So in my original post, what I was getting at is that with such resources, we wouldn't need to build shitty colonies in the clouds of venus. We could build giant orbital ones that would be way nicer inside.
Also, there's more than one route to 'strong' AI. Human neurons in a life support system, wired into computers is certainly a possibility. And since we already KNOW that the brain tissue can develop sentience, given the right conditions, it's at least plausible that such a "computer" would be capable of developing it as well.
At worst, one could cut the working brain of an adult humans out and wire it into the computers. Logically, it would work, assuming the life support was sophisticated enough to keep said brain alive. (which cannot be done today, I am aware, due to the fact that we couldn't stop infections)
One comment : self replicating robots don't necessarily need to have strong AI guiding them. We could still fully exploit the resources of the moon and build vast floating habitats without AI. Instead, the robots would be semi-automated...with billions of Chinese and Indians (and ok, USians too) slaving away behind computer consoles to "nanny" the bots past problems they encounter.
So now I am talking about a much lesser goal : robots sophisticated enough that they can do every manual task a human can do, and factories on the moon that can manufacture almost every part that the factory uses.
Examples of both these things already exist TODAY...I am saying a scaled up version of it will more than likely exist within 100 years.
Because if you do that, you can't use the mass of the planet itself. With self replicating robots, you are pretty soon going to have so many that in order to build more, you'll need to start eating into the cores of planets. That includes the earth.
Basically, after a few dozen cycles of exponential growth, the limit will be solid matter. There's plenty of energy coming from our star - but it takes matter to put out panels to absorb that energy. We'll need to start getting matter from deeper into moons and planets.
Hopefully, earth will be last on the teardown list - and we would use a small amount of the matter we got from tearing up the earth to make rotating habitats with enough internal surface area to archive the biosphere.
Of course, at a certain point in this process, human habitats would also no longer be needed. Human beings might still be "alive"...their brains stored in life support capsules, their minds linked into this vast civilization of wonders.
What would we do with such resources? For one, interstellar colonization will take a ridiculous amount of resources to do quickly. For another, if wormholes are possible, it will take stupendous amounts of mass-energy to generate them and keep them open.
While possible in theory, I think it is incredibly unlikely that humans will build any kind of colony on other planets. Simply put : the projected technological growth curve suggests that we will have self replicating robots (and possibly artificial intelligence smart enough to control them) within a century.
Why would we go to the hassle of creating compromise habitats on other planets (moon, mars, the rest) when we could simply place linear accelerators (aka railguns) to launch raw materials into orbit? Self-replicating factories on the moon would mine materials and manufacture more robots and parts. The finished bots as well as raw materials would be launched into orbit, to be used to manufacture gigantic rotating habitats.
The habitats would be MUCH posh-er than anything that could be made on a planet, with near perfect control of the internal environment.
Actually, I had a chance to test this. Before Army Basic Training, I spent hours on the videogame "America's Army", which has a level that is an accurate representation of the Fort Benning range. I remember it was pretty difficult to score 'expert' in order to be allowed to go to sniper training, which helped a lot in multiplayer.
Well, in real life, I found my training carried over. It took a few practice sessions to get used to the weapon, but pretty soon shooting the real m16 felt like "clicking" on targets with the mouse. I found that I could shoot very rapidly and accurately, and easily scored 38/40 hits on qualification day.
It was easier and I scored higher than in the video game, ironically. Kind of like how I found a real car is easier to drive than a Grand Theft Auto car if you are using a PC keyboard for control.
So the security on the ID badges themselves is meaningless. A plastic card with a color pattern is trivial to duplicate with today's technology. The team from the article could easily defeat that.
"We use separate access-control cards." - that's the real security. UNLESS those cards use a magnetic strip...then, umm, no...they could easily, easily be copied. The security breaching team would need an attractive female member or something in order to obtain access...you get the idea.
The USB stick mention was a malware idea...a windows rootkit that cannot be detected by whatever security is on those machines would work fine. This idea HAS worked by pen testing teams at credit unions and banks. I read about it here on slashdot. Clueless employees pick up the stick that says "family photos" on the sticker, plug it into their machine, and windows auto-installs the rootkit.
Despite your assertion that the IRS IT guys would detect it in 10 minutes, you realize that whatever IRS IT uses, it cannot generally detect a rootkit as it is not visible as a process.
