Voting machines should not be relying on physical security in the first place, because it is not practical to physically protect them 24/365. Their trustworthiness should be the result of double-handshake cryptographic authentications between the touchscreens, consoles,...
I have a bit of EKMS experience, and I have to say that you really need both. At some point somewhere the information has to exist on the machine in unencrypted form, and an intruder could attack that point. The typical response to an intrusion is to zeorize all the encrypted data, but you certainly don't want to do that in a voting machine. That itself could become an attack.
But the real issue is that encryption has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is trust. I don't trust your machine, no matter what. How can I trust that the encryption algorithm doesn't also change %25 of all votes cast to a preferred candidate? You could show me your software (hint, Diebold won't). But then how can I be sure that the code didn't get modified, or I didn't miss some code somewhere? I can't. For example, there could be a purposely-written unchecked buffer, combined with a special card that the attacker inserts that overflows the buffer with modified vote-counting code just as voting gets underway.
The only way is to have a paper backup of the votes that can be counted by a different method of my choice. That way, when the machine cheats. I can catch it. However, if the machine creates or electronically stores the backup, then I can't trust the backup either. Thus the paper copy *has* to be the master copy that the voter filled out, physically stored somewhere.
the _real_ VHS vs. Beta war where the better format (longer tapes, for one thing) actually won
That was a selling point at the time (yes, I'm old enough to remember). However, what really won it for VHS was that it was the more open standard. Unless Sony changes its attitude toward its format drastically, HD-DVD is destined to win out.
Oh come on. Without copyright there IS no closed source. There would be no law to keep me from using it.
That was my knee-jerk reaction too. However, that's missing the point. If everything were public domain, then there'd be nothing preventing someone from taking the sources for some software, making useful changes to it, and then only selling the binaries. You could probably even legally prevent employees from releasing the sources own their own initiative my designating them as "trade secrets".
You probably couldn't legally stop people from disassembling your binaries, but if your changes are extensive enough that wouldn't be a particularly attractive solution.
The Bayesian analysis in spam filters only works on text. Spammers realized that they could get around it by filling the text portion of the message with some random passage from a Project Gutenberg fil
I'm using Thunderbird 1.5.0.9, and it seems to work great on those "book attack" spams. I haven't seen one get through yet, so they appear to be less likely to get through than normal spams.
On a guess, I'd say that a random chunk of literature is far more likely to contain words never used in valid correspondence to me than any other kind of message. Just looking over the last one it caught, it uses literary words nobody would use in a one-to-one conversation like "modester", "idolatry", "mankind". It also goes on about the Pyrenees, Saxony, the Duchy of Brittany, etc. There's even a smattering of Latin in it. It would be tough to purposely make up something more likely to trip filters.
The root problem is that correspondence and literature are two *very* different styles of writing. Putting random literature is what is trying to pass as correspondence is doomed to failure. Please don't tell the spammers this though.
Err...yeah. There's no way to filter this stuff. We're all doomed!
So they are just the same, unless you count tactics, issues, and beliefs?
You may be right, but as near as I can tell from your post, the only thing that makes them "idealogical twins" is that you don't agree with either of them.
I notice someone has already corrected you on the proper capitalization of Ada. It seems a silly thing to get sensitive about, right? But there's a good reason it gets folk's panties in a bunch. For one thing, it is nearly always done by someone who doesn't know a thing about the language, doesn't care to know a thing about it, and wants to be able to dismiss it (without getting into messy details, like its actual qualities).
That would be enough to annoy many people by itself. Additionally, by capitalizing it you are implicitly categorizing it with older acronym languages like COBOL, FORTRAN. PL/I, rather than its proper contemporaries like Modula-2, Oberon, Java, etc.
That's in terms of age. In terms of use and philosophy, probably the closest language to Ada that most folks here would be familiar with is Java. They both had the same design goals of safety, readability, and reliability. The main difference between them is that Java's designers thought that C-style syntax's marketability outweighed its readability drawbacks. Most of the other differences between the languages are in emphasis.
Anyway, I think you can probably see where Ada users would get a little ticked at someone trying to dismiss it at an ancient COBOL-like language. Try talking dismissively about "that ancient language JAVA", and see what kind of responses you get.
I'm confused - didn't you just then go on to confirm that Apple switched to Intel because they got better performance per watt, as the original poster said?
