Who the hell thought it would be a good idea.. to make a pie out of meat The British did. We invented the pie in it's modern form ; our innovation was to add fat to the crust, which was previously used as a kind of disposable container to keep the gravy moist in a baked meat stew.
Depends on the fighting style. Styles arranged around lunges and thrusts like western fencing don't need weight, or even much in the way of stiffness. To quote a famous courtesan, "It takes less than a pound of pressure to cut skin.". And armour typically has chinks that can be exploited by a skilled opponent, it's mostly good versus unskilled opponents - the sort who rely on bludgeoning weapons and heavy slashing blades.
They revoke keys by not using them to encrypt session keys anymore on new disks.
The disk holds the "master" key for it's own content, encrypted over and over with keys issued to player manufacturers. The player can only decrypt copies of the master key that it has player keys for. If a player key is revoked, the disk authoring software just stops writing key blocks for that player key to new masters.
Players with revoked keys can still play old disks pressed before their key was revoked, just not anything after.
If you wanted, you could design a system where the player would "self-destruct" on insertion of a disk with a kill-code encrypted with its player key, but you just know that if such a thing was possible, Sony would start printing disks that killed the hardware of it's competitors and call it a "tragic technical error that could never happen with it's superior hardware designs."
Now take those out-of-time backwards people, and propose to them the notion that they cannot legally publicly perform a traditional, popular, well-known song without paying someone for the privilege. They'd probably all consider that asinine and offensive.
Here's a thought...
Disk caches can be pretty big. Sometimes, when I wind back to the beginning of a track to hear it again, that entire track will be played from cache. Was that an illegal copy I just played?
don't know that that's fair. Sounds fair to me ; Apple has always been about lock-in. Appletalk networks, non standard floppy drives, one button mice, discontinuing support for users who upgrade their own memory, no support for managing your own music collection, all the way through to bricking the hardware of people who "upgrade" their own phones. On the one hand, this does make for a more stable and seamless experience. On the other hand, it's Apples' way or the highway.
Now, given the contract they signed, the people who have been burned by this should really have expected nothing less. If they're the sort of people who like hardware which they can tinker with, more fool them ; they have subsidised the activities of a company who has no interest in giving them that access. They allowed their style urge to override their inner geek and got burned in the pocketbook for their trouble. Hell, even Windows Mobile is more open.
Bug finding is a valuable contribution to the value of any product. My current testing policy is to find the biggest pain in the ass in my user community - whoever has the largest bug count from the previous release. And give them the first beta. Every bug squashed improves the product for everyone. The cumulative value can't be ignored.
If you find bugs in any software, it's in your interest to report them, because you obviously want them fixed. If it's a commercial product, you may even be able to get more instant satisfaction. OTOH, for open-source products, I've had an instance where I was able to saunter into an IRC channel, mention a particular bug, and have the lead developer upload a new version to my server within 10 minutes, because he recognised the value of having a technically able user put his product through heavy stress.
Don't just swear and cuss about bugs in OpenOffice. Report them, send them copies of the files that break it. You might get your bug fixed. For free, in the next version. When did you last get that sort of deal from Microsoft?
If EEStor pans out, that could be just the ticket. A 52 kWh device could hold 4 days worth of domestic use for those cloudy spots. And since that's a device that weighs 400 pounds and is designed to fit in a car, there's no reason a house couldn't have more than one.
If it works, the auto industry will prime the pump of mass-production on these things, and the domestic applications can't be far behind.
My VB coding improved immeasurably after I learned C#. And I'm not just talking VB6, I'm talking VB3 as well.
Learning a new language can teach you to do so much better in your old ones. I am *still* more productive, if you want something fast, in VB6 than I am in Java or C#. I can knock together a small cheap GUI very fast.
Of course, sometimes you do run into the limits of your chosen platform. VB6 strings are all 2-byte unicode internally, which makes dealing with UTF-8 a real pain. Then the ugly kludges start coming out.
nLite will solve your problem. With it you can slipstream a full Windows installation disk, plus patches, plus any drivers that you would otherwise need to install. You can even remove chunks that you don't need.
I do take issue with some of your points though. Your knowledge of the DOS/Win32 operating environment is no doubt something that you have accumulated slowly over a number of years. I too found the unix command line unfamiliar and painful when I first used it. I'm still a novice, but I now find it more productive than cmd.exe by an order of magnitude.
