It's obvious that neither you nor the grandparent post understand the NT architecture. A "user land" process can do no more harm to the Windows kernel than it could the Linux.
The majority of the time that bluescreens happen on Windows, it's because some 3rd party vendor's drivers are written poorly. Given the plethora of hardware that's supported under Windows, how likely do you suspect that it is that the average home user has at least *1* driver with at least *1* bug in it somewhere? That's your BSOD.
That's also why companies such as Dell make so much money -- they provide a fully-supported system with verified drivers. Computers you get from, say, www.cyberpowersystem.com or pieced together from Newegg parts are less likely to be consistent. Writing drivers is not easy.
How often do you see bug free programs? Never. I've had Firefox crash on me; I've had IE crash on me; I've had Visual Studio crash; I've had Eclipse crash. Everything crashes, it just so happens that when drivers do it it brings down the system. And there happens to be a *lot* more hardware support on Windows, which means a lot more people writing software, and a lot more bugs.
I'd challenge you to find me a set of API calls that can actually crash an out-of-the-box Win2k machine from "userland".
There are plenty of legitimate uses for alternative Battle.Net servers. For example, the custom map Dota Allstars has attracted a crowd of Warcraft 3: FT players in the hundreds of thousands. A serious problem with the emergence of the map, however, is that there is no ranking system. Players can simply leave games at any time with no repercussions. Most games are an hour long, with 5 players per team, which means that once the action really starts to get sticky, the experience can be ruined by one jackass who simply decides to quit -- because he has no incentive to stay in the game.
Blizzard's Battle.Net treats all custom maps the same -- no ranking system, no automatic player match-ups, etc. They're unregulated.
I've been on alternative servers (for Starcraft) that allowed statistics tracking for all various kinds of maps. A solution like this would be ideal to promote custom maps. I have participated in talks with the guys who run Dota-Allstars.com to create a ranking system that runs along side existing Battle.Net and specific to their map to address these problems; Blizzard refuses to recognize the issue.
Alternative Battle.net servers can be used to do a lot of other things besides promote piracy.
Newton's original papers on physics are all wrong. So what?
They've been replaced by something else. Sure, they're generally true, enough to be taught in physics classes, but all the specifics on gravitation etc. are incorrect.
They're being replaced with: (pick your theory) quantum gravity, string theory, quantum mechanics and more things I don't know.
But so what? Science, by its nature, is always being improved upon. Any time you correct someone else's theory, you could say their theory is now wrong.
Well, maybe this description is even wrong or inapplicable, considering I didn't read TFA =)
Viruses originally meant just malicious programs that would replicate themselves. However, viruses that just did that are not very productive (from the sense of a virus writer). I suppose in my usage of the word virus I actually meant "virus that exploits a software vulnerability to propagate itself".
After all, viruses that don't can only make victims those who give the viruses privilege to their computer.
A clue should've been the title of the article linked to: "A virus for Windows Vista? Wrong."
From TFA:
"First of all, in examining the details of the reports, there is no Windows Vista virus described in them....The viruses do not attempt to exploit a software vulnerability and do not encompass a new method of attack."
If one had read either of the two articles linked, one would realize that the so-called "viruses" are nothing more than malicious scripts. No software hole is exploited; the viruses are no more dangerous than any arbitrary piece of code running on your system.
They are not viruses; they only have the privileges that a user gives them. They're the same as any other executable file.
If a stranger sends you an executable, be it a script or a compiled program, and you run it, you're already in trouble. These scripts are nothing special.
Did the article author even read what he was submitting? The author states, "because of the possible virus threat that targets Monad the shell will not be included in Windows Vista", which could not be more deliberately misleading, and is contracted by both articles he links to!
The thing that you fail to see is that copyright was created to serve the public interest. I could get into a long-winded discussion as to how it no longer does, but I'm not going to.
Just because something is against the law does not make it ethically right. I firmly believe that the current state of affairs in the legislature is harming consumers and preventing fair use -- among other things. I firmly believe that what most people do is NOT wrong, but rather that the large companies attempted to use copyright law to gouge consumers are wrong.
You must expunge this idea you seem to have that illegal != immoral. They are not the same and never have been.
If you read copyright law it is clear that the *community* owns all works in question; they belong to the society, not the artist. Copyright law makes it clear that what it grants is a *temporary* control over distribution of such things so as to create a greater incentive to create -- a greater incentive to create being supported because it benefits society.
