I can't imagine that Microsoft would be so stupid as to eventually start turning off people's Windows systems. Talk about cutting your own throat. Even the Microsoft fans would start thinking of turning to other OS options.
A very insightful post on ZD (same subject) pointed out that MS has had enough experience now with desktop Linux to not fear it. A few years ago, they were really worried -- but Linux got to be very good as a desktop system and MS saw absolutely no loss of market.
Now they know that they really do have the world by the balls, and they've decided to squeeze.
Let's face it -- the MS fans will bitch and whine, then they'll do as they're told. This is going to be a very good bottom-line move for Microsoft.
Tunnels sound very interesting. Leakage presumably has many causes, but would boil down to electrons leaving the desired path and going elsewhere. There MAY be ways of replacing the interconnects (which are usually just regular conductors) with superconductors, as superconductors should leak a lot less. (Resistance is a function of leakage, and superconductors have zero resistance.) This won't fix links on the silicon itself, but any improvement would be a good thing.
Leakage in this context is actually either:
Current that flows in the channel of an OFF transistor (this helps with that) or,
Current that flows through the gate dielectric (this doesn't help, you need high-K dielectrics for that)
Superconductors don't leak, dielectrics do. You may be thinking of losses.
Resistance isn't a function of leakage. Don't know where you got that one.
Actually, the described improvement will "fix links (sic) on the silicon itself"
Pretty cool, but that should come with a 3x increase in the gate's capacitance, shouldn't it? and fighting capacitance is one of the major struggles of increased speed, right? People doing very low-power stuff should love this. People doing high-speed design, maybe not so much.
Not really a problem. The transconductance of a transistor is actually proportional to the charge induced in the channel, which in turn is proportional to the gate voltage (limited) and the capacitance. In other words, you aren't going to get more gain without also getting more capacitance. In other words, for a given gain the capacitance is the same, but the leakage is less. [1]
The other reason this isn't a problem for low power is that interconnect capacitance is much greater than gate capacitance for practical circuits.
[1] Size isn't much affected, because so many other features are much larger than the channel. Contacts and required spacings, for instance.
Straw man: Would Bruce become liable for bad security decisions people made based on reading one of his columns?
Patently not -- the publishers of every imaginable work from cookbooks to newspapers would rise up in revolt, and the Courts would almost certainly find First Amendment grounds to shoot the idea down.
Well, software libre is no different. Fortunately, the current Supreme Court seems to have acquired clue on the subject (I remain boggled). Lower court decisions that "code is not speech" aren't given much of a chance by the oddsmakers, although they grant that betting on any court decision, much less those of the USSC, is unwise.
The "killer argument" from those who want a legal distinction is that "code" can be used to "make computers do things," as compared to "speech." Those whose courts have been relocated out of caves are familiar with the idea that computer capabilities are improving over time, and that we already have limited speech recognition. Thus, the "killer counterargument" is that the permissible scope of protected speech is shrinking as computer speech recognition improves, eventually to disappear entirely once we reach threshold levels of artificial intelligence.
Don't try to tell a Federal Judge that the First Amendment was a quaint and transitory historical fashion, to be obsoleted by technology.
Thus, liability for "code" falls, in the end, under the same law as liability for any other writing. Which judges really do understand, and are very unlikely to impose in any way that materially threatens software libre.
If I establish that it's okay for me to fire someone purely for being gay/Commie/whatever, then I've also established that it's okay for you to fire me for being ugly/Democrat/whatever.
That's silly -- the two cases are obviously nothing alike.
You see, I'm right. That makes all the difference.
--
OK, fine -- the sad fact is that some people never quite see why "special pleading" is a fallacy.
All things considered, it's a whole lot safer (not to mention more profitable) to notify the black hats about vulnerabilities rather than the vendors or the public.
We need a society in which there's no difference between what's illegal and what harms others, and holds all other things not only legal, but acceptable.
Gurrrk.
Put some more thought into this one. There are any number of things that are "unacceptable" that aren't bad enough to merit applying the might and majesty of the State's criminal justice system. By denying all social sanctions short of criminal prosecution, you create a society with the worst of both worlds: a plague of officers (lawyers) worse than what we have now, along with a degree of rudeness that would make the French recoil in horror.