I found installing and using Gentoo to be a great learning experience. The lack of a graphical installer (at the time) forces you to use the command line for everything. If you follow the install manual "blind" you pick up a few things. If you go through it reading the manuals for every command you use, you pick up a lot of things. I didn't get along with the graphical distributions at the time, I couldn't find any of the options I wanted. They have improved, but my TV server still runs Gentoo since it was the only distribution that supported my hardware at the time.
Your old hardware is much more likely to be supported than newer hardware.
As for games? I'm not going to chime in with the rest of the people in this thread and claim you can use Linux to run them all. I like to play games. I intend to keep running Windows until I give them up (which may well happen, they innovate less every year), or until Linux versions are commonplace.
As a software developer, I also can't do without Windows. I depend on Windows, because it's where most of my code lives. But I love open-source. I'm lucky enough to be doing a job where I don't have to avoid it - I can use what I like. And if I have to pick and choose, using OSS tools are just overall much less hassle. I don't have to requisition them, justify purchase costs, fill in forms, wait thirteen weeks for approval. If they have bugs, I don't have to contact the supplier and engage in complex political games about who's fault it is, I just fix them. OSS for me is just far more agile and productive.
One of our suppliers has a large infrastructure application. We are defining standards for communication.
We wrote the standard in the best way possible according to our parent standards body, which provides a meta-standard which should make messages comprehensible even if you haven't read the standard. Our supplier pouted, sulked, whined, and eventually we were forced from above to rewrite them to comply as closely as possible with the existing API, which contains horrible magic numbers and revolting anachronisms.
It's really strange how standards are weakened by money.
If it's an integrity check, they could just use a CRC and stick to the content on the disk. Or SHA1, if they wanted to be really paranoid about integrity.
Hashing the serial number of the hardware with an unknown key is lockout, no alternate explanation.
He's talking about the ageing population of Western nations. The reduced birth rates and increased longevity means that an increasing fraction of the population are at an age where they are retired from work and thus no longer contributing to the economy. Worse still (from an economic viewpoint) this segment also costs the economy large amounts of welfare.
While automation is a wonderful thing, there are some things that are still the province of humans. Personal care is one of those things. But with a reduced number of young people participating in the economy, there are a reduced number of potential carers. With a reduced amount of production, there is less real wealth to provide for this care. A pension fund doesn't mean squat - it's just money. Without actual production, money is worthless.
Japan is well aware of this problem and is trying to compensate with things like robotic beds for the elderly.
ATI have historically always had excellent features on their cards for supporting media playback. The downside was that accessing them in Linux has always been much harder than using the equivalent features on nvidia hardware.
If these specs allow a good stable XVMC driver to be written for ATI hardware, ATI could become the top choice for Linux media centre boxes.
Presumably because it's a lot easier to abuse Asian children in, like, China? Perhaps this goon got himself transferred to China to sate his lust for Chinese kids?
... despite all the hardwired ports in the building, the central network rack was getting a little claustrophobic and all the ports were taken.
The CEO bought one of those new-fangled 11b wireless cards and thought it was so great that everyone using a laptop should have one, including the development department. The majority of the company were laptop users at the time.
Within a week I had subverted this policy and snuck into the network cabinet to rewire the port under my desk. A the time we were using Visual SourceSafe. VSS sulks and corrupts it's repository at the slightest hint of network dropout. Not to mention the awful sloth of deploying software to, well, anywhere.
People are so used to switched networks that they never notice how chattery Windows boxes are. Move from 100MBit wired switched ports to a 10MBit wireless hub for a whole room of terminal bandwidth addicts (software developers) and you soon notice the difference. Now, there is a lot more wireless bandwidth to go around these days, but it's still a hub.
This was the same CEO who managed to knock our customer support website off the net by getting infected with Code Red and saturating our measly 128Kbit bonded ISDN line with spam and infection traffic.
I knocked this one around with a colleague a bit after posting. We thought that an old phone plugged into its charger permanently would make an excellent local node, with your phone only configured to peer with it.
The protocol could make allowances for battery levels (as pointed out elsewhere on the thread), and if you were plugged in you should be fair game.
I also thought that it would make a great, cheap, ad-hoc communications node for expeditions into areas with no coverage. Even if you can't persuade someone to sit around being a peer between you and civilization, you could carry some very minimal "portable cell towers" consisting of a phone and maybe an extended aerial. Stick them up a tree and you're good to go - you can text pretty much all you want. If you want to add talk time, bolt on a battery and for those extended trips, a solar panel. This is presumably something they have considered in the African trials.
