantum state."
[Proof follows]
"Interestingly, no-cloning rules out a mechanism for using entanglement to send superluminal classical signals. Suppose Alice will choose between performing a {|0>, |1>} basis or {|+>, |->} basis measurement. Bob can determine which she did instantaneously if he can produce multiple copies of his entangled twin particle."
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Spock. It doesn't work, it doesn't work, nyah nyah nyah!
If you have a big movie screen sufficiently far away, and you wave a laser pointer across it, the spot of light on the screen will be moving faster than light itself. The thought experiment works with a gigantic rotating disk too, but you can't build one, whereas you can "do it yourself" with light.
The point is that there ARE possible superluminal events, but that they are ultimately useless for actually transmitting information.
There are a lot of things that happen faster than light. You can even demonstrate one to yourself right now.
Go outside. Shine a flashlight into the sky and sweep it back and forth. At some point Out There, your spot of light will be moving from side to side faster than the speed of light. Do the geometry if you want to figure out how far away that is.
The problem is this: there is no way to exploit anything like that into an information-transmitting system. That quantum interconnected stuff you alluded to is the same way. It's cool, but ultimately useless.
We're not going to trick physics that easily.
Re:It's worse than that
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 2
Been there, done that. In my dorm I was known as the "Mac Mage" for my wizardry. The dorm's official computer lab would even send people up to the 4th floor when there was a problem they couldn't solve. (quite often, I'm afraid.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Essentially meaningless?" Microsoft sure looks like the proverbial 800 lb gorilla to me. Suit yourself though.
Microsoft isn't "HUGE" by any stretch of the imagination.
You couldn't be more wrong. Microsoft is worth $334 billion. They are the second biggest company in America. Only General Electric is bigger -- and MS even overtook them for a bit back in '98.
I live in fear that @Home Seattle will kill 80 and 25. I have become totally dependent on my servers, run in violation of the AUP.
As a matter of fact, I am switching to Speakeasy DSL. Did the research, talked to the (clueful) sales guy for 20 minutes today... calling back soon and setting it up. Slower download, faster upload, and servers explicitly OK. Cool.
Imagine if the phone company did this!
Virtually no one today will understand that argument. Everyone of every age "gets" the phone. Internet connectivity is too new. In a generation or two, people will "get" it, but it will be too late. They'll probably be conditioned by then, narcing on each other for trading compressed music files, and expecting every byte they move to be monitored. Hell, they'll probably demand it for their own "safety."
Can't we spend 2 weeks a year without electricity?
You first.
Every Sony CD-R I have used has been a total POS. I hope yours works out! Based on my experience I'd quickly pay 2x as much for a Yamaha. Maybe even for a shiny rock. Didn't care for those Sony drives, nope...
That is why I only drink rain water and grain alcohol.
Lately, more of the alcohol...
I'm actually pretty Libertarian at heart. And I admit this is a far-out scheme.
But I think you can argue that an operating system is a vital commodity. It's infrastructure. It's like a road. And the government throws all kinds of money at those things, for the greater good. I'm a very pro-freedom kind of guy, but I do NOT want roads privatized.
But putting all that aside, you might be able to justify it from a simple cost savings angle. The gov't has a zillion copies of Windows and MS Office. If they developed their own software to their own standards, they might save money in the long run. And if that software became freely available... well, cool. Options are good.
An OS is something the private sector can handle.
Considering the current Microsoft trial, I would say it has been handled badly.
OK, here's a weird, wacky idea.
I think the Feds should fund the development of an operating system and office suite. The software would be released to the public, including source code.
Sounds crazy at first, yes. But bear with me.
My reasoning is this: simply put, an OS and office suite is IMPORTANT. Damn important, like roads, and telephone service. Like those other infrastructure elements, it makes sense to have some kind of government supported offering. We already rely on Federally-funded roads... the Post Office gets Fed subsidies and tax breaks... Why not get some support for them from the gov't for the computers on our desks?