The RIAA is now a monopoly and is using copyright laws to harm society by preventing fair use, etc. Copyright law in this circumstance is no longer benefitting the community... it is harming it.
The economic losses created by the existance of a monopoly in a particular market is a subject well-studied in economics.
Losses, perhaps, over some ideal market -- a perfectly competitive market. No markets are, in reality, perfect competition. There are huge barriers to entry in the OS world, simply because an OS is not just an OS but also a suite of programs, drivers, etc. That alone prevents the market from being perfectly competitive.
Many markets in fact BENEFIT in terms of efficiency from having a monopoly -- the phone companies in this past century are an example. Would it have been to the consumer's benefit for each of them to lay separate, un-cooperative lines to their houses? No; the system is better off having a single monopoly do it.
Things are different now, obviously, but that argument made perfect sense then.
While you are right in pointing out that Microsot's monopoly is a loss, you seem to neglect that it's a loss against some intractable ideal market. If you take a look at how our society has handled new technology, (phone companies were that 50 years ago; tech companies are now) you see that the industry benefits overall by having one company set the standard, break the ground, and lay the wires.
Microsoft did that for the computing world. While they are a loss over a perfectly competitive market, no market is perfectly competitive. One could make a reasonable argument that the compatibility provided by a monopoly far outweighs its disadvantages. I am not saying this is necessarily true; I'm just trying to point out that that consideration is far too often left out of arguments.
Look at it from the perspective of a hardware developer: You make a piece of new equipment, write a driver for Windows, and suddenly 95% of your market can use it. Isn't that good for them?
If you want to argue that an ideal, perfectly competitive market should exist, try to think of what it would be like to develop software and hardware in that world. Are all the platforms the same, such that one driver or one hardware can run on all of them? That's what we have right now with Windows! Or are all the platforms different, so you have to write different drivers and software for all of them? Is that really better?
What exactly do you think this ideal market should look like?
Some (CC) licenses serve a purpose, such as the ones that are similar to the GPL.
Dvorak is remarking that some of them *don't* serve a purpose, such as the one for Public Domain works. Indeed, what *is* the purpose of a specific license to mark that a work is under public domain? Why not just say that in the first place?
His beef is not with the more useful licenses, but rather with the ones that are useless, like the public domain.
Dylan agreed to do a concert for us because he is one of our top selling artists period. And I say we, because yes I work for Amazon.com. He is not doing it because he "sold out to the man" but out of appreciation for our business. He's probably made many millions of dollars through sales on our website.
World banks are actually very concerned that this might happen. However, our saving grace currently is that other countries have invested too much money in our economy. They can't withdraw their money; if they did then what you described would be very likely to occur.
As pointed out in popular movies such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Saudi money comprises a couple percent of the US economy. That's a lot. About as much as Wal-Mart.
If that money went away we'd be feeling it very hard. But, I think there's a 90% chance that doesn't happen.
Think of it as a game of chicken. The US and other countries are in a game of chicken. We all know that our currency is quickly losing real value, but people are too afraid and too dependent on the US economy to "pull out". Japan might be a big electronics buyer itself, but many more of its products are shipped overseas, primarily to the USA. If our market of consumers disappeared, so would their production economy.
The game of chicken continues until one of two things occurs. (1) Other countries pull out of the US. A cascade effect occurs and the world is in a depression. (2) Other countries don't pull out and slow, steady inflation causes US foreign debts to be effectively erased.
Lots of powerful companies are banking on #2 to happen. If #1 happens, everyone loses, but if #2 happens, it's really the poor people, the factory workers and sweatshop slaves, in 3rd world countries that lose out.
Mod parent and grandparent down. Quantum Cryptography is indeed real cryptography. It uses the encryption system known as the One Time Pad. The "Quantum" aspect of it is used in transmission (really, creation) of the random pad on both sides of the communications line.
There is nothing unhackable.
Perhaps, but information encrypted with quantum cryptography is un-interceptable. Because of the way a one time pad works, you have no way to verify that you've cracked a message -- any "decrypted" result is the same as any other.
This is distinct from other encryption methods, which use complicated math to encrypt and decrypt things.
A one-time pad is merely a block of random data. You XOR your pad with your plaintext to get ciphertext. With a given ciphertext block, you have no way to verify what the correct plaintext is. For example, if I have a ciphertext message: ABCD, that could just as equally be the plaintext HELO as ROFL.