By and large, servers are well maintained. And people seldom use them as their desktop machine. And server admins are usually too savvy to infect themselves with a trojan horse bundled in an email. And when they do get pwned, people notice because their infrastructure starts suffering.
With that in mind, the Storm Worm specifically doesn't infect Windows 2003 server - a deliberate decision on the part of the author, I'm sure. If you upset enough businesses, they'll devote enough money to the problem to fix it.
The problem is desktops. Specifically, Windows desktops in the hands of the technically illiterate.
Just connecting an unpatched Windows box directly to the internet is enough. It belongs to a hacker in very short order. Even if you patch it up, the sheer number of services running on your average Windows box that listen to network ports is worrying. Never mind being on the internet, with the number of laptops moving in and out of corporate networks, it's not even safe "indoors". And it's hard to turn a lot of this stuff off without adversely affecting it's functionality.
I wouldn't even trust a general-purpose Linux installation on the internet ; it's just too difficult to track all the potential vulnerabilities. I keep a dedicated firewall running in my router, and the only services it runs are network translation, and a secure shell for administration, which reduces the target footprint to two highly secured services which were designed to be secure in the first place.
Windows users don't help, they are daft enough to infest themselves with everything going. Even if they are not quite daft enough to double-click executable attachments, they will download all the worst sorts of "Freeware" and click straight through the license agreement. Not only are they pwned, they actually agreed to it!
A case in point - one of our accountants was mailing around an executable Flash package (some kind of novelty). I deleted it instantly, and made a point of telling her that it could have been anything and done anything. Ten minutes later, I mailed her a VB executable decorated with the Flash icon. All it did was plonk up a dialogue box which said "Erasing hard drive". Somewhat predictably, she executed it. I almost pretended that I didn't send it and that it was a virus that emailed it.
The root problem is the design of Windows and windows applications.
1) Double-click to open OR execute
This isn't all Windows fault. People don't make a distinction between running a program and opening a file, because there isn't one in terms of the user action required. I'm willing to bet that the average user doesn't even understand the difference. If you had to perform a different action from double-click to execute programs, viral infection rates would drop enormously. You could still keep the d-click to open files with their registered program, just stop running programs themselves by this method. You've not lost the convenience of file-association. Just put "execute" on the context menu and make it a non-default action.
2) No executable flag in filesystems.
In Linux, a file isn't executable until you grant it permission to be so. If you had to open the permissions dialogue and check the "executable" box, it would hammer home the difference between executables and mere content. And by making it something more than a casual action, it would reduce the "impulse" running of many of these things, where people have their caution overridden momentarily by the promise of naked flesh or other inducements. Heck, you can even have whole filesystems that refuse to execute files - download all internet content into one of these and before you run it, you'll have to unpack it, move it to an executable folder, and check it's execute bit. This would seem too much work for the average Joe for a quick glimpse at Jessica Alba with no bra...
Money has always been about trust. The trust used to come from the actual exchange of rare or difficult to obtain materials. This is still the case, with the modifier that the labour cost of producing money tokens is now much lower than it used to be. Electronic money is the next logical step - it reduces the exchanged tokens to a pattern of electrons in a wire, and a few photons in a fibre.
This doesn't devalue the currency. It wasn't worth anything except the value of the trust embodied in it anyway.
If people cease to trust a means of payment, they will stop using it. If people stop using a means of payment, it becomes worthless, even if it's made of solid gold tablets encrusted with diamonds.
Read the notes - "I promise to pay the bearer". If you don't trust that promise, your money is worth nothing.
Acknowledged, it would be very difficult for people to stop using national currencies, because so much of our social system is based on their use. Going back to barter would be crippling for our economy, causing enormous disruption.
There is a case that this is the real cause of the Iraq war. Saddam was insisting that his country started trading its oil exclusively for Euro. A large part of the value of the US dollar is that it is used internationally as the de-facto oil trading currency. Petrodollars are like a huge interest free loan to the entire US economy. If people start trading oil in Euro, they are going to want to realise value for their surplus stocks of US currency. The big question is of course, just what does the US have that would provide that value? They've shipped all their manufacturing to China, they don't have any material resources which the rest of the world lacks, and their labour pool is too expensive. They do have a surplus of food, but that all gets sold anyway. The only remaining asset the US has that is of any interest is land. Perhaps they invaded Iraq to forestall an invasion (of purchase) by China......