Getting the data OUT from the compromised machine might be more difficult, however. If *I* were designing IRS IT security, I would make it impossible for computers that contain taxpayer files to access the internet. There would be two separate internal computer networks, one a "hot" network that can talk to the internet and the other that is isolated from the outside world.
But, I suspect the IRS doesn't do that...they probably use software running on windows boxes to achieve the same effect.
I found your reply very interesting and frank about the issue. Despite the above criticisms, you've convinced me. I'm used to the typical government office I have seen : outdated computers, slow as a snail procedures, fat slovenly employees who are rude. But, it sounds like even a well funded team of experts that tried to crack the IRS would probably end up going downtown in handcuffs.
Umm, I'm sure there are ways. See numerous movies for a method. Or buy a badge from a fired employee. I mean, since EVERY employee has an ID badge, they probably follow the same template. It would be the work of a few days to create a near-perfect fake. The "look" of the badge itself secures nothing, there are numerous websites out there explaining in great detail how to replicate virtually any badge or ID card.
The CODES on it are the only security : to pass those electronic locks, you would need a badge that has either an internal chip or a magnetic strips. Mag strips are trivial to copy. The internal RFID chips are the only secure thing on any of those badges.
But backing away from specific methods, since I am not a criminal, my main point is that it's the government. It can't possibly be as secure as you think it is, the government is generally incompetent.
My gut feel, upon reading your description, is that no-one is that good. I would be very interested to know if any teams like the one in TFA have actually tried to break the security at the IRS.
Possible holes : everyone seems fixated on those ID badges. Precisely what is the security on those? RFID, or is it a magnetic strip?
Magnetic strips can be copied. RFID chips are more difficult and take serious hacking.
Other simple tricks : are the PCs at the IRS running windows? Would a simple trick like the "drop a few USB dongles in the employee smoking area" work?
Finally, there's insider information. Somehow, I doubt the IRS pays people very well. There must be all kind of employees with IT jobs who could physically copy from computers containing millions of tax records.
Information is inherently far, far more difficult to secure than a physical item. I would be greatly surprised if the security were as airtight as you make it out to be.
What sort of calculations could possibly be worth the expense of building an early computer to do them with? That's one thing I have wondered about : these machines had about as much memory as a sheet of notebook paper, and were glacially slow at calculations. What kind of tasks could be worth the expense of building one?
Yes. And I'm not saying that isn't bad : I'm just saying that the kid isn't getting significantly worse "justice" than our own citizens would receive. Don't commit crimes in the U.S., and make sure you are rich and white with a good lawyer if you do commit a crime, or are falsely accused. The point is, if the kid had done the same crime within U.S. borders, and there was a video tape, he'd get 20 years to life. Death row if someone was killed by a landmine.
Let me make myself more clear : *I* think this kid "should" be rehabilitated back into society.
That isn't the issue.
I am ALSO saying that the reality of the American criminal justice system is that no kid of age 15 who plants landmines would be rehabilitated. Fair trial or not, the person committing the crime does the time. And planting a bomb that kills anyone who steps on it is very major crime. Odds are, the kid helped kill or maim someone for life. In most American states, kids over 14 can be tried as an adult if their crime was serious.
NONE of this is "FAIR" : I am saying, however, that even if the kid DID get the fair trial he deserves as an American citizen, he would still be locked up.
If you want things to be different, you need to change massive parts of the American criminal justice system. Jury trials should be abolished and replaced with panels like they use in Sweden. The whole concept of prison needs to be changed, and 90% of the current prison population released following rehabilitation. Parts of the American constitution needs to be rewritten, and most of the court procedures simplified to resemble those used by certain European courts.
Obviously, that isn't happening. It's like Microsoft deciding to wipe the slate clean and write Windows from scratch, with no backwards compatibility. Sure, you'd get a vastly superior result in the end, but the transition costs would be too high.
Among other things, reforms would put at least 70% of the lawyers practicing today (over 500,000 people) out of work. Courts would be places of justice and speedy, simple procedures. The quality of a lawyer and the arcane knowledge they have would be irrelevant.
You could try. And, on one level, I AGREE with you. I'm not saying it's fair : I'm just saying that even if this kid had constitutional rights, the outcome would be the same.