No. What he went on to say was that there are two PPC lines, one of which was increasing PPW only by lowering the W, and the other only trying to raise the P. What they need is one CPU line that does *both*.
Sure, the PPW may look good for both, but it makes someone like Apple have to choose between having a very low wattage slow CPU (designed for small embedded devices), or a high wattage fast CPU (designed for big hairy servers).
No alternative is going to get 100% of supporters of the existing system on board. But if even 10% of those supporters can be convinced to at least consider the possibility of practical alternatives, this might be enough to tip the balance
The supporters are all industry groups, with a few hyper-successful artists. I think even %10 would be an overestimate. The MPAA represents the industry, not the actors, directors, or writers. The RIAA represents the Recording Industry, not the recording artists. You could convince every artist you have a better system, and it wouldn't back the RIAA or the MPAA off one iota. Any system that looks to cut out the middlemen between us and our artists is a mortal threat to them.
There are large organizations representing artists, like the SAG, but you never hear much of anything out of them about digital copyright issues. Why? Because there isn't really much in the current copyright system for them. The industry hardly gives them any money from electronic sales as it is. Only a few hyper-successful recording artists ever see a dime of royalties. MPAA contracts almost never give artists any digital rights, and when they do, they tend to give percentages of the net. They have special accountants whose sole job is to make sure no movie ever shows any net profit.
I read your article, and can see your heart's in the right place. However, I think it was a pointless avenue to go down, because it doesn't address the root cause of the "war". This is being driven by big companies that have gotten rich acting as middlemen between artists and art lovers. Any "solution" that doesn't continue to offer these middlemen their profits (or more) isn't going to interest them in the slightest.
I used to think that the solution was for these little myopic companies to get bought up by the larger electronics companies that have much more money at stake in digital freedom. Sadly, this happened with Sony when their DAT technology got blocked back in the early 90s. All we ended up with was little myopic divisions with the full weight of huge companies behind them.
That's weaseling. First off, you or me being wrong about this is one thing. However, people whose job it was to find the truth were wrong. I'm supposed to just shrug that off because my gas station attendant was wrong too? This isn't like someone got my order wrong at the drive-through. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of it. There have to be repercussions for the people responsible for gathering and verifying this intelligence. That includes the whole chain of command.
Secondly, they weren't trying to be right in the first place. They were just using the most convincing arguments they could scrounge up. The whole WMD argument comming out of the executive branch was clearly ends-based from day one. Saddam was a disgrace to the human race, so everyone was willing to overlook the shoddy arguments at the time. But I have no patience for people crying crocodile tears about being wrong or being fooled by the president now. The time for self-delusion is long past.
You are abolutely right about the important thing at the moment being the problem, and not the history though. As much as those in charge may deserve a good flogging, verbally and otherwise, I'm quite sure historians will be up to the task when the time comes. However, since there have been no repercussions against the incompetents in the executive branch who got us into this mess, they are still (for the most part) in charge. Just listen to their latest statements about the war. They are now insisting, against all evidence, that there is no civil war there. They still sound just as incompetent and self-delusional now as they were 4 years ago. So yes, fingers need to be pointed. If we don't bother to identify and remove the incompetents, they will just keep making things worse.
We don't have that kind of say anymore. Iraq has its own sovereign government. Such subjects as how to dispose of its territory are their business now, not ours.
Iraq's neighbors would never accept it. Turkey's condition for agreeing to our intervention in the first place was that there be no independant "Kurdistan". Iran would also refuse to live with an independant Kurdish country on the border of their majority-Kurdish districts. If this were to happen, Turkey and Iran would almost certianly march in and divide the country between themselves. Likewise, Saudi Arabia will never accept a Shi'ite Iranian puppet state on the border of their Shi'ite majority territory. They've already announced that they are going to start supporting Sunni parties in Iraq. You can bet this "support" will include weaponry and covert ops.
This can't happen cleanly. There are millions of Shi'a in the middle "sunni" territory, and hundreds of thousands of Sunnis in the northern "Kurdish" area. A three way partition will only truly separate the warring factions after several more rounds of bloody "ethnic cleansing". Lets be men about it and call it by its true name: genocide.
There are no good options left for us in Iraq, so I think we should quit casting about for some magic bullet, and just try to contain the mess as best as is still possible.
I too initially supported this fiasco. If there are any Iraqi's reading, I'm about as sorry as a human being can be. "Sorry" ain't gonna be enough to wash the stain of the blood of more than half a million Iraqi's off my hands though.