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the fighting style. Styles arranged around lunges and thrusts like western fencing don't need weight, or even much in the way of stiffness. To quote a famous courtesan, "It takes less than a pound of pressure to cut skin.". And armour typically has chinks that can be exploited by a skilled opponent, it's mostly good versus unskilled opponents - the sort who rely on bludgeoning weapons and heavy slashing blades.
They revoke keys by not using them to encrypt session keys anymore on new disks.
The disk holds the "master" key for it's own content, encrypted over and over with keys issued to player manufacturers. The player can only decrypt copies of the master key that it has player keys for. If a player key is revoked, the disk authoring software just stops writing key blocks for that player key to new masters.
Players with revoked keys can still play old disks pressed before their key was revoked, just not anything after.
If you wanted, you could design a system where the player would "self-destruct" on insertion of a disk with a kill-code encrypted with its player key, but you just know that if such a thing was possible, Sony would start printing disks that killed the hardware of it's competitors and call it a "tragic technical error that could never happen with it's superior hardware designs."
Now take those out-of-time backwards people, and propose to them the notion that they cannot legally publicly perform a traditional, popular, well-known song without paying someone for the privilege. They'd probably all consider that asinine and offensive.
Here's a thought...
Disk caches can be pretty big. Sometimes, when I wind back to the beginning of a track to hear it again, that entire track will be played from cache. Was that an illegal copy I just played?
Now, given the contract they signed, the people who have been burned by this should really have expected nothing less. If they're the sort of people who like hardware which they can tinker with, more fool them ; they have subsidised the activities of a company who has no interest in giving them that access. They allowed their style urge to override their inner geek and got burned in the pocketbook for their trouble. Hell, even Windows Mobile is more open.
Reminds me of an episode of TNG....
...?"
Troi asks the replicator for something containing an disgustingly indulgent amount of chocolate
"This station is configured to produce foodstuffs that fit within healthy nutritional parameters. Are you sure you want to
The replicators on the Enterprise-D obviously run LCARS Vista....
Aye, mine was made in Scotland..... from girders
Dude, your manners suck, are you American?
... your payment is a free office suite.
Bug finding is a valuable contribution to the value of any product. My current testing policy is to find the biggest pain in the ass in my user community - whoever has the largest bug count from the previous release. And give them the first beta. Every bug squashed improves the product for everyone. The cumulative value can't be ignored.
If you find bugs in any software, it's in your interest to report them, because you obviously want them fixed. If it's a commercial product, you may even be able to get more instant satisfaction. OTOH, for open-source products, I've had an instance where I was able to saunter into an IRC channel, mention a particular bug, and have the lead developer upload a new version to my server within 10 minutes, because he recognised the value of having a technically able user put his product through heavy stress.
Don't just swear and cuss about bugs in OpenOffice. Report them, send them copies of the files that break it. You might get your bug fixed. For free, in the next version. When did you last get that sort of deal from Microsoft?
If EEStor pans out, that could be just the ticket. A 52 kWh device could hold 4 days worth of domestic use for those cloudy spots. And since that's a device that weighs 400 pounds and is designed to fit in a car, there's no reason a house couldn't have more than one.
If it works, the auto industry will prime the pump of mass-production on these things, and the domestic applications can't be far behind.
This is his best point.
My VB coding improved immeasurably after I learned C#. And I'm not just talking VB6, I'm talking VB3 as well.
Learning a new language can teach you to do so much better in your old ones. I am *still* more productive, if you want something fast, in VB6 than I am in Java or C#. I can knock together a small cheap GUI very fast.
Of course, sometimes you do run into the limits of your chosen platform. VB6 strings are all 2-byte unicode internally, which makes dealing with UTF-8 a real pain. Then the ugly kludges start coming out.
.. sucked.
I'm so glad I still have my old Palm III, Graffiti 1 was good. Although I'm quite fond of the Fitaly keyboard now.
nLite will solve your problem. With it you can slipstream a full Windows installation disk, plus patches, plus any drivers that you would otherwise need to install. You can even remove chunks that you don't need.
I do take issue with some of your points though. Your knowledge of the DOS/Win32 operating environment is no doubt something that you have accumulated slowly over a number of years. I too found the unix command line unfamiliar and painful when I first used it. I'm still a novice, but I now find it more productive than cmd.exe by an order of magnitude.