I mean, "brainwashed" is a pretty broad term. Had the kids who committed one of the various school shootings been captured, they would probably try to argue that they had been "brainwashed" by playing violent video games and from being abused by their classmates. And, from an objective reality standpoint, if you had the "video camera of God" to follow the kids around in their life, you might find that the kids were telling the truth.
I bet the kids who committed the Columbine massacre were treated horribly by their classmates.
And it wouldn't change anything : jury would have still sent them to death row.
Ok, let me rephrase the "should" : from a MORAL perspective, maybe he should be punished differently. I am saying, however, if he were a rich, white American 15 year old with an expert lawyer defending him and a fair trial...
He would be tried as an adult for an act of terrorism (planting landmines) and receive at least a 20 year sentence. No parole.
I'm only saying that even if he got a fair trial it wouldn't help : we would punish an American kid who planted a series of bombs, each containing a plastic explosive charge, that kill or maim anyone who steps on them.
I am not talking about that. Read the wiki article : they have him ON VIDEOTAPE planting landmines in a sovereign country. That's a crime against humanity, period. He should be locked up for most of his life for this crime.
In LEGAL terms it doesn't change anything. If you had been arrest in the U.S. for a crime, and tortured, even if you produced evidence of the torture you'd still stay in jail. Depending on the scenario, you might be moved to a different prison, or financially compensated in an extreme situation.
We don't routinely use them. And, they are a powerful weapon in the right circumstances. Nevertheless, if you or I or ANYONE, just about, in the U.S. went around and planted a dozen landmines anywhere in the country, we'd go to jail. I'm not saying the rules aren't a touch hypocritical, or that it is fair that the kid was tortured. I'm just saying that even if he got a perfectly fair trial, he'd still be convicted and stay in prison.
I felt sympathetic until I read the wikipedia entry on this kid in detail. They have him on videotape planting landmines.
If you or I or anyone in the United States went and planted landmines, and there was a videotape of the crime, we would go to jail for a very long time. Fair trial or not.
Whether Khadr was tortured or not changes nothing : he still committed the crime.
The videotape was not obtained using evidence from torture, either.
Nevertheless, I do agree he was abused. The kid probably knows nothing, and they tortured the heck out of him anyways.
Why doesn't microsoft just announce an XP extension program that lasts as long as people are willing to PAY for updates.
That is, after a certain date, Microsoft would continue to allow you to update XP, you would just have to pay $20 a year or something for the privilege.
With this money, they would port over Direct X 10 and make other essential changes so that XP could be used until at least 2015.
I wish the results were that antimatter falls upwards. If that were true, while it would have no practical use in the near future, it would be a hole in physics that our far descendants could exploit.
-----There are only two-three competitors, intel and AMD and sort-of VIA. They would cross license the same TPM core. Only these companies would be allowed to add entries to the public key database. Game companies would wait until all new x86 CPUs sold for at least 2 years had a TPM module. By this point, if you had an older chip without one, you could upgrade for less than $50. At this point, the games would be TPM only.
" So the game software on the disc is encrypted with the same key world wide? "
---No. The game software on the disc would include base libraries and all graphical/sound ect resources. The core executable, including the game's 3d engine, would have to be downloaded from a server run by a game company. (or more likely, run by a reliable third party). That server would encrypt the executable using the public key for the TPM in your PC. Your TPM would decrypt the executable and place it in a protected region of memory that no software but low level OS components can access.
---Enough bits would be used that a brute force approach to crack the encryption would take longer than the heat death of the universe.
This could be a GOOD thing. Those that create software would finally have a way of reliably preventing it from being copied, after nearly 30 years. It would NOT prevent you from writing your own software, or from using Linux, or anything crazy like that. Just you wouldn't be able to access the memory space of 'trusted' code or run said code on machines without a working TPM.
Of COURSE it won't be totally uncrackable : this system sounds extremely similar to the systems in game consoles. But, it could be made secure enough that breaking this system would require a hardware mod-chip. If Intel were to go further and include the TPM in the processor die, it would become nearly impossible.
