What I don't understand is why the *heck* the SCADA systems running Iran's { illegal | sooper-sekrit | stealth } nuclear weapons program aren't air-gapped! Isn't that something like standard procedure?
It doesn't really matter if they're air-gapped. Plenty of malware moves around on removable media like USB flash drives. And you have to be able to upgrade/reprogram/patch these SCADA systems somehow.
All it takes is one person plugging a USB stick into the wrong computer and your air-gap has become useless.
It's not a dictatorship, people voted in place the officials that made this happen, it's what most of them want.
1. Don't local elections tend to have really lousy turnout? It's hard to say "most" people want this, if most people don't bother to vote.
If you don't vote, you literally don't count.
Voting is your responsibility as a citizen. It is your civic duty. It should not be voluntary.
If somebody didn't show up to vote, and gets screwed over by this, it's their own damn fault. Maybe next time they'll show up to vote.
2. If people do think they want this, do they understand the (obvious) implications of what they agreed to?
Probably not.
That's the big problem with the democratic process... It relies on informed voters. Too many people today base their voting decisions on fearmongering and emotional responses. Folks don't do any research, don't actually think about what they're doing. They just vote for the guy they want to hang out with. Or they vote against the guy who looks scariest in the commercials.
Same thing here.
Somebody made an impassioned argument that cell phone towers have to be all-but banned. Maybe to keep those scary radio waves from mutating your children... Maybe to preserve property values... Maybe to prop up the local phone companies... Who knows. Folks liked what they heard.
Maybe some of them really contemplated the outcome of the vote... But I doubt if many of them did.
I do wonder how much acclaim and praise these two would get if they were constantly poking fun at the other side. Instead of spending an hour joking about Sarah Palin and Rand Paul. How about Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi or Obama? Do you think there might be some rich material there?
If you did watch the shows more often, you'd be aware of the fact that they're both equal opportunity offenders.
They routinely poke fun at both sides.
Try audience replacing his studio audience with middle aged tax payers or people working two jobs to pay their mortgage and see how funny they are!
I'm middle aged. I pay taxes. My wife is disabled, so I work a crapton of hours to pay my mortgage (and my kid's tuition, and my wife's healthcare).
I have had to show an ID to get M rated games from stores here in Texas, does California not already do that?
The video game industry has imposed its own regulations in an attempt to avoid government-imposed regulations.
The ESRB sets ratings. Individual stores have their own policies on what rating they'll carry, and who they'll sell to. But none of it is actual law. You might get fired for selling an AO title to a minor, but you wouldn't get arrested (unless the rating was earned because of sexual content and you were charged with providing pornography to a minor).
Frankly, this seems a little silly to me. We already have laws that prohibit selling pornography to minors, you don't really need to specify exactly what medium the pornography occupies. If it's pornographic, it's illegal.
I suppose you could codify into law a regulation against selling ultra-violent stuff to kids... Or classify that under existing obscenity laws... I certainly feel that violent imagery is more harmful to minors than sexual imagery... But you'd have a hell of a time getting something like that passed - our society loves violence. If you classified violent content as obscenity, you'd have to censor half the shows on TV, and a hell of a lot more movies would be rated R or even X.
Ultimately, this just seems un-necessary. The industry already does a halfway-decent job of regulating itself. We already have laws covering the more extreme cases. And it's ultimately up to the parent to dictate what is or isn't available to a child.
Just like a normal wireless AP picks up wireless traffic and routes it onto a wired network, these femtocells pick up cell phone traffic and route it onto the Internet.
If I recall correctly, AT&T counts your internet-routed voice traffic on your 3G cell plan. Pretty silly if this is the case.
I don't know about AT&T, but Verizon does bill you normally, even if you're using a femtocell.
Spend $250 for a box to extend their wireless network for them... Let them use your electricity and bandwidth... And they still charge you like normal.
The biggest problem with femtocells is that customers expect them to be free. This isn't unreasonable, after all they're paying a monthly fee to get a service and they expect that they can stand in the bathroom in their city centre flat and be able to make a call.
It isn't so much that they aren't free... It's that they cost so much, while costing me additional resources, and not really doing much for me except allowing me to use the device that I'm supposed to be able to use anyway.
I have a Verizon cell phone. According to all their coverage maps, I should be fine. I'm not. I routinely drop calls at home. Regardless of what they say, we're right on the edge of their coverage.