The idea is not to give the government control of OS technology though... the goal is to give US something WE can use, for nothing more than a couple bucks each in taxes. GovOS would give people a way to write a paper for school, or look at the web without being FORCED into buying an OS from some other big company. It would be an ideal solution for basic gov't employees -- those people who do nothing but prepare documents and send email all day.
Of course, we would ALWAYS have the choice to go with MS or Apple or whoever, but GovOS would be ideal for poor people, or for schools that otherwise would have to lay out a fortune in OS licenses.
The GovOS should be made compatible with as much hardware as possible. Its office suite should be made as inter-operable as possible with all the current document standards. Businesses that want to do work with the government would be required to submit files in GovOS-compatible format.
Before y'all flip out, this really isn't any different that the current Free Software philosophy that permeates this site. I'm just saying, let's go a step further and throw some tax money at the problem. How much could it *possibly* cost to start with Linux or FreeBSD, and create a dirt-easy-to-install OS and office suite? A few hundred million? Like, the price of a few warplanes? It's nothin'. We're paying for far less useful things already. And the gov't pays Microsoft alone a hell of a lot in license fees. Imagine what could be developed if a small fraction of that money was used to hire decent programmers?
GovOS isn't about restricting freedom. It's about increasing it, by providing a tax-funded public domain desktop computing infrastructure. OS plus office suite, with some well-paid professional developers behind it, in the public domain... It sounds good to me.
I know a lot of you are going to say, "we don't need GovOS. We have Mandrake and Debian." To that I say those are fine products, but they *clearly* have not passed the ease-of-use test the mainstream demands. So let's throw a bomber's worth of money at one of them and produce something that anyone can install and use -- and rob Microsoft of a ton of money in the process.
40k upload cap? Luxury. Here in Seattle (@Home) I get about 12k.
I paid for a static IP address too. However, they are attempting to move their entire userbase to dynamic IPs via DHCP. Whenever I call tech support about an outage in my area, they threaten to take away my static IP. They are phasing them out now. Scary. DSL time.
I had a competent lesbian technician dispatched from ATT@Home one time. She did a great job.
My friend down the street had an @Home horror story... weeks of intermittent service interruptions that they couldn't fix. They couldn't even TELL him APPROXIMATELY when a service guy would be out. Their system, in Seattle at least, is not capable of that. Weeks? Months? Hours? They could tell him nothing. he'll be there when he's there. Hope you're home.
Eventually he went up to a cable company van he saw on the street and talked to the tech, who came by the next day on his OWN time and gave him a cable amp that fixed his problem.
I have stupid fast downloads, but that is the ONLY good thing I can say about ATT@Home. Looking forward to going with Speakeasy DSL for the benefit of my servers.
In the end, PC hardware is just FUNKY. I have used and owned many systems, and they all have personalities, like chimps at the zoo. When something just doesn't work on a PC, I shrug and try it on another PC.
If you only have one PC, that attitude doesn't help, I know.
I don't want to call the previous-precious poster cheap or ill-informed, but I have learned over the years that quality components make ALL the difference in the Wintel hardware world. There is no such thing as a bargain motherboard: you pay more in the end, even if the sticker price was cheap. I bet the Mandrake install trouble was caused by 1 or 2 "bargain" parts. No flames please, just stating my experience -- learned the hard way, I assure you.
Recently I helped a Mac-using friend build an Athlon system for games. It's reliable enough that Mr. PC Hating Mac Man is able to use it and not hate it, or himself.
(BTW, I am a self-loathing PC user. I have a Mac too, but I am on the PC when I am not doing layout. And I feel guilty about it.)
I formulate my opinions without any outside influence, while I am enjoying a cool, refreshing Coca-Cola.
It's the pause that refreshes!
Heh, I just got a funny idea for an adblocker. Instead of replacing banners with blank space or broken images, replace them with the slogans from They Live [imdb.com], such as "Obey", "Marry and Reproduce", etc.