Quantum cryptography is the usage of quantum mechanisms to generate the same random data at two different locations. Because of properties of quantum physics that I don't personally understand, interception of that quantum data is impossible.
But no, quantum cryptography is not breakable because it's impossible to know whether you have the correct plaintext, and it's impossible to get the one-time pad from the quantum transmission line (physics guarantees it). In other encryption systems, you know mathematically whether you have discovered the "key". The ciphertext of a one-time-pad, according to information theory (and the assumption that your pad is made of truly random data), provides you absolutely no information about the pad or the plaintext.
Unfortunately you are incorrect. Rights are granted by default and only removed under certain conditions. Our society does not operate on social contract; we (the US) have codified it into law and a large part of it is called the Constitution.
Another part of our law is called Contact law, which states that no mutual obligations can exist between two people without being formed explicitly (written or verbal). I have made no such arrangements with any websites I visit.
I did not sign a document or even click an "I Agree" button to terms of service obligating me to look at their advertisements in exchange for their content. Therefore, it is my right and privilege not to look at their advertising; yes, I can modify their website in any way before viewing it. No laws or contracts prevent me from doing otherwise.
If website authors began switching to such systems, where users must agree to Terms of Service in order to view the site (which includes agreeing to download advertisements), I would sympathize with you. But that is not the situation. I am free to do what I want.
Google has been conducting its research extensively in the services area.
Google labs contains a plethora of useful services Google's researching, with new ones coming almost every month. A few ones that interested me:
Google sets allows users to enter a few items (apple, banana, orange) and Google will find more from that set (pear, kiwi).
Google ride finder allows you to find taxis and limousines by tracking their positions in realtime.
All of these services are available to the public so Google can get feedback on their "research".
As funny as that might seem, it's not too far from reality.
Retailers are already pushing for RFID tags in everything. Once their presence becomes ubiquitous and appliances in the house recognize them (e.g., refrigerator for food or closet for clothes), it wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a house that can search for its contents.
Once it's possible I'm sure Google will get into the market, too: "Download Google Dirty Socks Search today!"
Or, perhaps, your girlfriend/wife could search for lingerie that isn't hers and nail your one-night-stand...
Slashdot Mirror
It's obvious that neither you nor the grandparent post understand the NT architecture. A "user land" process can do no more harm to the Windows kernel than it could the Linux.
The majority of the time that bluescreens happen on Windows, it's because some 3rd party vendor's drivers are written poorly. Given the plethora of hardware that's supported under Windows, how likely do you suspect that it is that the average home user has at least *1* driver with at least *1* bug in it somewhere? That's your BSOD.
That's also why companies such as Dell make so much money -- they provide a fully-supported system with verified drivers. Computers you get from, say, www.cyberpowersystem.com or pieced together from Newegg parts are less likely to be consistent. Writing drivers is not easy.
How often do you see bug free programs? Never. I've had Firefox crash on me; I've had IE crash on me; I've had Visual Studio crash; I've had Eclipse crash. Everything crashes, it just so happens that when drivers do it it brings down the system. And there happens to be a *lot* more hardware support on Windows, which means a lot more people writing software, and a lot more bugs.
I'd challenge you to find me a set of API calls that can actually crash an out-of-the-box Win2k machine from "userland".
There are plenty of legitimate uses for alternative Battle.Net servers. For example, the custom map Dota Allstars has attracted a crowd of Warcraft 3: FT players in the hundreds of thousands. A serious problem with the emergence of the map, however, is that there is no ranking system. Players can simply leave games at any time with no repercussions. Most games are an hour long, with 5 players per team, which means that once the action really starts to get sticky, the experience can be ruined by one jackass who simply decides to quit -- because he has no incentive to stay in the game.
Blizzard's Battle.Net treats all custom maps the same -- no ranking system, no automatic player match-ups, etc. They're unregulated.
I've been on alternative servers (for Starcraft) that allowed statistics tracking for all various kinds of maps. A solution like this would be ideal to promote custom maps. I have participated in talks with the guys who run Dota-Allstars.com to create a ranking system that runs along side existing Battle.Net and specific to their map to address these problems; Blizzard refuses to recognize the issue.
Alternative Battle.net servers can be used to do a lot of other things besides promote piracy.
Newton's original papers on physics are all wrong. So what?