I found installing and using Gentoo to be a great learning experience. The lack of a graphical installer (at the time) forces you to use the command line for everything. If you follow the install manual "blind" you pick up a few things. If you go through it reading the manuals for every command you use, you pick up a lot of things. I didn't get along with the graphical distributions at the time, I couldn't find any of the options I wanted. They have improved, but my TV server still runs Gentoo since it was the only distribution that supported my hardware at the time.
Your old hardware is much more likely to be supported than newer hardware.
As for games? I'm not going to chime in with the rest of the people in this thread and claim you can use Linux to run them all. I like to play games. I intend to keep running Windows until I give them up (which may well happen, they innovate less every year), or until Linux versions are commonplace.
As a software developer, I also can't do without Windows. I depend on Windows, because it's where most of my code lives. But I love open-source. I'm lucky enough to be doing a job where I don't have to avoid it - I can use what I like. And if I have to pick and choose, using OSS tools are just overall much less hassle. I don't have to requisition them, justify purchase costs, fill in forms, wait thirteen weeks for approval. If they have bugs, I don't have to contact the supplier and engage in complex political games about who's fault it is, I just fix them. OSS for me is just far more agile and productive.
I work for a national standards organisation.
One of our suppliers has a large infrastructure application. We are defining standards for communication.
We wrote the standard in the best way possible according to our parent standards body, which provides a meta-standard which should make messages comprehensible even if you haven't read the standard. Our supplier pouted, sulked, whined, and eventually we were forced from above to rewrite them to comply as closely as possible with the existing API, which contains horrible magic numbers and revolting anachronisms.
It's really strange how standards are weakened by money.
If it's an integrity check, they could just use a CRC and stick to the content on the disk. Or SHA1, if they wanted to be really paranoid about integrity.
Hashing the serial number of the hardware with an unknown key is lockout, no alternate explanation.
He's talking about the ageing population of Western nations. The reduced birth rates and increased longevity means that an increasing fraction of the population are at an age where they are retired from work and thus no longer contributing to the economy. Worse still (from an economic viewpoint) this segment also costs the economy large amounts of welfare.
While automation is a wonderful thing, there are some things that are still the province of humans. Personal care is one of those things. But with a reduced number of young people participating in the economy, there are a reduced number of potential carers. With a reduced amount of production, there is less real wealth to provide for this care. A pension fund doesn't mean squat - it's just money. Without actual production, money is worthless.
Japan is well aware of this problem and is trying to compensate with things like robotic beds for the elderly.
ATI have historically always had excellent features on their cards for supporting media playback. The downside was that accessing them in Linux has always been much harder than using the equivalent features on nvidia hardware.
If these specs allow a good stable XVMC driver to be written for ATI hardware, ATI could become the top choice for Linux media centre boxes.
Presumably because it's a lot easier to abuse Asian children in, like, China? Perhaps this goon got himself transferred to China to sate his lust for Chinese kids?
... despite all the hardwired ports in the building, the central network rack was getting a little claustrophobic and all the ports were taken.
The CEO bought one of those new-fangled 11b wireless cards and thought it was so great that everyone using a laptop should have one, including the development department. The majority of the company were laptop users at the time.
Within a week I had subverted this policy and snuck into the network cabinet to rewire the port under my desk. A the time we were using Visual SourceSafe. VSS sulks and corrupts it's repository at the slightest hint of network dropout. Not to mention the awful sloth of deploying software to, well, anywhere.
People are so used to switched networks that they never notice how chattery Windows boxes are. Move from 100MBit wired switched ports to a 10MBit wireless hub for a whole room of terminal bandwidth addicts (software developers) and you soon notice the difference. Now, there is a lot more wireless bandwidth to go around these days, but it's still a hub.
This was the same CEO who managed to knock our customer support website off the net by getting infected with Code Red and saturating our measly 128Kbit bonded ISDN line with spam and infection traffic.
After replacing it, I couldn't find her XP disk, so I just installed Ubuntu on it.
Her first response on logging in? "This is crap, it's brown."
I knocked this one around with a colleague a bit after posting. We thought that an old phone plugged into its charger permanently would make an excellent local node, with your phone only configured to peer with it.
The protocol could make allowances for battery levels (as pointed out elsewhere on the thread), and if you were plugged in you should be fair game.
I also thought that it would make a great, cheap, ad-hoc communications node for expeditions into areas with no coverage. Even if you can't persuade someone to sit around being a peer between you and civilization, you could carry some very minimal "portable cell towers" consisting of a phone and maybe an extended aerial. Stick them up a tree and you're good to go - you can text pretty much all you want. If you want to add talk time, bolt on a battery and for those extended trips, a solar panel. This is presumably something they have considered in the African trials.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3639679.stm
By and large, servers are well maintained. And people seldom use them as their desktop machine. And server admins are usually too savvy to infect themselves with a trojan horse bundled in an email. And when they do get pwned, people notice because their infrastructure starts suffering.