Verizon offers a femtocell for $250. This femtocell will use my electricity, it will use my bandwidth, and it will not save me any money at all. I still get charged for calls and data at the normal rate even though I'm having less of an impact on their infrastructure. All I get for my money is the ability to use my cell phone in an area where they swear I should be able to use it anyway.
I wouldn't complain if the femtocell was just $50... Or if they took $5/month off my bill... Or if calls/data/whatever were discounted while using the femtocell...
Aren't these home signal booster things just repeaters? If so, what happens to mobile bandwidth when a lot of these repeaters are used instead of actual basestations?
They are not repeaters - they do not repeat a wireless signal.
Just like a normal wireless AP picks up wireless traffic and routes it onto a wired network, these femtocells pick up cell phone traffic and route it onto the Internet.
“Instant messaging and Exchange are the worst offenders,” claiming that a smartphone with “always on” applications like Exchange - while doing very little - can produce the same signalling load on the network as a device making 1000 voice calls per day.
I'm not trying to be facetious, but how does a phone with Exchange produce the same amount of load on a network as a device that's constantly making voice calls? I realize that the phone will be signaling to a server to keep data synced, but how does it produce that much load?
Well... Exchange is a server product... So I'd assume it's handling a fairly large volume of traffic...
Sarcasm aside, I assume they mean it's running a mail/PIM client talking to an Exchange server. Which will be chatty. There's constant updates and checking for updates and whatnot. But I honestly can't imagine the traffic is really that high volume. We're talking about, essentially, text messages. Maybe some HTML formatting... An attachment or two here and there...
Sure, maybe some folks throw a big ol' 10 GB movie on an email once in a while...
But I can't imagine that simply using an Exchange server instead of POP or IMAP would really consume that much more bandwidth.
I wish there were a way that we could take actors, news-people, and sports figures with good gigs who insist on complaining, and have them work at a real job for a couple of years. Take anything you see on the show 'Dirty Jobs' and have them do that for a couple years. Then tell them if they insist on telling the world how hard they have it once back at their easy job, permanently install them in the real world with the rest of us.
Except that they're already in the real world with the rest of us.
It's all relative.
Sure, I can sit here and watch Myth Busters and think that's the greatest job in the world... But I bet they have shitty days too. I bet they've got folks on staff that they can't stand working with. I bet they've got bosses telling them to do stupid things. I bet they have days when they really don't want to wake up and go in to work. I bet they have days when they just can't wait to get home and relax. I bet there's stretches where they don't know if they'll be doing another season, and don't know if they're going to have a reliable paycheck.
Just because you aren't sweating and getting dirty doesn't mean you've got it easy. Just because you are sweating and getting dirty doesn't mean you've got it hard.
This just in: The best way to advertise your university is to offer some batshit-ridiculous course. *sigh*
It isn't batshit-ridiculous though.
There are tons of literature and film classes out there. They've all got various themes or focuses. I personally took a science fiction class. I've seen Stephen King classes and supernatural classes offered.
What's wrong with a zombie-themed class?
There's plenty of substance to be found in zombie movies. Sure, there's crap too, but I'd assume some effort is put into finding the good stuff. And a zombie theme will draw in students who wouldn't normally take any kind of literature or film class.
So they just need one password to access all your profiles?
No.
The idea is to implement some kind of centralized authentication - not necessarily a password. You could do one of those RSA keychain fobs... Or some kind of smartcard or biometric or something... Since it's centralized, you only need one doohickey/password/scan/whatever. And once you're authenticated against that one central site, you don't need to continually re-authenticate everywhere you go.
In theory, you can do something more secure. The end user only needs one doohickey. The individual websites don't need to spend a ton of time or money developing fancy authentication schemes. So you've actually got less burden on both the end user and the individual websites.
For MP3 players and phones, you obviously don't know how they work or how much power they use or how much power is available through energy harvesting and similar techniques. It's similar to wishing for a 300 MPG car. The energy equations don't work out.
Sure, right now the technology is generally awkward and unusable. Devices generally draw too much power, so you have to recharge them fairly often... And the charging process generally requires fairly vigorous motion... But power requirements get lower, and generation efficiency gets higher...
The fact of the matter, whether you like it or not, is that technology changes.
Go back a few years and we only had CRT's - massive things that wouldn't even fit in today's portable devices. And they drew plenty of power. Then we had LCD's... And now we've got OLED's that use even less power.
