I think this is a result of the recent Supreme Court action that raised the bar for patentability. I suspect that a large number of Microsoft's software patents (and everyone else's for that matter) will not withstand scrutiny under the new test.
This is just a net being scattered far and wide to try and turn some of their (now worthless) patents into revenue before anyone has the chance to challenge the validity of those patents.
The Open Source model only works because the commercial services, hardware, and software industries are generating the revenue to give OSS developers a day job of some kind (whether that day job is developing commercial software or OSS software isn't relevant.) I would wager that the majority of this contribution is via jobs developing commercial or proprietary software.
This extends to college students as well - their contributions aren't free, they are paid for by loans, grants, college savings funds, etc. Honestly, who is going to pay many thousands of dollars, depending on where you go, to get a Computer Science degree and then spend their free time writing OSS software? Meanwhile this mythological individual flips burgers for a day job because we've achieved Stallman's grand vision of Free Software where programmers are a mere commodity and the only thing you can sell is glorified IT administrator services configuring and installing systems.
I would wager that most of us who have contributed to OSS in one way or another have learned, had our education paid for, cut our teeth on, or were in some other way compensated for our efforts by companies developing internal or closed-source systems.
If I am reading the decision correctly, SCOTUS has changed the game by ruling that a patent fails the obviousness test if:
1) Any ordinarily skilled person in that area of expertise would, if they set about building a device to do what the patented device does, come up with nearly the same solution you did. In other words, you can't patent sending email over a cellular network, because anyone with email/cellular networking experience would come up with the same system you did (or one substantially similar).
2) A patent that is merely a combination of two existing methods is considered routine exercise of general knowledge in the art and is also not patentable.
One-click patent? IsNot operator? Connecting VOIP calls to the POTS network? Not patentable; these things fail the obviousness test. They are all examples of combining multiple existing methodologies, applying existing methodologies to new technology, or doing what any sane person with skills in that area would do.
However something like JPEG or WMV would still qualify, as there are many ways to compress images to fit into a smaller space. Frankly, that's the kind of software I think should be patentable... There is very little (relative to total patented software overall) that deserves protection, but there are still a few novel ideas that are worth protecting.
I might also point out that patent examiners are bound by these court decisions as well; I know there have been many cases where frivilous patents were rejected (often several times) by the examiner but the examiner was overruled thanks to the jacked-up circuit court decisions that essentially made it impossible to demonstrate prior art. Now that SCOTUS has put patents back in their place many more of the rejections from the patent office should stick.
More like if the web were run like most open source projects there would be five incompatible forks of HTTP:
HTTP - the original NHTTP - Not HTTP, fork due to changing the word "if" to "when" in the original license SHTTP - SSH HTTP, runs HTTP over SSH for security HTTPS - HTTP over SSL, but adds new incompatible commands making it not backwards compatible. DTF - Document transfer protocol, because John L., a major contributor to NHTTP, was offended when another contributor made a "yo-mamma" joke and left the project to start his own fork
Not to mention the 300 forks-that-never-were where the forking person got tired of working on it, gave up, or never finished the fork in the first place.
GoDaddy got back to me. General counsel Christine Jones defends taking down SecLists.org, saying that Fyodor had close to an hour to respond to GoDaddy's voicemail and e-mail warnings yesterday, and didn't.
"We couldn't reach him, and because the content was hundreds and hundreds of MySpace user names and password, we went ahead and redirected the domain to remove that content," she says.
An hour's notice doesn't seem much time before shutting down someone's website, particularly when the content in question is nine days old. Jones says there was urgency, because so many MySpace users are young teenagers, and they could suffer serious privacy invasions if perverts start logging into their profiles to get private photos and messages.
"For something that has safety implication like that, we take it really seriously," she says. "For spammers, we give people a little bit of time to respond to us."
Ouch. Archiving Full Disclosure is worse than spamming.
From what I can tell AACS either uses a different key for each model/version of a player or actually assigns individual keys to each individual player. I'm having trouble finding out from the documentation, but it would appear that revoking a very small set of users is possible with AACS, overcoming the chief reason the CSS revokation was never used: there were too few keys and revoking one would kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of players all at once.
That's why this decision is ultimately GOOD for consumers... it allows smaller players to enter the market with a small but very profitable build-out to start competing. Then, as their business grows, they can expand into other areas.
