In much simplified terms: The very first thing the thief is going to do after gaining access to the coins is spend them, by transfering to another wallet they control.
A couple of games have come in for special criticism for the 'optional manditory payment.' Dungeon Keeper mobile slows down in parts to an unplayable pace (according to some - I think it only happens on later levels) without micropayments. The Friendship is Magic game was also heavily criticised for using a similar model, because it was targetted at children. It'd be possible to complete it without paying, but only for the most obcessive basement-dwelling grinder willing to spend months slaving over repetative tasks - it was really designed so the only way to realistically finish was to spend real money, leading to a lot of pestered parents an enough complaints that Hasbro has to reduce the price to bring completion cost within pocket-money feasibility.
Vista introduced the utility to make symbolic links. The filesystem supported them before that, there was just no support for actually using them. You can get them working in XP, it just takes some hackery.
NTFS isn't. Symlinks work fine and are very useful on an OS made to handle them. On Windows they are bodged in awkwardly and clumsily. The only reason NTFS supports them at all is so it can claim POSIX compatibility.
Plus they are one of the few components left that anyone with a soldering iron can diagnose and replace, even in this age of surface-mount stacked-chip fiddleyness.
If it's a PCI-e port on a cable, does that mean you can plug non-storage devices in too? I can see applications for things like video walls or GPGPU number-crunchers, where very 'sata' port is potentially a way to cram another video card in.
Not when you're dumping that much money into them at once - you can see who gets the disproportionate payout. That's the way to do it, but it'd have to be done slowly, so as to disappear into the background noise.
I'm expecting to see a new sport of theft-watching as enthusiasts peer through the block chain trying to work out where the coins are going. Whoever has them now is probably sensible enough to know they are too hot to spend. Laundering takes time, even with bitcoin.
Take helicopter. Remove controls. Add piloting computer. Use the weight savings to sound-dampen the interior.
You can use optical guidance for landing - paint markers on the helipads it can lock on to. With GPS navigation, the basic flight it easy. Only problem technically is that in the event of mechanical failure, the computer won't be so good as an experience human at picking out a landing site and setting down safely.
I can see a few advantages in convenience though. Get in and dial. No need for a schedule* to follow or a human pilot to sit around waiting until you are ready to head home for the day.
*Let us assume that, as a toy of the mega-rich, they can sway the FAA into lessening regulations a bit - perhaps they FAA could even set up an automatic flight path approval computer allowing journeys to be approved as and when desired while still ensuring no other aircraft are on intersecting paths.
The only way I see this working would be for the mega-rich as a more convenient alternative to a helicopter to commute from mansion to office. A private helipad at each end, and it'd be a lot faster than driving. Sure, it might cost a few million dollars, and a few hundred more in fuel each trip, but some people can throw that kind of money away - and would rather not deal with depending on a human pilot.
Is this any better than filling the sky with pilots who fly as well as most people drive? If you think drink-driving is dangerous, wait until a car comes through your roof from a hundred meters up.
The general rule is that EU censors couldn't care much about sex, but will grow very concerned about violent content. The US censors are the other way around - violence is rarely any type of problem, but even a hint of sex can invoke their ire.
The GTA Hot Coffee incident is a good example. Glorification of gang culture, player characters committing and rewarded for violent crime, gun fights, car theft, mowing down pedestrians for extra points and shooting police officers? That's all just harmless fantasy. But a mini-game that shows characters in sexual positions (Still clothed!), which can't even be accessed without hacking the game? That's instant grounds for an AO rating and for most retailers to refuse to carry the game.
They kept 9x for home PCs though, because their greatest advantage at the time was the vast library of existing software from DOS through 3.11 through 9x. Going to a multiuser network-friendly OS would mean breaking a lot of things - that's why NT was confined almost exclusively to business. Eventually they finally got with of 9x and finally adapted the NT kernel for consumer use, but by then it was obvious to all that with 9x they'd been maintaining something that should have been taken out back and shot years ago.
Perverse incentive. If people can pay money to skip the lines, then longer lines are good for profit.
Much like ISPs: If your $40/month package is good enough for everyday use, a bit of gaming, netflix and the occasional torrent, who is going to pay for the $100/month package? The obvious solution is to make sure the $40/month package is sufficiently rubbish that anyone who can afford to pay more will do so.
" Has someone actually managed to create a virus that spreads via reading an infected partition table or file system? That would actually be pretty impressive."
It was a long time ago, but I do recall reading vaguely about a virus that did exactly that. It's long-obsolete now - it was spread by floppies, exploiting a vulnerability in certain versions of MS-DOS. Not just a boot sector virus, but something that worked through abuse of FAT so even if the disk was just inserted as soon as the OS tried to read the root directory it'd execute the payload - which then went memory resident, and wrote the virus back to any subsequent disks inserted.
Sort of. Nothing that isn't possible to do right now. But the MITM-via-trusted-cert isn't the tidiest approach. It's an administrative headache - every OS has its own method for adding a trusted cert, and some don't permit it at all, and it doesn't allow clients to validate the server's certificate if the proxy doesn't accept it. I'm not sure quite what this proposal is, but it appears to be something to build in properly from the beginning support for trusted cert interception so it won't be such an inconvenience.
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In much simplified terms: The very first thing the thief is going to do after gaining access to the coins is spend them, by transfering to another wallet they control.
It's nice of them to put the serial number on the case. Shame it only works on a Windows edition that is impossible to legitimately obtain.