Time was when being rude enough in public would get you tossed into the street by half of the men in the place. We solved that (and I'm not sure it was the wrong thing to do) by criminalizing the eviction as assault -- but now we have people carrying on loud cellphone conversations during movies.
Shunning and scorn aren't on the order of a punch in the nose -- don't deny us those as well.
They point out that there are more than 100 nanotechnology products and that nanoparticles can penetrate cells and tissues, migrate through the body and brain and cause biochemical damage."
Makes perfect sense. Who better than the FDA to regulate skis?
Of course, there are other things that "can penetrate cells and tissues, migrate through the body and brain and cause biochemical damage." Many of them occur in nature. Some of those (like buckyballs in smoke) are even nanoparticles.
Assuming for a second that the quoted individual isn't full of it, why are any unmeritorious lawsuits expensive to defend? Don't courts do things like order one party to pay the other's legal fees in cases like that?
He's not, they are, and the court's don't.
The main reason is that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure #10 is basically a dead letter.
"Professional courtesy" means that other lawyers won't accuse an abuser of being abusive because the rest of the legal community will retaliate. Nobody likes a snitch.
The Court won't because it just means more work, and they're too busy as it is. Besides, the Court of Appeals will probably reverse anyway.
For a suit to be legally frivolous requires that a whole bunch of lawyers decide that there was no conceivable way that there was the slightest shred of argument to support it. Gimme a break! These are lawyers -- their training, their whole point in existence, is finding something to argue about.
One possible solution would be to have lawyers on both sides be paid a fixed rate by the state, which would fix some inequalities, although admittedly individual people might still be motivated by money to sue.
If you want to see some real panic in the class-action racket, try this:
Counsel for the plaintiffs in a class-action suit may not receive any more than is actually distributed to the plaintiffs.
That's the classic scam: the defendents settle for $100 million, the plaintiffs' law firm get $95 million of it, $5 million is offered to the plaintiff class if they respond to request 20 pages of paperwork to apply for their $0.75 payout; a total of $120 thousand is actually distributed to the plaintiff class members and "their" lawyers pocket the balance.
Suggest it to your Congresscritters. The ABA and Trial Lawyers' Association will hate it, but if it ever sees daylight nobody will dare vote against it because (unlike a lot of tort reform) it doesn't take a dime from plaintiffs -- the ones they ABA and TLA use to justify their normal way of doing business.
After all, the malware business is one of those "ecosystems" that's wholly dependent on Microsoft. Only fair that MS should offer a little direction to their clients.
The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor.
If you calculate the power density required to read/write that data, "vapor" is quite likely exactly what you're likely to get. If it happened to me, I'd be steamed; if it happened to $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER I'd be in really hot water.
That being said, given mandates like the ADA, if people want OSS to take an bigger role on the desktop, accessibility and cooperation with assistive technology is a big area where more needs to be done. Sure, it may not be as much interest to developers, but given mandates like the ADA, it may be essential for many large decision-makers in deciding whether or ot to adopt a particular solution.
That's not a problem that can be solved in baby steps, because Microsoft platforms don't support assistive technology. OpenOffice on Solaris or Linux, by contrast, has excellent assistive support because those platforms have provisions at the platform level that all applications can use readily without expensive reverse-engineering on a per-version basis by third parties.
In other words, as long as MSWindows is off the table, so are all but the most popular applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Now they know that they really do have the world by the balls, and they've decided to squeeze.
Let's face it -- the MS fans will bitch and whine, then they'll do as they're told. This is going to be a very good bottom-line move for Microsoft.
Not really a problem. The transconductance of a transistor is actually proportional to the charge induced in the channel, which in turn is proportional to the gate voltage (limited) and the capacitance. In other words, you aren't going to get more gain without also getting more capacitance. In other words, for a given gain the capacitance is the same, but the leakage is less. [1]
The other reason this isn't a problem for low power is that interconnect capacitance is much greater than gate capacitance for practical circuits.
[1] Size isn't much affected, because so many other features are much larger than the channel. Contacts and required spacings, for instance.