There really isn't any technical reason you can't have 3-5 fibers/cables running through the existing right-of-ways. Then you'd have REAL choice/competition, but without unnecessary government interference.
Personally, I understand the need for build-out requirements, so it would seem a compromise is in order. Once you reach $X in yearly revenue, or X% penetration in your coverage area, or whatever the trigger is, you are THEN required to adhere to a higher build-out standard (reach more areas). This means if you want to grow you need to keep expanding your service-level across the entire municipality. For example, once you reach $1 million in revenue in that city you are required to cover at least 25% of the city. This allows for measured growth without a ton of upfront captial investment.
Minor improvement patents. They would grant some protections but wouldn't qualify for full patent protection. Ideally the standard is slightly lower than the existing patent standards while patents for "new" devices would be raised significantly in their requirements.
This should be coupled with government-set rates for minor improvement patents, just like we have for song royalties. It would completely eliminate the whole patent litigation aspect and remove the threat of complete shutdown of a company or product just because someone patented sending email over a wireless link.
So a drug company makes a minor modification to an existing drug? Fine, they get some protection and can make money off it, but not nearly as much as for a true innovation.
The internet also allows people with insane viewpoints to find like-minded nutjobs, with which they can circle jerk about their common opinions all day long and never need to expose themselves to an alternate viewpoint or way of life.
Do you believe we never landed on the moon? Do you think horse-fucking is A-OK? Would you like to find someone to kill (with mutual consent) via erotic asphyxiation?... or worse, do you think sexually abusing little kids is acceptable behavior? No problem! The Internet has a message board or newsgroup just for you, that way you never need to think about your thoughts, actions, or obsessions.
There is no such thing as deviant behavior on the internet!
I think everyone is missing what this really means... TiVO won't want to risk losing on Appeal and DISH won't want to risk having to shut down their DVR service. I predict a settlement between the two companies in the next two weeks that will resolve all outstanding claims.
This isn't about the keys themselves... this is about the fact that if you can pull off the attack you can render the "blacklisting" or "key-revocation" system completely inert, meaning the protection is now permanently broken.
The whole idea behind the revocations was that when hackers inevitably get ahold of some keys they can just blacklist those keys and everything will be A-OK (no DeCSS). We now know that this system will never work.
Well I am a live-sound engineer and a compressor merely reduces the dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and softest sounds). More technically once the threshold has been reached the input must increase by X db to give 1db of output. If you use a ratio > 10:1 you've effectively created a limiter.
None of this necessarily reduces volume... in fact compressors are often used along with their make-up gain setting to result in an increase in volume, just with a smashed dynamic range.
Personally, at work, I use complete over-ear closed headphones (Sennheiser HD265) that block out much of the ambient noise and allow me to use a reduced volume level.
That isn't what he is saying. Natural selection doesn't always "select" the better gene... or in this case it isn't acting on whether one gene is better than another. A group is simply wholesale overridden by another for whatever reason (such as war or colonization.)
That action is, in fact, natural selection at work but not in the limited way we typically think of it. It has nothing to do with whos genes are superior, a master race, or any of that other crap. However the fact is that european/western genes are some of the most widely-spread (as a group).
Are you going to hand out headphones to each of your family members, friends, etc? There are two main benefits to surround sound:
1. Multiple listeners can take part without having to have a headphone distribution system and headphones for everyone.
2. It is slightly more natural in the sense that when you move your head the sources shift positions slightly wich is how things work in real-life. A good headphone 2-ch mix* is pretty damn good but it isn't as natural (and can cause listening fatigue).
*In general there aren't any good movie headphone mixes because they always compromise for people who are using stereo speakers. As a result the surround mix often sounds better regardless of #2.
Re:Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologiz
on
Pluto Probe Launches
·
· Score: 1
Except the RTGs are designed to withstand the explosion of a rocket and subsequent impact to the earth without vaporizing or scattering the radioactive material across the globe.
In fact in at least one case the RTG was recovered, reconditioned, and put into the replacement rocket and launched again.
Someone comes up with a theory that may permit FTL space travel. There isn't any known way to test the theory with the current techniques.
Sometime later someone comes up with a way to test the theory to see if it works or not (we are here).
If the theory works, the nature of human society changes forever as we become a true spacefaring race.