Used to be we needed spinning disks to store data, lots of energy wasted to produce mechanical motion that didn't really get us anywhere. Now we've got flash instead - no moving parts, lower power usage.
Hell, just look at your remote control. I remember having to replace the batteries in my remote almost monthly - now they last for ages.
We're constantly seeing stories here on Slashdot about how some new technology has made even denser batteries, or even more efficient solar cells, or even less power-hungry chips.
Wishing for a 300 MPG car may very well be futile... Since you've got to physically move the mass of the car, plus the passengers, plus any cargo... But a self-charging iPod doesn't need to physically move anything. It just has to power a display, some storage, and a playback chip - and we can make all those things more energy-efficient.
They aren't the future. They're just another niche product that makes sense for a few particular applications.
I dunno... Look around you at all the various battery-powered devices you've got. How many of those are completely stationary? How many of them actually get picked up and moved around fairly often?
Remote controls for various devices... Cell phones... MP3 players... Game controllers... Cordless mice... Cordless phones... Flashlights...
Sure, right now the technology is generally awkward and unusable. Devices generally draw too much power, so you have to recharge them fairly often... And the charging process generally requires fairly vigorous motion... But power requirements get lower, and generation efficiency gets higher...
How long before simply picking up your remote control to change the channel generates enough electricity to keep it charged and working for a day or two? Until simply carrying your MP3 player or phone around is enough to keep it up and running forever?
Sure... Big appliances inside a house probably won't benefit from any kind of ubiquitous/passive power generation like this. It's hard to pump enough sunlight into your basement to run your washer, and you probably don't want your house shaking enough to generate electricity for your water heater...
But I bet you could probably make it work for just about anything portable, or anything that is used outdoors.
Note: yes, I'm aware that most nerds won't be affected by this...but it will certainly confuse some normal folk, I guarantee it.
Nah. Most normal folk don't even know what companies do what. Sure, they've probably heard the names Intel and AMD... And maybe even know that they both make processors... And maybe they've even noticed that you typically only have one or the other on a box... But normal folk aren't even going to ponder why they've now got both on a box. They'll just buy the machine with the most gigawhosits and call it done.
Legalese is a bit archaic these days. You can't have the language evolving because then your old contract doesn't mean what it used to. So legal language is set in stone. Which is fine for lawyers, since they know what it means. But it winds up sounding odd to the rest of us.
A "peer", in this context, means a fellow citizen. As opposed to having some prince or king or noble pass judgement on you.
Try to think of citizenship as a job. You get "paid" in the various rights you are entitled to. Things like the right to a fair trial, the right to free speech, etc.
You also have responsibilities. You have the responsibility to serve in a jury if summoned.
If you don't like the job you can quit - by moving to a different country.
I wish jury service was a voluntary duty, not unlike voting.
Agree?? When do you have an opportunity to agree to anything in jury service? You are required to show up on such-and-such date at such-and-such time. You may not wear shorts, tank tops, beach shoes or t-shirts, or any clothing with offensive language or logos. Don't do this, and for heaven's sake, don't do that! Jurors lose quite a bit of freedom when they get that notice in the mail.
You agree when you live in this country.
Yes, US Citizens have a number of rights... We also have a number of responsibilities. Don't like it? Go live somewhere else.
Just a minor quibble, but if it turns out the Buddhists are right, Christirans won't spend eternity being reborn and suffering - they only spend as long as it takes to figure out that the Buddhists were right and to get with the program. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism isn't one of those you get one chance, don't fuck it up kind of religions.
Ignoring the fact that I was basically just being a sarcastic asshole...
The assumption was that the Christians would continue being Christians, and insisting that their holy book was the right holy book. In which case they would never figure out that the Buddhists were right, and would in fact spend all of eternity in that cycle.
Christians stake their eternal future on the presumptions that their God does exist. They live their whole lives doing what the Bible dictates they should, and rejecting the concept that there could be any other reasons or explanations. If they are wrong, and it turns out that the Buddhists are right they will spend eternity being reborn and suffering. That takes a great deal of faith (or ignorance take your pick).
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What I don't understand is why the *heck* the SCADA systems running Iran's { illegal | sooper-sekrit | stealth } nuclear weapons program aren't air-gapped! Isn't that something like standard procedure?
It doesn't really matter if they're air-gapped. Plenty of malware moves around on removable media like USB flash drives. And you have to be able to upgrade/reprogram/patch these SCADA systems somehow.
All it takes is one person plugging a USB stick into the wrong computer and your air-gap has become useless.