I'm not entirely sure how TPM works, but the logical way to do it would be that every single TPM would have a unique private key, not found in any database on earth except for inside the hardware of the chip itself. Only this key would be capable of decrypting code so that a piece of software can run. Games would include a downloaded component, although the majority of the game software would still be using an optical disk, and that component would include a portion encrypted using the public key for your PC's TPM.
A secure third party would have the database of public keys, supplied by the manufacturer of the TPM chips. The database would be correlated with identifying information about every PC. This is so that you could not use hacked software to supply the game company's servers with a public key that you have the private key to.
PC games would become as armored against piracy as console games. If the Vista fiasco is dealt with as well, this could lead to a renaissance in PC gaming.
A quick counter-example : if the society had some technical means of recording every person's actions, all the time, no matter what, then your argument would go out the window. With a perfect record of a person's every move, it would be trivial to establish who committed any given crime.
Incorrect. It is true that in most circumstances FTL travel without any restrictions would allow for time travel. However, in the case of wormholes, the Chronology Protection Conjecture (coined by Hawking no less) would prevent setting up wormholes in such a way to allow for time travel. However, instantaneous links across space would be allowed (and would be incredibly useful). Wormhole mouths cannot be moved any faster than the speed of light, however. (so you would have to wait that long to initially 'set up' an interstellar civilization linked by wormholes)
It is extremely frustrating to be a PC gamer with this kind of crap. We gamers have to spend around $1000 or more for a decent gaming PC and we purchase quite capable hardware. Yet, we can't make full use of quad core machines with multiple graphics cards due to crappy drivers from Nvidia. We can't play our games in stereoscopic 3d because Nvidia won't spend a paltry few bucks to support it better. Nvidia makes the best graphics cards in terms of performance, yet their drivers AND their refusal to open source anything cripple them.
Creative makes the best gaming sound cards in terms of performance, but their shitty software and the inability to download decent drivers when you lose the install cd cripple them as well. Creative's idiocy can be the weak link in a $10,000 sound system that you want to use for PC games.
And then, Microsoft. DirectX 10 is pretty spiffy...but they chain it to an OS that is NOT suitable for high performance real time games.
All three of these people could serve gamers MUCH better than they do, without spending any more money.
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So in my original post, what I was getting at is that with such resources, we wouldn't need to build shitty colonies in the clouds of venus. We could build giant orbital ones that would be way nicer inside.
Also, there's more than one route to 'strong' AI. Human neurons in a life support system, wired into computers is certainly a possibility. And since we already KNOW that the brain tissue can develop sentience, given the right conditions, it's at least plausible that such a "computer" would be capable of developing it as well.
At worst, one could cut the working brain of an adult humans out and wire it into the computers. Logically, it would work, assuming the life support was sophisticated enough to keep said brain alive. (which cannot be done today, I am aware, due to the fact that we couldn't stop infections)
One comment : self replicating robots don't necessarily need to have strong AI guiding them. We could still fully exploit the resources of the moon and build vast floating habitats without AI. Instead, the robots would be semi-automated...with billions of Chinese and Indians (and ok, USians too) slaving away behind computer consoles to "nanny" the bots past problems they encounter.
So now I am talking about a much lesser goal : robots sophisticated enough that they can do every manual task a human can do, and factories on the moon that can manufacture almost every part that the factory uses.
Examples of both these things already exist TODAY...I am saying a scaled up version of it will more than likely exist within 100 years.
Go look in the mirror.
Sentient, self replicating robots exist.
Go open a history book to 1908. Tell me I'm wrong.
Because if you do that, you can't use the mass of the planet itself. With self replicating robots, you are pretty soon going to have so many that in order to build more, you'll need to start eating into the cores of planets. That includes the earth.
Basically, after a few dozen cycles of exponential growth, the limit will be solid matter. There's plenty of energy coming from our star - but it takes matter to put out panels to absorb that energy. We'll need to start getting matter from deeper into moons and planets.
Hopefully, earth will be last on the teardown list - and we would use a small amount of the matter we got from tearing up the earth to make rotating habitats with enough internal surface area to archive the biosphere.
Of course, at a certain point in this process, human habitats would also no longer be needed. Human beings might still be "alive"...their brains stored in life support capsules, their minds linked into this vast civilization of wonders.
What would we do with such resources? For one, interstellar colonization will take a ridiculous amount of resources to do quickly. For another, if wormholes are possible, it will take stupendous amounts of mass-energy to generate them and keep them open.