With that in mind, the Storm Worm specifically doesn't infect Windows 2003 server - a deliberate decision on the part of the author, I'm sure. If you upset enough businesses, they'll devote enough money to the problem to fix it.
The problem is desktops. Specifically, Windows desktops in the hands of the technically illiterate.
Just connecting an unpatched Windows box directly to the internet is enough. It belongs to a hacker in very short order. Even if you patch it up, the sheer number of services running on your average Windows box that listen to network ports is worrying. Never mind being on the internet, with the number of laptops moving in and out of corporate networks, it's not even safe "indoors". And it's hard to turn a lot of this stuff off without adversely affecting it's functionality.
I wouldn't even trust a general-purpose Linux installation on the internet ; it's just too difficult to track all the potential vulnerabilities. I keep a dedicated firewall running in my router, and the only services it runs are network translation, and a secure shell for administration, which reduces the target footprint to two highly secured services which were designed to be secure in the first place.
Windows users don't help, they are daft enough to infest themselves with everything going. Even if they are not quite daft enough to double-click executable attachments, they will download all the worst sorts of "Freeware" and click straight through the license agreement. Not only are they pwned, they actually agreed to it!
A case in point - one of our accountants was mailing around an executable Flash package (some kind of novelty). I deleted it instantly, and made a point of telling her that it could have been anything and done anything. Ten minutes later, I mailed her a VB executable decorated with the Flash icon. All it did was plonk up a dialogue box which said "Erasing hard drive". Somewhat predictably, she executed it. I almost pretended that I didn't send it and that it was a virus that emailed it.
The root problem is the design of Windows and windows applications.
1) Double-click to open OR execute
This isn't all Windows fault. People don't make a distinction between running a program and opening a file, because there isn't one in terms of the user action required. I'm willing to bet that the average user doesn't even understand the difference. If you had to perform a different action from double-click to execute programs, viral infection rates would drop enormously. You could still keep the d-click to open files with their registered program, just stop running programs themselves by this method. You've not lost the convenience of file-association. Just put "execute" on the context menu and make it a non-default action.
2) No executable flag in filesystems.
In Linux, a file isn't executable until you grant it permission to be so. If you had to open the permissions dialogue and check the "executable" box, it would hammer home the difference between executables and mere content. And by making it something more than a casual action, it would reduce the "impulse" running of many of these things, where people have their caution overridden momentarily by the promise of naked flesh or other inducements. Heck, you can even have whole filesystems that refuse to execute files - download all internet content into one of these and before you run it, you'll have to unpack it, move it to an executable folder, and check it's execute bit. This would seem too much work for the average Joe for a quick glimpse at Jessica Alba with no bra...
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
Money has always been about trust. The trust used to come from the actual exchange of rare or difficult to obtain materials. This is still the case, with the modifier that the labour cost of producing money tokens is now much lower than it used to be. Electronic money is the next logical step - it reduces the exchanged tokens to a pattern of electrons in a wire, and a few photons in a fibre.
This doesn't devalue the currency. It wasn't worth anything except the value of the trust embodied in it anyway.
If people cease to trust a means of payment, they will stop using it. If people stop using a means of payment, it becomes worthless, even if it's made of solid gold tablets encrusted with diamonds.
Read the notes - "I promise to pay the bearer". If you don't trust that promise, your money is worth nothing.
Acknowledged, it would be very difficult for people to stop using national currencies, because so much of our social system is based on their use. Going back to barter would be crippling for our economy, causing enormous disruption.
There is a case that this is the real cause of the Iraq war. Saddam was insisting that his country started trading its oil exclusively for Euro. A large part of the value of the US dollar is that it is used internationally as the de-facto oil trading currency. Petrodollars are like a huge interest free loan to the entire US economy. If people start trading oil in Euro, they are going to want to realise value for their surplus stocks of US currency. The big question is of course, just what does the US have that would provide that value? They've shipped all their manufacturing to China, they don't have any material resources which the rest of the world lacks, and their labour pool is too expensive. They do have a surplus of food, but that all gets sold anyway. The only remaining asset the US has that is of any interest is land. Perhaps they invaded Iraq to forestall an invasion (of purchase) by China......