It's not a dictatorship, people voted in place the officials that made this happen, it's what most of them want.
1. Don't local elections tend to have really lousy turnout? It's hard to say "most" people want this, if most people don't bother to vote.
If you don't vote, you literally don't count.
Voting is your responsibility as a citizen. It is your civic duty. It should not be voluntary.
If somebody didn't show up to vote, and gets screwed over by this, it's their own damn fault. Maybe next time they'll show up to vote.
2. If people do think they want this, do they understand the (obvious) implications of what they agreed to?
Probably not.
That's the big problem with the democratic process... It relies on informed voters. Too many people today base their voting decisions on fearmongering and emotional responses. Folks don't do any research, don't actually think about what they're doing. They just vote for the guy they want to hang out with. Or they vote against the guy who looks scariest in the commercials.
Same thing here.
Somebody made an impassioned argument that cell phone towers have to be all-but banned. Maybe to keep those scary radio waves from mutating your children... Maybe to preserve property values... Maybe to prop up the local phone companies... Who knows. Folks liked what they heard.
Maybe some of them really contemplated the outcome of the vote... But I doubt if many of them did.
I do wonder how much acclaim and praise these two would get if they were constantly poking fun at the other side. Instead of spending an hour joking about Sarah Palin and Rand Paul. How about Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi or Obama? Do you think there might be some rich material there?
If you did watch the shows more often, you'd be aware of the fact that they're both equal opportunity offenders.
They routinely poke fun at both sides.
Try audience replacing his studio audience with middle aged tax payers or people working two jobs to pay their mortgage and see how funny they are!
I'm middle aged. I pay taxes. My wife is disabled, so I work a crapton of hours to pay my mortgage (and my kid's tuition, and my wife's healthcare).
I think they're both hilarious.
I have had to show an ID to get M rated games from stores here in Texas, does California not already do that?
The video game industry has imposed its own regulations in an attempt to avoid government-imposed regulations.
The ESRB sets ratings. Individual stores have their own policies on what rating they'll carry, and who they'll sell to. But none of it is actual law. You might get fired for selling an AO title to a minor, but you wouldn't get arrested (unless the rating was earned because of sexual content and you were charged with providing pornography to a minor).
Frankly, this seems a little silly to me. We already have laws that prohibit selling pornography to minors, you don't really need to specify exactly what medium the pornography occupies. If it's pornographic, it's illegal.
I suppose you could codify into law a regulation against selling ultra-violent stuff to kids... Or classify that under existing obscenity laws... I certainly feel that violent imagery is more harmful to minors than sexual imagery... But you'd have a hell of a time getting something like that passed - our society loves violence. If you classified violent content as obscenity, you'd have to censor half the shows on TV, and a hell of a lot more movies would be rated R or even X.
Ultimately, this just seems un-necessary. The industry already does a halfway-decent job of regulating itself. We already have laws covering the more extreme cases. And it's ultimately up to the parent to dictate what is or isn't available to a child.
Just like a normal wireless AP picks up wireless traffic and routes it onto a wired network, these femtocells pick up cell phone traffic and route it onto the Internet.
If I recall correctly, AT&T counts your internet-routed voice traffic on your 3G cell plan. Pretty silly if this is the case.
I don't know about AT&T, but Verizon does bill you normally, even if you're using a femtocell.
Spend $250 for a box to extend their wireless network for them... Let them use your electricity and bandwidth... And they still charge you like normal.
The biggest problem with femtocells is that customers expect them to be free. This isn't unreasonable, after all they're paying a monthly fee to get a service and they expect that they can stand in the bathroom in their city centre flat and be able to make a call.
It isn't so much that they aren't free... It's that they cost so much, while costing me additional resources, and not really doing much for me except allowing me to use the device that I'm supposed to be able to use anyway.
I have a Verizon cell phone. According to all their coverage maps, I should be fine. I'm not. I routinely drop calls at home. Regardless of what they say, we're right on the edge of their coverage.
Verizon offers a femtocell for $250. This femtocell will use my electricity, it will use my bandwidth, and it will not save me any money at all. I still get charged for calls and data at the normal rate even though I'm having less of an impact on their infrastructure. All I get for my money is the ability to use my cell phone in an area where they swear I should be able to use it anyway.
I wouldn't complain if the femtocell was just $50... Or if they took $5/month off my bill... Or if calls/data/whatever were discounted while using the femtocell...