Or: you could just believe that both versions of Genesis are contradictory and wrong, and then just apply this manner of thinking to the rest of the bible. It's what I believe, and I assume many others do too.
This actually points out my biggest problem with literalists. If one makes a literal interpretation of the text an article of faith, then you are exactly right. The implicit implication of literalism is that any logical inconsistencies in the Bible would mean that Christianity, with its 2000 years of philosophical thought by some of the best minds in the West, must be thrown out wholesale. Guess what...the Bible is chock full of logical inconsistencies. Its also been manually copied so much by so many people from so many different sources that there's no authoritative way to say what exactly "the text" is anymore, even if it were originally logically perfect.
What this leads to is a lot of our best minds eventually giving up the faith over stupid little technicalities that really have nothing to do with the faith itself.
I'm specifically referring to "the old Hebrew creation myth", as you call it. Is it intended to be poetry, or documentary? That's the key question, and the one that's not answered in your post.
I'm sorry. I actually didn't answer it because it seemed a nonsensical question. "Poetry" and "Documentary" are two rather unrelated concepts. There's no reason that something couldn't be both, or neither, or a varying bits of each.
In fact any story in an oral tradition has to be some kind of poetry, as it makes remembering the details much easier. When there are no books to pass on cultural, religous, and historical knowledge for you, the amount of material a person is expected to memorize can be rather overwhelming.
In fact, to say that one contradicts the other is only appropriate if they are both literal!
I agree totally. Which is why I much prefer to consider the creation stories in the Bible as not to be taken literally. The only remaining alternatives are to reinterpret the stories and call the new interpretations "literal", which is intellectually dishonest, or to give up on the whole thing and pick some other belief system.
I live in Southern Ohio, I would go out protesting against this museum along with anyone else who wishes to do so.
Nah, let them have their silly museum. If you want to do something to mess with them, buy some land across the street and open a museum to the Giant Spaghetti Monster. In it, mimic every single display in the the other museum, but with a Spaghetti theme. I bet you get more visitors.
To the best of my knowledge, scholars of the Hebrew language do not consider the text of Genesis chapter one to be poetry, but rather documentary.
That's wrong. Biblical scholars will tell you that part of Gen 1 was the old Hebrew creation myth, and another part was likely written during the exile in Babylon. That part of the story was likely meant to indirectly address their current condtion in exile from their land and in servitude in Babylon. Consider reading Misquoting Jesus by biblical scholar Bart Ehrman.
On a more general note, this points out that, there are actually two different creation stories in Genesis 1. Two different stories. Different things happen in different order on different days in them. If you insist on reading the bible literally, with no creative interpretation, then one of the two is wrong. You aren't even out of the first chapter of the Bible yet, and you already can't be strictly literal.
Like it or not, most internet technologies have their roots in Latin speaking countries
I believe you meant to say something like "in countries that use a Latin-derived script". The only "Latin-speaking" country left is the Papal State, and I think the pope's been too busy with matters of faith the last few decades to spend a lot of time developing internet technologies.
There are quite a few countries around that speak languages descended from Latin, but I think a lot (if not most) of the development was done in countries that speak Germanic languages instead. (eg: English and German)
The WTO is sticking up for this tiny little country, against the USA, in the name of freedom to gamble online. They're still evil right? Because they're sticking up for mega-corporations, right? I didn't get the shit kicked out of me in Seattle for no reason, right?
Apparently you did, as you seem to be quite clueless on what the issues were. Perhaps you just had a thing for chicks who don't shave? In that case, you should tell us if you got anything out of it. On second thought, don't. I just ate...
The issue I heard from the people in Seattle way back when was that WTO is an unelected body that has been given the power to veto nearly any US law that somehow affects the bottom line of a company based outside the US. Mostly I think they were worried about our labor and environmental laws. However, this story illustrates that the problem doesn't stop there, and is very real.
Actually, the lack of respect for fair use has been a big problem in the history of rap. It used to be quite common for rap artists to get sued by the artists they sampled from. The only thing that eventually stopped it was rap artists starting to pay royalties to the sample-es (who now loooove getting sampled).
Weird Al has the same problem with his work. He gets permission from the original artists for every song he parodies. He shouldn't need to, but he does.