HILARIOUS!
REMAIN ASLEEP
I don't think that law is needed. I don't see any reason why people informing trojaned lusers cannot do that safely.
Of course it isn't safe to communicate -- if the only route open to you is to exploit the compromised system. That is the situation many Code Red haters are in. I believe it should be permissable to get a message to the victim, even if it involves using an exploit, especially when their unsecured box is causing you grief.
The problem with your statement "(...) so long as no harm was done" is hard to objectively maintain.
Well, of course it is. If a law was passed it would have to take an extremely narrow definition. See below.
Informing people is fine and totally legal.
Sometimes. I was thinking specifically of Code Red. There are compromised boxen on my cable modem subnet. They attack me daily. There is NO WAY for me to inform those people WITHOUT exploiting the trojan they already have. You can use the Code Red root exploit to pop up a message saying "Fix your system, idiot" but it would be illegal to do so, since you are compromising their system.
That's the kind of communication I would like to see protected by some kind of law.
As it is, we have a 110% crazy system. People with compromised computers are all over the place... the ISPs can't or won't contact them directly, and we by law can't contact them either as individuals, because the required communication method makes use of a security hole. Only if the compromised computer has a domain name can you try to email the admin.
(I called ATT @Home and said, "I have a big list of Code Red infected computers in my area. Where shall I send it? After many minutes on hold the tech guy said I could try to send to to abuse@home.com, but it was *clear* they had no standing policy about this. I got a form email back from abuse@home.com saying thanks for the Code Red related email, steps are being taken. That makes me feel real good... The attacks are not slowing fast enough.)
Bottom line, I don't want you or ANYONE regardless of their intentions modifying my computer.
And if your computer is like a runaway train, screwing things up for everyone else? And if you are a clueless Win2k PC owner who has been 0wned for weeks and still hasn't read about Code Red or applied patches? And your PC is attacking everyone else around you, repeatedly? I such a situation, I think you should lose just a bit of protection.
An infected computer is sort of a "public health" issue. It's like having the house next door on fire... I think you should be able to throw water on it. Or at *least* go tell the owner what's up.
But I can't do even that. I can't email the chump at 65.3.142.xx because he doesn't have a domain name. And the ISP isn't doing anything, so how can we help this person to clean up their mess?
The "hacker ethic" that it's OK to break into people's property for "learning purposes" or "curiosity" must be put to cold, hard death.
Agreed. But...
It would be nice to have a law passed that explicitly made it okey-dokey for people to merely inform a Trojaned luser of their situation, so long as no harm was done.
Unfortunately, we will have to wait until today's Nintendo generation is in office before such laws have any chance of being introduced. If my mom is only now coming to grasp PPP connections, how can I expect people of similar age and experience in the legislature to understand things like the Code Red virus? All they know is "computers scary."
OK, here's a weird, wacky idea.
I think the Feds should fund the development of an operating system and office suite. The products, once done, would be released to the public, including source code.
It's a positively crazy idea, but bear with me.
My reasoning is this: simply put, an OS and office suite is IMPORTANT. Damn important, like roads, and telephone service. Like those other infrastructure elements, it makes sense to have some kind of government supported offering. We already rely on the Post Office to send out mail across Federally-funded roads... and nowadays computer documents are critical too. Why not get some support for them from the gov't?
The idea is not to give the government control of OS technology though... the goal is to give US something WE can use, for nothing more than a couple bucks each in taxes. GovOS would give people a way to write a paper for school, or look at the web without being FORCED into buying an OS from some other big company. It would be an ideal solution for basoc gov't employees -- those people who do nothing but prepare documents and send email all day.
Of course, we would ALWAYS have the choice to go with MS or Apple or whoever, but GovOS would be ideal for poor people, or for schools that otherwise would have to lay out a fortune in OS licenses.
The GovOS should be made compatible with as much hardware as possible. Its office suite should be made as interoperable as possible with all the current document standards. Businesses that want to do work with the government would be required to submit files in GovOS-compatible format.