Aren't these home signal booster things just repeaters? If so, what happens to mobile bandwidth when a lot of these repeaters are used instead of actual basestations?
They are not repeaters - they do not repeat a wireless signal.
Just like a normal wireless AP picks up wireless traffic and routes it onto a wired network, these femtocells pick up cell phone traffic and route it onto the Internet.
FTA:
“Instant messaging and Exchange are the worst offenders,” claiming that a smartphone with “always on” applications like Exchange - while doing very little - can produce the same signalling load on the network as a device making 1000 voice calls per day.
I'm not trying to be facetious, but how does a phone with Exchange produce the same amount of load on a network as a device that's constantly making voice calls? I realize that the phone will be signaling to a server to keep data synced, but how does it produce that much load?
Well... Exchange is a server product... So I'd assume it's handling a fairly large volume of traffic...
Sarcasm aside, I assume they mean it's running a mail/PIM client talking to an Exchange server. Which will be chatty. There's constant updates and checking for updates and whatnot. But I honestly can't imagine the traffic is really that high volume. We're talking about, essentially, text messages. Maybe some HTML formatting... An attachment or two here and there...
Sure, maybe some folks throw a big ol' 10 GB movie on an email once in a while...
But I can't imagine that simply using an Exchange server instead of POP or IMAP would really consume that much more bandwidth.
I wish there were a way that we could take actors, news-people, and sports figures with good gigs who insist on complaining, and have them work at a real job for a couple of years. Take anything you see on the show 'Dirty Jobs' and have them do that for a couple years. Then tell them if they insist on telling the world how hard they have it once back at their easy job, permanently install them in the real world with the rest of us.
Except that they're already in the real world with the rest of us.
It's all relative.
Sure, I can sit here and watch Myth Busters and think that's the greatest job in the world... But I bet they have shitty days too. I bet they've got folks on staff that they can't stand working with. I bet they've got bosses telling them to do stupid things. I bet they have days when they really don't want to wake up and go in to work. I bet they have days when they just can't wait to get home and relax. I bet there's stretches where they don't know if they'll be doing another season, and don't know if they're going to have a reliable paycheck.
Just because you aren't sweating and getting dirty doesn't mean you've got it easy. Just because you are sweating and getting dirty doesn't mean you've got it hard.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I didn't realize there were any books...
Good to see I'm not the only one who thought that as soon as I saw the name...
This just in: The best way to advertise your university is to offer some batshit-ridiculous course. *sigh*
It isn't batshit-ridiculous though.
There are tons of literature and film classes out there. They've all got various themes or focuses. I personally took a science fiction class. I've seen Stephen King classes and supernatural classes offered.
What's wrong with a zombie-themed class?
There's plenty of substance to be found in zombie movies. Sure, there's crap too, but I'd assume some effort is put into finding the good stuff. And a zombie theme will draw in students who wouldn't normally take any kind of literature or film class.
So they just need one password to access all your profiles?
No.
The idea is to implement some kind of centralized authentication - not necessarily a password. You could do one of those RSA keychain fobs... Or some kind of smartcard or biometric or something... Since it's centralized, you only need one doohickey/password/scan/whatever. And once you're authenticated against that one central site, you don't need to continually re-authenticate everywhere you go.
In theory, you can do something more secure. The end user only needs one doohickey. The individual websites don't need to spend a ton of time or money developing fancy authentication schemes. So you've actually got less burden on both the end user and the individual websites.
Always a great idea. Windows registry anyone?
It doesn't actually have to be a single point of failure though... What ever happened to OpenID?
For MP3 players and phones, you obviously don't know how they work or how much power they use or how much power is available through energy harvesting and similar techniques. It's similar to wishing for a 300 MPG car. The energy equations don't work out.
Sure, right now the technology is generally awkward and unusable. Devices generally draw too much power, so you have to recharge them fairly often... And the charging process generally requires fairly vigorous motion... But power requirements get lower, and generation efficiency gets higher...
The fact of the matter, whether you like it or not, is that technology changes.
Go back a few years and we only had CRT's - massive things that wouldn't even fit in today's portable devices. And they drew plenty of power. Then we had LCD's... And now we've got OLED's that use even less power.
Used to be we needed spinning disks to store data, lots of energy wasted to produce mechanical motion that didn't really get us anywhere. Now we've got flash instead - no moving parts, lower power usage.
Hell, just look at your remote control. I remember having to replace the batteries in my remote almost monthly - now they last for ages.