While possible in theory, I think it is incredibly unlikely that humans will build any kind of colony on other planets. Simply put : the projected technological growth curve suggests that we will have self replicating robots (and possibly artificial intelligence smart enough to control them) within a century.
Why would we go to the hassle of creating compromise habitats on other planets (moon, mars, the rest) when we could simply place linear accelerators (aka railguns) to launch raw materials into orbit? Self-replicating factories on the moon would mine materials and manufacture more robots and parts. The finished bots as well as raw materials would be launched into orbit, to be used to manufacture gigantic rotating habitats.
The habitats would be MUCH posh-er than anything that could be made on a planet, with near perfect control of the internal environment.
Actually, I had a chance to test this. Before Army Basic Training, I spent hours on the videogame "America's Army", which has a level that is an accurate representation of the Fort Benning range. I remember it was pretty difficult to score 'expert' in order to be allowed to go to sniper training, which helped a lot in multiplayer.
Well, in real life, I found my training carried over. It took a few practice sessions to get used to the weapon, but pretty soon shooting the real m16 felt like "clicking" on targets with the mouse. I found that I could shoot very rapidly and accurately, and easily scored 38/40 hits on qualification day.
It was easier and I scored higher than in the video game, ironically. Kind of like how I found a real car is easier to drive than a Grand Theft Auto car if you are using a PC keyboard for control.
So the security on the ID badges themselves is meaningless. A plastic card with a color pattern is trivial to duplicate with today's technology. The team from the article could easily defeat that.
"We use separate access-control cards." - that's the real security. UNLESS those cards use a magnetic strip...then, umm, no...they could easily, easily be copied. The security breaching team would need an attractive female member or something in order to obtain access...you get the idea.
The USB stick mention was a malware idea...a windows rootkit that cannot be detected by whatever security is on those machines would work fine. This idea HAS worked by pen testing teams at credit unions and banks. I read about it here on slashdot. Clueless employees pick up the stick that says "family photos" on the sticker, plug it into their machine, and windows auto-installs the rootkit.
Despite your assertion that the IRS IT guys would detect it in 10 minutes, you realize that whatever IRS IT uses, it cannot generally detect a rootkit as it is not visible as a process.
Getting the data OUT from the compromised machine might be more difficult, however. If *I* were designing IRS IT security, I would make it impossible for computers that contain taxpayer files to access the internet. There would be two separate internal computer networks, one a "hot" network that can talk to the internet and the other that is isolated from the outside world.
But, I suspect the IRS doesn't do that...they probably use software running on windows boxes to achieve the same effect.
I found your reply very interesting and frank about the issue. Despite the above criticisms, you've convinced me. I'm used to the typical government office I have seen : outdated computers, slow as a snail procedures, fat slovenly employees who are rude. But, it sounds like even a well funded team of experts that tried to crack the IRS would probably end up going downtown in handcuffs.
Umm, I'm sure there are ways. See numerous movies for a method. Or buy a badge from a fired employee. I mean, since EVERY employee has an ID badge, they probably follow the same template. It would be the work of a few days to create a near-perfect fake. The "look" of the badge itself secures nothing, there are numerous websites out there explaining in great detail how to replicate virtually any badge or ID card.
The CODES on it are the only security : to pass those electronic locks, you would need a badge that has either an internal chip or a magnetic strips. Mag strips are trivial to copy. The internal RFID chips are the only secure thing on any of those badges.
But backing away from specific methods, since I am not a criminal, my main point is that it's the government. It can't possibly be as secure as you think it is, the government is generally incompetent.
My gut feel, upon reading your description, is that no-one is that good. I would be very interested to know if any teams like the one in TFA have actually tried to break the security at the IRS.
Possible holes : everyone seems fixated on those ID badges. Precisely what is the security on those? RFID, or is it a magnetic strip?
Magnetic strips can be copied. RFID chips are more difficult and take serious hacking.
Other simple tricks : are the PCs at the IRS running windows? Would a simple trick like the "drop a few USB dongles in the employee smoking area" work?
Finally, there's insider information. Somehow, I doubt the IRS pays people very well. There must be all kind of employees with IT jobs who could physically copy from computers containing millions of tax records.