If the theory fails to hold up then we've disproven it and learned something new about the nature of the universe in the process (or possibly just confirmed a different conflicting theory).
Patches need to follow the "do no harm" mantra... you don't want to make things worse by issuing an untested patch. How many resources does it take to ensure, within 8 days, that the patch doesn't break any of the patched versions of Windows, doesn't expose any NEW security holes, and doesn't break any known applications?
Re:about bloody time the feds gave something back
on
The Feds Vacate Airwaves
·
· Score: 4, Informative
the government controls 99% of the spectrum, useable and experimental, and this is the first time they have ever given back a single kilocycle of allocation. in the past, it has always been nonprofit, public safety, and commercial use that has been tagged for reallocations.
congratulations for finally stepping up to the plate, and many more for uncle selfish.
The vast majority of the spectrum is non-government exclusive or shared government/non-government. Only the sections with RED under them are government-exclusive allocations.
I think you mean the rest of the world refuses to use the same frequencies we use. We picked the vast majority of them first. We invented the technologies for and allocated the frequencies for AM, FM, TV (which is just FM), Radar, Cell, et al first almost without exception (in terms of commercial or public availability, not necessarily in terms of first invention/patent)
It is the rest of the world (Europe, Japan, China, etc) that refuses to use the standards we created.
Actually it is obvious you have no clue of what you speak and are just spouting off.
If you bother to read any of the documentation from the developers or look at the videos you will see that predictability is a primary goal of the new interface. Things always display in the same order and in the same place you remember them. The developers were trying to avoid the seeming randomness of the "short" menus present in Office 2000/2003.
The contextual menu adjustments only appear on the very right of the ribbon and only the main tab header changes. The placement of individual items on any tab stays the same. Also all the "main" tabs on the ribbon stay the same and never change positions.
Reading about the interface and looking at screenshots doesn't do it justice by a long shot. Look at the videos and then you'll understand.
Actually the 16-bit pieces only exist as a few legacy apps (included for compatibility reasons) and the 16-bit system libraries which just translate all calls into 32-bit calls.
Windows XP is the NT 5.1 kernel, a 100% 32-bit protected mode operating system. It has been that way since the beginning, back when NT was actually Microsoft & IBM's joint OS/2 project.
FYI: The 64-bit version of Windows no longer supports running 16-bit programs, except for an explicitly defined list of 16-bit installer bootstrap applications (older versions of InstallShield/Wise/etc used the 16-bit bootstrap apps to launch their actual 32-bit setup apps).
My guess is that Vista won't even support that and the 16-to-32 libraries (Wow32) won't be included.
Simple: no one bought any copies of Windows when it *was* available on other processors. The 3.x line was available for MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, and x86. Only x86 and Alpha sold any copies so the 4.0 release was Alpha & x86 only.
Windows 2000 was slated to have Alpha support but Compaq told Microsoft not to bother so Microsoft dropped the Alpha support at their request.
The real problem (that I see) was that the dotnet Common Language Runtime wasn't available back in those days (And would have had performance problems with the machines of the day anyway). If the CLR existed and machines were capable enough of running it then almost everything today would be platform-neutral MSIL and new processor architectures would have a snowball's chance of gaining a significant foothold.
If you talk to most patent examiners they don't care. They think its their job to approve as many patents as possible and the courts can decide which ones are valid or not. They honestly don't see anything wrong with the current system.
Lithium Ion batteries make really good bombs; they tend to explode if not handled, charged, and discharged very specifically. That's why all consumer Li-ion batteries have built-in circuit breakers, are encased in strong plastic, have chargers with the appropriate computer circuitry to monitor the status of the battery and deliver the proper charge, and have proper discharge circuitry built into the device.
If you want to have some fun take a discharged Li-ion battery, hook it up to an 18v transformer, then stand way back and turn the sucker on. It shouldn't take too long for it to explode and/or catch fire.
So FYI: I don't think the hazards of fuel cells are anything new compared to carrying Li-ion batteries in your pocket.
I'm sure the fact that it was a test/proof-of-concept ship put out to sea without ANY formal software testing or even basic data safety checks isn't part of your "haha Windoze sux" fable but we can't let the truth get in the way of Microsoft-bashing now can we?
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a result of the recent Supreme Court action that raised the bar for patentability. I suspect that a large number of Microsoft's software patents (and everyone else's for that matter) will not withstand scrutiny under the new test.