We're constantly seeing stories here on Slashdot about how some new technology has made even denser batteries, or even more efficient solar cells, or even less power-hungry chips.
Wishing for a 300 MPG car may very well be futile... Since you've got to physically move the mass of the car, plus the passengers, plus any cargo... But a self-charging iPod doesn't need to physically move anything. It just has to power a display, some storage, and a playback chip - and we can make all those things more energy-efficient.
They aren't the future. They're just another niche product that makes sense for a few particular applications.
I dunno... Look around you at all the various battery-powered devices you've got. How many of those are completely stationary? How many of them actually get picked up and moved around fairly often?
Remote controls for various devices... Cell phones... MP3 players... Game controllers... Cordless mice... Cordless phones... Flashlights...
Sure, right now the technology is generally awkward and unusable. Devices generally draw too much power, so you have to recharge them fairly often... And the charging process generally requires fairly vigorous motion... But power requirements get lower, and generation efficiency gets higher...
How long before simply picking up your remote control to change the channel generates enough electricity to keep it charged and working for a day or two? Until simply carrying your MP3 player or phone around is enough to keep it up and running forever?
Sure... Big appliances inside a house probably won't benefit from any kind of ubiquitous/passive power generation like this. It's hard to pump enough sunlight into your basement to run your washer, and you probably don't want your house shaking enough to generate electricity for your water heater...
But I bet you could probably make it work for just about anything portable, or anything that is used outdoors.
...an umbrella group...
Anyone else read that and immediately think of zombies?
Never mind the fact that AMD will be the source of confusion for "normal" folks in the not-too-distant future. Yay for having Intel and AMD stickers on the same system!
Note: yes, I'm aware that most nerds won't be affected by this...but it will certainly confuse some normal folk, I guarantee it.
Nah. Most normal folk don't even know what companies do what. Sure, they've probably heard the names Intel and AMD... And maybe even know that they both make processors... And maybe they've even noticed that you typically only have one or the other on a box... But normal folk aren't even going to ponder why they've now got both on a box. They'll just buy the machine with the most gigawhosits and call it done.
it is a jury of fellow citizens and nothing more.
That's the whole point.
Legalese is a bit archaic these days. You can't have the language evolving because then your old contract doesn't mean what it used to. So legal language is set in stone. Which is fine for lawyers, since they know what it means. But it winds up sounding odd to the rest of us.
A "peer", in this context, means a fellow citizen. As opposed to having some prince or king or noble pass judgement on you.
Try to think of citizenship as a job. You get "paid" in the various rights you are entitled to. Things like the right to a fair trial, the right to free speech, etc.
You also have responsibilities. You have the responsibility to serve in a jury if summoned.
If you don't like the job you can quit - by moving to a different country.
I wish jury service was a voluntary duty, not unlike voting.
Voting should not be voluntary.
Agree?? When do you have an opportunity to agree to anything in jury service? You are required to show up on such-and-such date at such-and-such time. You may not wear shorts, tank tops, beach shoes or t-shirts, or any clothing with offensive language or logos. Don't do this, and for heaven's sake, don't do that! Jurors lose quite a bit of freedom when they get that notice in the mail.
You agree when you live in this country.
Yes, US Citizens have a number of rights... We also have a number of responsibilities. Don't like it? Go live somewhere else.
While with Cisco sure you will be on hold for 3 hours but at least you can talk to someone and get it resolved.
Depends on the level of support you need...
If you've got a SmartNet contract with them, and your network is down, they get back to you fast.
Just a minor quibble, but if it turns out the Buddhists are right, Christirans won't spend eternity being reborn and suffering - they only spend as long as it takes to figure out that the Buddhists were right and to get with the program. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism isn't one of those you get one chance, don't fuck it up kind of religions.
Ignoring the fact that I was basically just being a sarcastic asshole...
The assumption was that the Christians would continue being Christians, and insisting that their holy book was the right holy book. In which case they would never figure out that the Buddhists were right, and would in fact spend all of eternity in that cycle.
Christians stake their eternal future on the presumptions that their God does exist. They live their whole lives doing what the Bible dictates they should, and rejecting the concept that there could be any other reasons or explanations. If they are wrong, and it turns out that the Buddhists are right they will spend eternity being reborn and suffering. That takes a great deal of faith (or ignorance take your pick).
The irony is that MS is patenting something for which they know very little, when patents are intended to spur innovation.
But... That isn't ironic....?