Sometimes, all of these entities are the same company. Look at Sony for example. They own a record label, produce consumer electronics, and sell blank media.
The reason Sony owns a record label is that back when Sony was pushing digital audio tape, said record label held things up for years by suing Sony over these same copyright issues. Buying the stupid little snits was the easiest way out of it.
I eventually became a hiring manager at that same company, and I would go out of my way to throw the candidates I interviewed off balance.
Why? Unless your employees' days are filled with intense pressure from random jerks, how is this at all relevant to their jobs?
I could see this for someone in sales or marketing. However, if your engineers are continually having to make snap decisions under intense pressure like this, perhaps you should take a good look at making your working conditions more humane.
I happen to be a very good engineer, who is also very easily flustered by this kind of obstinate behaviour from other human beings. Does that make me a bad fit for your company? Well then, I guess you're glad I don't work there. I know I am!
Being neither a Windows user nor a PC gamer, I'm wondering if you mean "Windows" where you said "Vista," or if there is a real reason for switching to Vista for gaming. Does it do something XP doesn't...?
What Vista does for games is allow them to install.
I'm currently a Win2K user who is looking at Vista because games have started comming out that refuse to install on 2K. I could buy XP, but eventually games will stop installing on XP as well, so I'd just be wasting my money in the long run. That's why I think all this posturing about not installing Vista is silly. I tried that myself with XP, but all you can really do is delay the inevitable.
As another poster said, if you are a PC gamer, Microsoft has you by the shorthairs.
Slashdot Mirror
But the real issue is that encryption has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is trust. I don't trust your machine, no matter what. How can I trust that the encryption algorithm doesn't also change %25 of all votes cast to a preferred candidate? You could show me your software (hint, Diebold won't). But then how can I be sure that the code didn't get modified, or I didn't miss some code somewhere? I can't. For example, there could be a purposely-written unchecked buffer, combined with a special card that the attacker inserts that overflows the buffer with modified vote-counting code just as voting gets underway.
The only way is to have a paper backup of the votes that can be counted by a different method of my choice. That way, when the machine cheats. I can catch it. However, if the machine creates or electronically stores the backup, then I can't trust the backup either. Thus the paper copy *has* to be the master copy that the voter filled out, physically stored somewhere.
That was a selling point at the time (yes, I'm old enough to remember). However, what really won it for VHS was that it was the more open standard. Unless Sony changes its attitude toward its format drastically, HD-DVD is destined to win out.
That was my knee-jerk reaction too. However, that's missing the point. If everything were public domain, then there'd be nothing preventing someone from taking the sources for some software, making useful changes to it, and then only selling the binaries. You could probably even legally prevent employees from releasing the sources own their own initiative my designating them as "trade secrets".
You probably couldn't legally stop people from disassembling your binaries, but if your changes are extensive enough that wouldn't be a particularly attractive solution.
I'm using Thunderbird 1.5.0.9, and it seems to work great on those "book attack" spams. I haven't seen one get through yet, so they appear to be less likely to get through than normal spams.
On a guess, I'd say that a random chunk of literature is far more likely to contain words never used in valid correspondence to me than any other kind of message. Just looking over the last one it caught, it uses literary words nobody would use in a one-to-one conversation like "modester", "idolatry", "mankind". It also goes on about the Pyrenees, Saxony, the Duchy of Brittany, etc. There's even a smattering of Latin in it. It would be tough to purposely make up something more likely to trip filters.
The root problem is that correspondence and literature are two *very* different styles of writing. Putting random literature is what is trying to pass as correspondence is doomed to failure. Please don't tell the spammers this though.
Err...yeah. There's no way to filter this stuff. We're all doomed!
So they are just the same, unless you count tactics, issues, and beliefs?
You may be right, but as near as I can tell from your post, the only thing that makes them "idealogical twins" is that you don't agree with either of them.
I notice someone has already corrected you on the proper capitalization of Ada. It seems a silly thing to get sensitive about, right? But there's a good reason it gets folk's panties in a bunch. For one thing, it is nearly always done by someone who doesn't know a thing about the language, doesn't care to know a thing about it, and wants to be able to dismiss it (without getting into messy details, like its actual qualities).
That would be enough to annoy many people by itself. Additionally, by capitalizing it you are implicitly categorizing it with older acronym languages like COBOL, FORTRAN. PL/I, rather than its proper contemporaries like Modula-2, Oberon, Java, etc.