This is just a net being scattered far and wide to try and turn some of their (now worthless) patents into revenue before anyone has the chance to challenge the validity of those patents.
My suggestion? Don't take the bait.
The Open Source model only works because the commercial services, hardware, and software industries are generating the revenue to give OSS developers a day job of some kind (whether that day job is developing commercial software or OSS software isn't relevant.) I would wager that the majority of this contribution is via jobs developing commercial or proprietary software.
This extends to college students as well - their contributions aren't free, they are paid for by loans, grants, college savings funds, etc. Honestly, who is going to pay many thousands of dollars, depending on where you go, to get a Computer Science degree and then spend their free time writing OSS software? Meanwhile this mythological individual flips burgers for a day job because we've achieved Stallman's grand vision of Free Software where programmers are a mere commodity and the only thing you can sell is glorified IT administrator services configuring and installing systems.
I would wager that most of us who have contributed to OSS in one way or another have learned, had our education paid for, cut our teeth on, or were in some other way compensated for our efforts by companies developing internal or closed-source systems.
OSS does not (and cannot) exist in a vacuum.
If I am reading the decision correctly, SCOTUS has changed the game by ruling that a patent fails the obviousness test if:
1) Any ordinarily skilled person in that area of expertise would, if they set about building a device to do what the patented device does, come up with nearly the same solution you did. In other words, you can't patent sending email over a cellular network, because anyone with email/cellular networking experience would come up with the same system you did (or one substantially similar).
2) A patent that is merely a combination of two existing methods is considered routine exercise of general knowledge in the art and is also not patentable.
One-click patent? IsNot operator? Connecting VOIP calls to the POTS network? Not patentable; these things fail the obviousness test. They are all examples of combining multiple existing methodologies, applying existing methodologies to new technology, or doing what any sane person with skills in that area would do.
However something like JPEG or WMV would still qualify, as there are many ways to compress images to fit into a smaller space. Frankly, that's the kind of software I think should be patentable... There is very little (relative to total patented software overall) that deserves protection, but there are still a few novel ideas that are worth protecting.
I might also point out that patent examiners are bound by these court decisions as well; I know there have been many cases where frivilous patents were rejected (often several times) by the examiner but the examiner was overruled thanks to the jacked-up circuit court decisions that essentially made it impossible to demonstrate prior art. Now that SCOTUS has put patents back in their place many more of the rejections from the patent office should stick.
More like if the web were run like most open source projects there would be five incompatible forks of HTTP:
HTTP - the original
NHTTP - Not HTTP, fork due to changing the word "if" to "when" in the original license
SHTTP - SSH HTTP, runs HTTP over SSH for security
HTTPS - HTTP over SSL, but adds new incompatible commands making it not backwards compatible.
DTF - Document transfer protocol, because John L., a major contributor to NHTTP, was offended when another contributor made a "yo-mamma" joke and left the project to start his own fork
Not to mention the 300 forks-that-never-were where the forking person got tired of working on it, gave up, or never finished the fork in the first place.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/01/godaddy_d efends.html
GoDaddy got back to me. General counsel Christine Jones defends taking down SecLists.org, saying that Fyodor had close to an hour to respond to GoDaddy's voicemail and e-mail warnings yesterday, and didn't.
"We couldn't reach him, and because the content was hundreds and hundreds of MySpace user names and password, we went ahead and redirected the domain to remove that content," she says.
An hour's notice doesn't seem much time before shutting down someone's website, particularly when the content in question is nine days old. Jones says there was urgency, because so many MySpace users are young teenagers, and they could suffer serious privacy invasions if perverts start logging into their profiles to get private photos and messages.
"For something that has safety implication like that, we take it really seriously," she says. "For spammers, we give people a little bit of time to respond to us."
Ouch. Archiving Full Disclosure is worse than spamming.
Awesome.
From what I can tell AACS either uses a different key for each model/version of a player or actually assigns individual keys to each individual player. I'm having trouble finding out from the documentation, but it would appear that revoking a very small set of users is possible with AACS, overcoming the chief reason the CSS revokation was never used: there were too few keys and revoking one would kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of players all at once.
That's why this decision is ultimately GOOD for consumers... it allows smaller players to enter the market with a small but very profitable build-out to start competing. Then, as their business grows, they can expand into other areas.