Information is inherently far, far more difficult to secure than a physical item. I would be greatly surprised if the security were as airtight as you make it out to be.
What sort of calculations could possibly be worth the expense of building an early computer to do them with? That's one thing I have wondered about : these machines had about as much memory as a sheet of notebook paper, and were glacially slow at calculations. What kind of tasks could be worth the expense of building one?
Yes. And I'm not saying that isn't bad : I'm just saying that the kid isn't getting significantly worse "justice" than our own citizens would receive. Don't commit crimes in the U.S., and make sure you are rich and white with a good lawyer if you do commit a crime, or are falsely accused. The point is, if the kid had done the same crime within U.S. borders, and there was a video tape, he'd get 20 years to life. Death row if someone was killed by a landmine.
Let me make myself more clear : *I* think this kid "should" be rehabilitated back into society.
That isn't the issue.
I am ALSO saying that the reality of the American criminal justice system is that no kid of age 15 who plants landmines would be rehabilitated. Fair trial or not, the person committing the crime does the time. And planting a bomb that kills anyone who steps on it is very major crime. Odds are, the kid helped kill or maim someone for life. In most American states, kids over 14 can be tried as an adult if their crime was serious.
NONE of this is "FAIR" : I am saying, however, that even if the kid DID get the fair trial he deserves as an American citizen, he would still be locked up.
If you want things to be different, you need to change massive parts of the American criminal justice system. Jury trials should be abolished and replaced with panels like they use in Sweden. The whole concept of prison needs to be changed, and 90% of the current prison population released following rehabilitation. Parts of the American constitution needs to be rewritten, and most of the court procedures simplified to resemble those used by certain European courts.
Obviously, that isn't happening. It's like Microsoft deciding to wipe the slate clean and write Windows from scratch, with no backwards compatibility. Sure, you'd get a vastly superior result in the end, but the transition costs would be too high.
Among other things, reforms would put at least 70% of the lawyers practicing today (over 500,000 people) out of work. Courts would be places of justice and speedy, simple procedures. The quality of a lawyer and the arcane knowledge they have would be irrelevant.
You could try. And, on one level, I AGREE with you. I'm not saying it's fair : I'm just saying that even if this kid had constitutional rights, the outcome would be the same.
I mean, "brainwashed" is a pretty broad term. Had the kids who committed one of the various school shootings been captured, they would probably try to argue that they had been "brainwashed" by playing violent video games and from being abused by their classmates. And, from an objective reality standpoint, if you had the "video camera of God" to follow the kids around in their life, you might find that the kids were telling the truth.
I bet the kids who committed the Columbine massacre were treated horribly by their classmates.
And it wouldn't change anything : jury would have still sent them to death row.
Ok, let me rephrase the "should" : from a MORAL perspective, maybe he should be punished differently. I am saying, however, if he were a rich, white American 15 year old with an expert lawyer defending him and a fair trial...
He would be tried as an adult for an act of terrorism (planting landmines) and receive at least a 20 year sentence. No parole.
I'm only saying that even if he got a fair trial it wouldn't help : we would punish an American kid who planted a series of bombs, each containing a plastic explosive charge, that kill or maim anyone who steps on them.
I am not talking about that. Read the wiki article : they have him ON VIDEOTAPE planting landmines in a sovereign country. That's a crime against humanity, period. He should be locked up for most of his life for this crime.
In LEGAL terms it doesn't change anything. If you had been arrest in the U.S. for a crime, and tortured, even if you produced evidence of the torture you'd still stay in jail. Depending on the scenario, you might be moved to a different prison, or financially compensated in an extreme situation.
We don't routinely use them. And, they are a powerful weapon in the right circumstances. Nevertheless, if you or I or ANYONE, just about, in the U.S. went around and planted a dozen landmines anywhere in the country, we'd go to jail. I'm not saying the rules aren't a touch hypocritical, or that it is fair that the kid was tortured. I'm just saying that even if he got a perfectly fair trial, he'd still be convicted and stay in prison.
I felt sympathetic until I read the wikipedia entry on this kid in detail. They have him on videotape planting landmines.
If you or I or anyone in the United States went and planted landmines, and there was a videotape of the crime, we would go to jail for a very long time. Fair trial or not.
Whether Khadr was tortured or not changes nothing : he still committed the crime.