That's in terms of age. In terms of use and philosophy, probably the closest language to Ada that most folks here would be familiar with is Java. They both had the same design goals of safety, readability, and reliability. The main difference between them is that Java's designers thought that C-style syntax's marketability outweighed its readability drawbacks. Most of the other differences between the languages are in emphasis.
Anyway, I think you can probably see where Ada users would get a little ticked at someone trying to dismiss it at an ancient COBOL-like language. Try talking dismissively about "that ancient language JAVA", and see what kind of responses you get.
No. What he went on to say was that there are two PPC lines, one of which was increasing PPW only by lowering the W, and the other only trying to raise the P. What they need is one CPU line that does *both*.
Sure, the PPW may look good for both, but it makes someone like Apple have to choose between having a very low wattage slow CPU (designed for small embedded devices), or a high wattage fast CPU (designed for big hairy servers).
Or they could switch to x86.
The supporters are all industry groups, with a few hyper-successful artists. I think even %10 would be an overestimate. The MPAA represents the industry, not the actors, directors, or writers. The RIAA represents the Recording Industry, not the recording artists. You could convince every artist you have a better system, and it wouldn't back the RIAA or the MPAA off one iota. Any system that looks to cut out the middlemen between us and our artists is a mortal threat to them.
There are large organizations representing artists, like the SAG, but you never hear much of anything out of them about digital copyright issues. Why? Because there isn't really much in the current copyright system for them. The industry hardly gives them any money from electronic sales as it is. Only a few hyper-successful recording artists ever see a dime of royalties. MPAA contracts almost never give artists any digital rights, and when they do, they tend to give percentages of the net. They have special accountants whose sole job is to make sure no movie ever shows any net profit.
I read your article, and can see your heart's in the right place. However, I think it was a pointless avenue to go down, because it doesn't address the root cause of the "war". This is being driven by big companies that have gotten rich acting as middlemen between artists and art lovers. Any "solution" that doesn't continue to offer these middlemen their profits (or more) isn't going to interest them in the slightest.
I used to think that the solution was for these little myopic companies to get bought up by the larger electronics companies that have much more money at stake in digital freedom. Sadly, this happened with Sony when their DAT technology got blocked back in the early 90s. All we ended up with was little myopic divisions with the full weight of huge companies behind them.
Destruction of Government Property. Its a felony too, so you just lost your right to vote, pal.
That's weaseling. First off, you or me being wrong about this is one thing. However, people whose job it was to find the truth were wrong. I'm supposed to just shrug that off because my gas station attendant was wrong too? This isn't like someone got my order wrong at the drive-through. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of it. There have to be repercussions for the people responsible for gathering and verifying this intelligence. That includes the whole chain of command.
Secondly, they weren't trying to be right in the first place. They were just using the most convincing arguments they could scrounge up. The whole WMD argument comming out of the executive branch was clearly ends-based from day one. Saddam was a disgrace to the human race, so everyone was willing to overlook the shoddy arguments at the time. But I have no patience for people crying crocodile tears about being wrong or being fooled by the president now. The time for self-delusion is long past.
You are abolutely right about the important thing at the moment being the problem, and not the history though. As much as those in charge may deserve a good flogging, verbally and otherwise, I'm quite sure historians will be up to the task when the time comes. However, since there have been no repercussions against the incompetents in the executive branch who got us into this mess, they are still (for the most part) in charge. Just listen to their latest statements about the war. They are now insisting, against all evidence, that there is no civil war there. They still sound just as incompetent and self-delusional now as they were 4 years ago. So yes, fingers need to be pointed. If we don't bother to identify and remove the incompetents, they will just keep making things worse.
There are several problems with this.
There are no good options left for us in Iraq, so I think we should quit casting about for some magic bullet, and just try to contain the mess as best as is still possible.
I too initially supported this fiasco. If there are any Iraqi's reading, I'm about as sorry as a human being can be. "Sorry" ain't gonna be enough to wash the stain of the blood of more than half a million Iraqi's off my hands though.
This actually points out my biggest problem with literalists. If one makes a literal interpretation of the text an article of faith, then you are exactly right. The implicit implication of literalism is that any logical inconsistencies in the Bible would mean that Christianity, with its 2000 years of philosophical thought by some of the best minds in the West, must be thrown out wholesale. Guess what...the Bible is chock full of logical inconsistencies. Its also been manually copied so much by so many people from so many different sources that there's no authoritative way to say what exactly "the text" is anymore, even if it were originally logically perfect.