There really isn't any technical reason you can't have 3-5 fibers/cables running through the existing right-of-ways. Then you'd have REAL choice/competition, but without unnecessary government interference.
Personally, I understand the need for build-out requirements, so it would seem a compromise is in order. Once you reach $X in yearly revenue, or X% penetration in your coverage area, or whatever the trigger is, you are THEN required to adhere to a higher build-out standard (reach more areas). This means if you want to grow you need to keep expanding your service-level across the entire municipality. For example, once you reach $1 million in revenue in that city you are required to cover at least 25% of the city. This allows for measured growth without a ton of upfront captial investment.
Minor improvement patents. They would grant some protections but wouldn't qualify for full patent protection. Ideally the standard is slightly lower than the existing patent standards while patents for "new" devices would be raised significantly in their requirements.
This should be coupled with government-set rates for minor improvement patents, just like we have for song royalties. It would completely eliminate the whole patent litigation aspect and remove the threat of complete shutdown of a company or product just because someone patented sending email over a wireless link.
So a drug company makes a minor modification to an existing drug? Fine, they get some protection and can make money off it, but not nearly as much as for a true innovation.
The internet also allows people with insane viewpoints to find like-minded nutjobs, with which they can circle jerk about their common opinions all day long and never need to expose themselves to an alternate viewpoint or way of life.
Do you believe we never landed on the moon? Do you think horse-fucking is A-OK? Would you like to find someone to kill (with mutual consent) via erotic asphyxiation?... or worse, do you think sexually abusing little kids is acceptable behavior? No problem! The Internet has a message board or newsgroup just for you, that way you never need to think about your thoughts, actions, or obsessions.
There is no such thing as deviant behavior on the internet!
I think everyone is missing what this really means... TiVO won't want to risk losing on Appeal and DISH won't want to risk having to shut down their DVR service. I predict a settlement between the two companies in the next two weeks that will resolve all outstanding claims.
This isn't about the keys themselves... this is about the fact that if you can pull off the attack you can render the "blacklisting" or "key-revocation" system completely inert, meaning the protection is now permanently broken.
The whole idea behind the revocations was that when hackers inevitably get ahold of some keys they can just blacklist those keys and everything will be A-OK (no DeCSS). We now know that this system will never work.
Well I am a live-sound engineer and a compressor merely reduces the dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and softest sounds). More technically once the threshold has been reached the input must increase by X db to give 1db of output. If you use a ratio > 10:1 you've effectively created a limiter.
None of this necessarily reduces volume... in fact compressors are often used along with their make-up gain setting to result in an increase in volume, just with a smashed dynamic range.
Personally, at work, I use complete over-ear closed headphones (Sennheiser HD265) that block out much of the ambient noise and allow me to use a reduced volume level.
That isn't what he is saying. Natural selection doesn't always "select" the better gene... or in this case it isn't acting on whether one gene is better than another. A group is simply wholesale overridden by another for whatever reason (such as war or colonization.)
That action is, in fact, natural selection at work but not in the limited way we typically think of it. It has nothing to do with whos genes are superior, a master race, or any of that other crap. However the fact is that european/western genes are some of the most widely-spread (as a group).
Are you going to hand out headphones to each of your family members, friends, etc? There are two main benefits to surround sound:
1. Multiple listeners can take part without having to have a headphone distribution system and headphones for everyone.
2. It is slightly more natural in the sense that when you move your head the sources shift positions slightly wich is how things work in real-life. A good headphone 2-ch mix* is pretty damn good but it isn't as natural (and can cause listening fatigue).
*In general there aren't any good movie headphone mixes because they always compromise for people who are using stereo speakers. As a result the surround mix often sounds better regardless of #2.
Except the RTGs are designed to withstand the explosion of a rocket and subsequent impact to the earth without vaporizing or scattering the radioactive material across the globe.
In fact in at least one case the RTG was recovered, reconditioned, and put into the replacement rocket and launched again.
This is basic science at its finest.
Someone comes up with a theory that may permit FTL space travel. There isn't any known way to test the theory with the current techniques.
Sometime later someone comes up with a way to test the theory to see if it works or not (we are here).
If the theory works, the nature of human society changes forever as we become a true spacefaring race.