A couple of games have come in for special criticism for the 'optional manditory payment.' Dungeon Keeper mobile slows down in parts to an unplayable pace (according to some - I think it only happens on later levels) without micropayments. The Friendship is Magic game was also heavily criticised for using a similar model, because it was targetted at children. It'd be possible to complete it without paying, but only for the most obcessive basement-dwelling grinder willing to spend months slaving over repetative tasks - it was really designed so the only way to realistically finish was to spend real money, leading to a lot of pestered parents an enough complaints that Hasbro has to reduce the price to bring completion cost within pocket-money feasibility.
There are issues with thunderbolt being ridiculously expensive.
I'm somewhat less impressed because I can see an obvious shorter tour.
Take out the big journey at the left, connect the ends on the right. It's worse than it looks - the map makes Iceland look closer than it is.
Vista introduced the utility to make symbolic links. The filesystem supported them before that, there was just no support for actually using them. You can get them working in XP, it just takes some hackery.
NTFS isn't. Symlinks work fine and are very useful on an OS made to handle them. On Windows they are bodged in awkwardly and clumsily. The only reason NTFS supports them at all is so it can claim POSIX compatibility.
Plus they are one of the few components left that anyone with a soldering iron can diagnose and replace, even in this age of surface-mount stacked-chip fiddleyness.
If it's a PCI-e port on a cable, does that mean you can plug non-storage devices in too? I can see applications for things like video walls or GPGPU number-crunchers, where very 'sata' port is potentially a way to cram another video card in.
Not when you're dumping that much money into them at once - you can see who gets the disproportionate payout. That's the way to do it, but it'd have to be done slowly, so as to disappear into the background noise.
I'm expecting to see a new sport of theft-watching as enthusiasts peer through the block chain trying to work out where the coins are going. Whoever has them now is probably sensible enough to know they are too hot to spend. Laundering takes time, even with bitcoin.
It's not the first time. Sometimes makers of slanted documentaries have to turn to deception to get people to appear. 'Expelled' comes to mind.
Take helicopter. Remove controls. Add piloting computer. Use the weight savings to sound-dampen the interior.
You can use optical guidance for landing - paint markers on the helipads it can lock on to. With GPS navigation, the basic flight it easy. Only problem technically is that in the event of mechanical failure, the computer won't be so good as an experience human at picking out a landing site and setting down safely.
I can see a few advantages in convenience though. Get in and dial. No need for a schedule* to follow or a human pilot to sit around waiting until you are ready to head home for the day.
*Let us assume that, as a toy of the mega-rich, they can sway the FAA into lessening regulations a bit - perhaps they FAA could even set up an automatic flight path approval computer allowing journeys to be approved as and when desired while still ensuring no other aircraft are on intersecting paths.
The first half of 'Mana.' Or was it Manna? Not sure.
The only way I see this working would be for the mega-rich as a more convenient alternative to a helicopter to commute from mansion to office. A private helipad at each end, and it'd be a lot faster than driving. Sure, it might cost a few million dollars, and a few hundred more in fuel each trip, but some people can throw that kind of money away - and would rather not deal with depending on a human pilot.
Is this any better than filling the sky with pilots who fly as well as most people drive? If you think drink-driving is dangerous, wait until a car comes through your roof from a hundred meters up.
"History Channel."
Maybe the aliens are behind the censorship.
The general rule is that EU censors couldn't care much about sex, but will grow very concerned about violent content. The US censors are the other way around - violence is rarely any type of problem, but even a hint of sex can invoke their ire.
The GTA Hot Coffee incident is a good example. Glorification of gang culture, player characters committing and rewarded for violent crime, gun fights, car theft, mowing down pedestrians for extra points and shooting police officers? That's all just harmless fantasy. But a mini-game that shows characters in sexual positions (Still clothed!), which can't even be accessed without hacking the game? That's instant grounds for an AO rating and for most retailers to refuse to carry the game.
Tea is a symbol of the imperialist British empire.
And we call it SELINUX.
They kept 9x for home PCs though, because their greatest advantage at the time was the vast library of existing software from DOS through 3.11 through 9x. Going to a multiuser network-friendly OS would mean breaking a lot of things - that's why NT was confined almost exclusively to business. Eventually they finally got with of 9x and finally adapted the NT kernel for consumer use, but by then it was obvious to all that with 9x they'd been maintaining something that should have been taken out back and shot years ago.
Perverse incentive. If people can pay money to skip the lines, then longer lines are good for profit.
Much like ISPs: If your $40/month package is good enough for everyday use, a bit of gaming, netflix and the occasional torrent, who is going to pay for the $100/month package? The obvious solution is to make sure the $40/month package is sufficiently rubbish that anyone who can afford to pay more will do so.
USB doesn't allow it, baring exploitable flaws in design. Firewire and thunderbolt do. It's one reason firewire has much lower CPU overhead.
" Has someone actually managed to create a virus that spreads via reading an infected partition table or file system? That would actually be pretty impressive."
It was a long time ago, but I do recall reading vaguely about a virus that did exactly that. It's long-obsolete now - it was spread by floppies, exploiting a vulnerability in certain versions of MS-DOS. Not just a boot sector virus, but something that worked through abuse of FAT so even if the disk was just inserted as soon as the OS tried to read the root directory it'd execute the payload - which then went memory resident, and wrote the virus back to any subsequent disks inserted.
Sort of. Nothing that isn't possible to do right now. But the MITM-via-trusted-cert isn't the tidiest approach. It's an administrative headache - every OS has its own method for adding a trusted cert, and some don't permit it at all, and it doesn't allow clients to validate the server's certificate if the proxy doesn't accept it. I'm not sure quite what this proposal is, but it appears to be something to build in properly from the beginning support for trusted cert interception so it won't be such an inconvenience.