What this leads to is a lot of our best minds eventually giving up the faith over stupid little technicalities that really have nothing to do with the faith itself.
I'm sorry. I actually didn't answer it because it seemed a nonsensical question. "Poetry" and "Documentary" are two rather unrelated concepts. There's no reason that something couldn't be both, or neither, or a varying bits of each.
In fact any story in an oral tradition has to be some kind of poetry, as it makes remembering the details much easier. When there are no books to pass on cultural, religous, and historical knowledge for you, the amount of material a person is expected to memorize can be rather overwhelming.
I agree totally. Which is why I much prefer to consider the creation stories in the Bible as not to be taken literally. The only remaining alternatives are to reinterpret the stories and call the new interpretations "literal", which is intellectually dishonest, or to give up on the whole thing and pick some other belief system.
Nah, let them have their silly museum. If you want to do something to mess with them, buy some land across the street and open a museum to the Giant Spaghetti Monster. In it, mimic every single display in the the other museum, but with a Spaghetti theme. I bet you get more visitors.
That's wrong. Biblical scholars will tell you that part of Gen 1 was the old Hebrew creation myth, and another part was likely written during the exile in Babylon. That part of the story was likely meant to indirectly address their current condtion in exile from their land and in servitude in Babylon. Consider reading Misquoting Jesus by biblical scholar Bart Ehrman.
On a more general note, this points out that, there are actually two different creation stories in Genesis 1. Two different stories. Different things happen in different order on different days in them. If you insist on reading the bible literally, with no creative interpretation, then one of the two is wrong. You aren't even out of the first chapter of the Bible yet, and you already can't be strictly literal.
I believe you meant to say something like "in countries that use a Latin-derived script". The only "Latin-speaking" country left is the Papal State, and I think the pope's been too busy with matters of faith the last few decades to spend a lot of time developing internet technologies.
There are quite a few countries around that speak languages descended from Latin, but I think a lot (if not most) of the development was done in countries that speak Germanic languages instead. (eg: English and German)
Apparently you did, as you seem to be quite clueless on what the issues were. Perhaps you just had a thing for chicks who don't shave? In that case, you should tell us if you got anything out of it. On second thought, don't. I just ate...
The issue I heard from the people in Seattle way back when was that WTO is an unelected body that has been given the power to veto nearly any US law that somehow affects the bottom line of a company based outside the US. Mostly I think they were worried about our labor and environmental laws. However, this story illustrates that the problem doesn't stop there, and is very real.
Actually, the lack of respect for fair use has been a big problem in the history of rap. It used to be quite common for rap artists to get sued by the artists they sampled from. The only thing that eventually stopped it was rap artists starting to pay royalties to the sample-es (who now loooove getting sampled).
Weird Al has the same problem with his work. He gets permission from the original artists for every song he parodies. He shouldn't need to, but he does.
The reason Sony owns a record label is that back when Sony was pushing digital audio tape, said record label held things up for years by suing Sony over these same copyright issues. Buying the stupid little snits was the easiest way out of it.
Unfortunately, Sony subsequently went native...
As long as you cook the brains throuroughly before eating them you shouldn't have that problem.
Bon'appetite
Why? Unless your employees' days are filled with intense pressure from random jerks, how is this at all relevant to their jobs?
I could see this for someone in sales or marketing. However, if your engineers are continually having to make snap decisions under intense pressure like this, perhaps you should take a good look at making your working conditions more humane.
I happen to be a very good engineer, who is also very easily flustered by this kind of obstinate behaviour from other human beings. Does that make me a bad fit for your company? Well then, I guess you're glad I don't work there. I know I am!
...makes a product that doesn't suck it probably the day Microsoft starts making vacuum cleaners.
-- Erns Jan Plugge
(Sorry, but I saw the title, and immediately thought of this quote from my random signature file).
What Vista does for games is allow them to install.
I'm currently a Win2K user who is looking at Vista because games have started comming out that refuse to install on 2K. I could buy XP, but eventually games will stop installing on XP as well, so I'd just be wasting my money in the long run. That's why I think all this posturing about not installing Vista is silly. I tried that myself with XP, but all you can really do is delay the inevitable.
As another poster said, if you are a PC gamer, Microsoft has you by the shorthairs.