If the theory fails to hold up then we've disproven it and learned something new about the nature of the universe in the process (or possibly just confirmed a different conflicting theory).
By all means - bring on the experiments/tests!
Patches need to follow the "do no harm" mantra... you don't want to make things worse by issuing an untested patch. How many resources does it take to ensure, within 8 days, that the patch doesn't break any of the patched versions of Windows, doesn't expose any NEW security holes, and doesn't break any known applications?
the government controls 99% of the spectrum, useable and experimental, and this is the first time they have ever given back a single kilocycle of allocation. in the past, it has always been nonprofit, public safety, and commercial use that has been tagged for reallocations.
congratulations for finally stepping up to the plate, and many more for uncle selfish.
Actually that isn't true... check the chart at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf
The vast majority of the spectrum is non-government exclusive or shared government/non-government. Only the sections with RED under them are government-exclusive allocations.
I think you mean the rest of the world refuses to use the same frequencies we use. We picked the vast majority of them first. We invented the technologies for and allocated the frequencies for AM, FM, TV (which is just FM), Radar, Cell, et al first almost without exception (in terms of commercial or public availability, not necessarily in terms of first invention/patent)
It is the rest of the world (Europe, Japan, China, etc) that refuses to use the standards we created.
Actually it is obvious you have no clue of what you speak and are just spouting off.
If you bother to read any of the documentation from the developers or look at the videos you will see that predictability is a primary goal of the new interface. Things always display in the same order and in the same place you remember them. The developers were trying to avoid the seeming randomness of the "short" menus present in Office 2000/2003.
The contextual menu adjustments only appear on the very right of the ribbon and only the main tab header changes. The placement of individual items on any tab stays the same. Also all the "main" tabs on the ribbon stay the same and never change positions.
Reading about the interface and looking at screenshots doesn't do it justice by a long shot. Look at the videos and then you'll understand.
Actually the 16-bit pieces only exist as a few legacy apps (included for compatibility reasons) and the 16-bit system libraries which just translate all calls into 32-bit calls.
Windows XP is the NT 5.1 kernel, a 100% 32-bit protected mode operating system. It has been that way since the beginning, back when NT was actually Microsoft & IBM's joint OS/2 project.
FYI: The 64-bit version of Windows no longer supports running 16-bit programs, except for an explicitly defined list of 16-bit installer bootstrap applications (older versions of InstallShield/Wise/etc used the 16-bit bootstrap apps to launch their actual 32-bit setup apps).
My guess is that Vista won't even support that and the 16-to-32 libraries (Wow32) won't be included.
Simple: no one bought any copies of Windows when it *was* available on other processors. The 3.x line was available for MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, and x86. Only x86 and Alpha sold any copies so the 4.0 release was Alpha & x86 only.
Windows 2000 was slated to have Alpha support but Compaq told Microsoft not to bother so Microsoft dropped the Alpha support at their request.
The real problem (that I see) was that the dotnet Common Language Runtime wasn't available back in those days (And would have had performance problems with the machines of the day anyway). If the CLR existed and machines were capable enough of running it then almost everything today would be platform-neutral MSIL and new processor architectures would have a snowball's chance of gaining a significant foothold.
If you talk to most patent examiners they don't care. They think its their job to approve as many patents as possible and the courts can decide which ones are valid or not. They honestly don't see anything wrong with the current system.
Lithium Ion batteries make really good bombs; they tend to explode if not handled, charged, and discharged very specifically. That's why all consumer Li-ion batteries have built-in circuit breakers, are encased in strong plastic, have chargers with the appropriate computer circuitry to monitor the status of the battery and deliver the proper charge, and have proper discharge circuitry built into the device.
If you want to have some fun take a discharged Li-ion battery, hook it up to an 18v transformer, then stand way back and turn the sucker on. It shouldn't take too long for it to explode and/or catch fire.
So FYI: I don't think the hazards of fuel cells are anything new compared to carrying Li-ion batteries in your pocket.
As has already been pointed out this was NOT a Windows bug of any kind:
http://www.gcn.com/17_32/news/33639-1.html
I'm sure the fact that it was a test/proof-of-concept ship put out to sea without ANY formal software testing or even basic data safety checks isn't part of your "haha Windoze sux" fable but we can't let the truth get in the way of Microsoft-bashing now can we?