Before y'all flip out, this really isn't any different that the current Free Software philosophy that permeates this site. I'm just saying, let's go a step further and throw some tax money at the problem. How much could it possibly cost to start with Linux, or FreeBSD, and create a decent OS and office suite? A few hundred million? Like, the price of a few warplanes? It's nothin'. We're paying for far less useful things already. And someone else posted that the gov't pays like a BILLION clams a year to MS for licenses. With just half that, couldn't they develop some software to replace a lot of the MS fees with?
GovOS isn't about restricting freedom. It's about incresing it, by providing a tax-funded public domain desktop computing infrastructure. OS plus office suite, with some well-paid professional developers behind it, in the public domain... It sounds good to me.
I think you are wrong. Corporations would still be making power grabs even if people didn't file ridiculous suits, just like they'd sneak their toxic waste into the water to save a buck.
We didn't bring it on ourselves; I think it's the natural evolution of business. Not that we shouldn't fight it.
Doesn't anyone take that shit seriously enough to think that maybe, just maybe, voting systems should be consistent?
The differences in voting systems are considered a benefit: one compromise can't rig the whole system.
Settle down, I admitted I could be off the mark. Frankly I'm GLAD that my creepy Fortran prof has probably had to adapt to the changing times. I am GENUINELY surprised that the web has become a useful academic tool though. I figured it would take a lot longer -- I thought the people I gradutated with would have to be the generation of profs that pushed those changes through.
I don't think you are thinking about the laser spot thought experiment the right way. Imagine a giant movie screen, or a giant screen of photodetectors. Wave the spot around on that. The "spot" could have data encoded in it, and it could travel from one end of screen to the other just as fast as you please. The only point of the thought experiment is to demonstrate that things can, in fact, move faster than light -- but in the end it's a "so what" situation.
Ask Dad about a giant rotating disk. As a thought experiment it is trivial to see that for a big enough disk, the edge will move faster than light. It's also trivial to demonstrate how even if such a thing could be built, it would be useless for communication. No free ride.
Gah! Show me who's built the gadget. Last I read up on this topic, the paper went on at great length about how it was not possible to exploit the phenomenon for purposes of communication. Now I have to go look for it because you have watched too much Star Trek.
Here, check out the math.
Here's the critical bit:
"An important first result in quantum information is "no-cloning" first proposed by Wooters and Zurek (1982) and Dieks (1982). It states that:
It is impossible to clone an arbitrary unknown quantum state."
[Proof follows]
"Interestingly, no-cloning rules out a mechanism for using entanglement to send superluminal classical signals. Suppose Alice will choose between performing a {|0>, |1>} basis or {|+>, |->} basis measurement. Bob can determine which she did instantaneously if he can produce multiple copies of his entangled twin particle."
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Spock. It doesn't work, it doesn't work, nyah nyah nyah!
If you have a big movie screen sufficiently far away, and you wave a laser pointer across it, the spot of light on the screen will be moving faster than light itself. The thought experiment works with a gigantic rotating disk too, but you can't build one, whereas you can "do it yourself" with light.
The point is that there ARE possible superluminal events, but that they are ultimately useless for actually transmitting information.
There are a lot of things that happen faster than light. You can even demonstrate one to yourself right now.
Go outside. Shine a flashlight into the sky and sweep it back and forth. At some point Out There, your spot of light will be moving from side to side faster than the speed of light. Do the geometry if you want to figure out how far away that is.
The problem is this: there is no way to exploit anything like that into an information-transmitting system. That quantum interconnected stuff you alluded to is the same way. It's cool, but ultimately useless.
We're not going to trick physics that easily.
Been there, done that. In my dorm I was known as the "Mac Mage" for my wizardry. The dorm's official computer lab would even send people up to the 4th floor when there was a problem they couldn't solve. (quite often, I'm afraid.)
Ungrateful bastards though, the lot of them.