How 'bout that. Intel has invented the pentode.
If Bruce wants to have freedom on the Internet, he can build his own.
I wish I were being funny.
Patently not -- the publishers of every imaginable work from cookbooks to newspapers would rise up in revolt, and the Courts would almost certainly find First Amendment grounds to shoot the idea down.
Well, software libre is no different. Fortunately, the current Supreme Court seems to have acquired clue on the subject (I remain boggled). Lower court decisions that "code is not speech" aren't given much of a chance by the oddsmakers, although they grant that betting on any court decision, much less those of the USSC, is unwise.
The "killer argument" from those who want a legal distinction is that "code" can be used to "make computers do things," as compared to "speech." Those whose courts have been relocated out of caves are familiar with the idea that computer capabilities are improving over time, and that we already have limited speech recognition. Thus, the "killer counterargument" is that the permissible scope of protected speech is shrinking as computer speech recognition improves, eventually to disappear entirely once we reach threshold levels of artificial intelligence.
Don't try to tell a Federal Judge that the First Amendment was a quaint and transitory historical fashion, to be obsoleted by technology.
Thus, liability for "code" falls, in the end, under the same law as liability for any other writing. Which judges really do understand, and are very unlikely to impose in any way that materially threatens software libre.
Sleep tight.
All sorts of possibilities there for creative writing, don't you think?
Should be no end of fun for the kids, and I rather suspect that the first several lawyers' fees will end up paid by the district too.
What a surprise. Isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's platform strategy? That it's pretty much an all or nothing proposition?
Way-kewl feature list, but about like driving in the Bradshaws: more rock than road.
That's silly -- the two cases are obviously nothing alike.
You see, I'm right. That makes all the difference.
--
OK, fine -- the sad fact is that some people never quite see why "special pleading" is a fallacy.
All things considered, it's a whole lot safer (not to mention more profitable) to notify the black hats about vulnerabilities rather than the vendors or the public.
Gurrrk.
Put some more thought into this one. There are any number of things that are "unacceptable" that aren't bad enough to merit applying the might and majesty of the State's criminal justice system. By denying all social sanctions short of criminal prosecution, you create a society with the worst of both worlds: a plague of officers (lawyers) worse than what we have now, along with a degree of rudeness that would make the French recoil in horror.
Time was when being rude enough in public would get you tossed into the street by half of the men in the place. We solved that (and I'm not sure it was the wrong thing to do) by criminalizing the eviction as assault -- but now we have people carrying on loud cellphone conversations during movies.
Shunning and scorn aren't on the order of a punch in the nose -- don't deny us those as well.
The MPAA is asking for legislation regulating this technology and imposing mandatory controls on all implementations.
Of course, there are other things that "can penetrate cells and tissues, migrate through the body and brain and cause biochemical damage." Many of them occur in nature. Some of those (like buckyballs in smoke) are even nanoparticles.
The point being to put a stop to cases where the lawyers are the only ones who get paid.
It certainly wasn't meant to be funny.
The main reason is that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure #10 is basically a dead letter.
Counsel for the plaintiffs in a class-action suit may not receive any more than is actually distributed to the plaintiffs.
That's the classic scam: the defendents settle for $100 million, the plaintiffs' law firm get $95 million of it, $5 million is offered to the plaintiff class if they respond to request 20 pages of paperwork to apply for their $0.75 payout; a total of $120 thousand is actually distributed to the plaintiff class members and "their" lawyers pocket the balance.
Suggest it to your Congresscritters. The ABA and Trial Lawyers' Association will hate it, but if it ever sees daylight nobody will dare vote against it because (unlike a lot of tort reform) it doesn't take a dime from plaintiffs -- the ones they ABA and TLA use to justify their normal way of doing business.
I'm sure the various Bar Associations will backdate his disbarment.
After all, the malware business is one of those "ecosystems" that's wholly dependent on Microsoft. Only fair that MS should offer a little direction to their clients.
Apparently they still haven't figured out who holds the whip. Microsoft is about to educate them.
In other words, as long as MSWindows is off the table, so are all but the most popular applications.