The videotape was not obtained using evidence from torture, either.
Nevertheless, I do agree he was abused. The kid probably knows nothing, and they tortured the heck out of him anyways.
Why doesn't microsoft just announce an XP extension program that lasts as long as people are willing to PAY for updates.
That is, after a certain date, Microsoft would continue to allow you to update XP, you would just have to pay $20 a year or something for the privilege.
With this money, they would port over Direct X 10 and make other essential changes so that XP could be used until at least 2015.
I wish the results were that antimatter falls upwards. If that were true, while it would have no practical use in the near future, it would be a hole in physics that our far descendants could exploit.
-----There are only two-three competitors, intel and AMD and sort-of VIA. They would cross license the same TPM core. Only these companies would be allowed to add entries to the public key database. Game companies would wait until all new x86 CPUs sold for at least 2 years had a TPM module. By this point, if you had an older chip without one, you could upgrade for less than $50. At this point, the games would be TPM only.
" So the game software on the disc is encrypted
with the same key world wide? "
---No. The game software on the disc would include base libraries and all graphical/sound ect resources. The core executable, including the game's 3d engine, would have to be downloaded from a server run by a game company. (or more likely, run by a reliable third party). That server would encrypt the executable using the public key for the TPM in your PC. Your TPM would decrypt the executable and place it in a protected region of memory that no software but low level OS components can access.
---Enough bits would be used that a brute force approach to crack the encryption would take longer than the heat death of the universe.
----Console game protection stops most copying
This could be a GOOD thing. Those that create software would finally have a way of reliably preventing it from being copied, after nearly 30 years. It would NOT prevent you from writing your own software, or from using Linux, or anything crazy like that. Just you wouldn't be able to access the memory space of 'trusted' code or run said code on machines without a working TPM.
Of COURSE it won't be totally uncrackable : this system sounds extremely similar to the systems in game consoles. But, it could be made secure enough that breaking this system would require a hardware mod-chip. If Intel were to go further and include the TPM in the processor die, it would become nearly impossible.
I'm not entirely sure how TPM works, but the logical way to do it would be that every single TPM would have a unique private key, not found in any database on earth except for inside the hardware of the chip itself. Only this key would be capable of decrypting code so that a piece of software can run. Games would include a downloaded component, although the majority of the game software would still be using an optical disk, and that component would include a portion encrypted using the public key for your PC's TPM.
A secure third party would have the database of public keys, supplied by the manufacturer of the TPM chips. The database would be correlated with identifying information about every PC. This is so that you could not use hacked software to supply the game company's servers with a public key that you have the private key to.
PC games would become as armored against piracy as console games. If the Vista fiasco is dealt with as well, this could lead to a renaissance in PC gaming.
A quick counter-example : if the society had some technical means of recording every person's actions, all the time, no matter what, then your argument would go out the window. With a perfect record of a person's every move, it would be trivial to establish who committed any given crime.
Incorrect. It is true that in most circumstances FTL travel without any restrictions would allow for time travel. However, in the case of wormholes, the Chronology Protection Conjecture (coined by Hawking no less) would prevent setting up wormholes in such a way to allow for time travel. However, instantaneous links across space would be allowed (and would be incredibly useful). Wormhole mouths cannot be moved any faster than the speed of light, however. (so you would have to wait that long to initially 'set up' an interstellar civilization linked by wormholes)
It is extremely frustrating to be a PC gamer with this kind of crap. We gamers have to spend around $1000 or more for a decent gaming PC and we purchase quite capable hardware. Yet, we can't make full use of quad core machines with multiple graphics cards due to crappy drivers from Nvidia. We can't play our games in stereoscopic 3d because Nvidia won't spend a paltry few bucks to support it better. Nvidia makes the best graphics cards in terms of performance, yet their drivers AND their refusal to open source anything cripple them.
Creative makes the best gaming sound cards in terms of performance, but their shitty software and the inability to download decent drivers when you lose the install cd cripple them as well. Creative's idiocy can be the weak link in a $10,000 sound system that you want to use for PC games.
And then, Microsoft. DirectX 10 is pretty spiffy...but they chain it to an OS that is NOT suitable for high performance real time games.
All three of these people could serve gamers MUCH better than they do, without spending any more money.