They've been replaced by something else. Sure, they're generally true, enough to be taught in physics classes, but all the specifics on gravitation etc. are incorrect.
They're being replaced with: (pick your theory) quantum gravity, string theory, quantum mechanics and more things I don't know.
But so what? Science, by its nature, is always being improved upon. Any time you correct someone else's theory, you could say their theory is now wrong.
Well, maybe this description is even wrong or inapplicable, considering I didn't read TFA =)
Phenomenon. Phonemona is plural =P
Hmm. I agree with you.
Viruses originally meant just malicious programs that would replicate themselves. However, viruses that just did that are not very productive (from the sense of a virus writer). I suppose in my usage of the word virus I actually meant "virus that exploits a software vulnerability to propagate itself".
After all, viruses that don't can only make victims those who give the viruses privilege to their computer.
A clue should've been the title of the article linked to: "A virus for Windows Vista? Wrong."
...The viruses do not attempt to exploit a software vulnerability and do not encompass a new method of attack."
From TFA:
"First of all, in examining the details of the reports, there is no Windows Vista virus described in them.
If one had read either of the two articles linked, one would realize that the so-called "viruses" are nothing more than malicious scripts. No software hole is exploited; the viruses are no more dangerous than any arbitrary piece of code running on your system.
They are not viruses; they only have the privileges that a user gives them. They're the same as any other executable file.
If a stranger sends you an executable, be it a script or a compiled program, and you run it, you're already in trouble. These scripts are nothing special.
Did the article author even read what he was submitting? The author states, "because of the possible virus threat that targets Monad the shell will not be included in Windows Vista", which could not be more deliberately misleading, and is contracted by both articles he links to!
Mason is a set of HTTP extensions for Perl. It's what I use at work to develop front end systems at Amazon.com.
I'm not really a fan of it, but it seems to work quite well for us.
The thing that you fail to see is that copyright was created to serve the public interest. I could get into a long-winded discussion as to how it no longer does, but I'm not going to.
Just because something is against the law does not make it ethically right. I firmly believe that the current state of affairs in the legislature is harming consumers and preventing fair use -- among other things. I firmly believe that what most people do is NOT wrong, but rather that the large companies attempted to use copyright law to gouge consumers are wrong.
You must expunge this idea you seem to have that illegal != immoral. They are not the same and never have been.
If you read copyright law it is clear that the *community* owns all works in question; they belong to the society, not the artist. Copyright law makes it clear that what it grants is a *temporary* control over distribution of such things so as to create a greater incentive to create -- a greater incentive to create being supported because it benefits society.
The RIAA is now a monopoly and is using copyright laws to harm society by preventing fair use, etc. Copyright law in this circumstance is no longer benefitting the community... it is harming it.
The economic losses created by the existance of a monopoly in a particular market is a subject well-studied in economics.
Losses, perhaps, over some ideal market -- a perfectly competitive market. No markets are, in reality, perfect competition. There are huge barriers to entry in the OS world, simply because an OS is not just an OS but also a suite of programs, drivers, etc. That alone prevents the market from being perfectly competitive.
Many markets in fact BENEFIT in terms of efficiency from having a monopoly -- the phone companies in this past century are an example. Would it have been to the consumer's benefit for each of them to lay separate, un-cooperative lines to their houses? No; the system is better off having a single monopoly do it.
Things are different now, obviously, but that argument made perfect sense then.
While you are right in pointing out that Microsot's monopoly is a loss, you seem to neglect that it's a loss against some intractable ideal market. If you take a look at how our society has handled new technology, (phone companies were that 50 years ago; tech companies are now) you see that the industry benefits overall by having one company set the standard, break the ground, and lay the wires.
Microsoft did that for the computing world. While they are a loss over a perfectly competitive market, no market is perfectly competitive. One could make a reasonable argument that the compatibility provided by a monopoly far outweighs its disadvantages. I am not saying this is necessarily true; I'm just trying to point out that that consideration is far too often left out of arguments.
Look at it from the perspective of a hardware developer: You make a piece of new equipment, write a driver for Windows, and suddenly 95% of your market can use it. Isn't that good for them?
If you want to argue that an ideal, perfectly competitive market should exist, try to think of what it would be like to develop software and hardware in that world. Are all the platforms the same, such that one driver or one hardware can run on all of them? That's what we have right now with Windows! Or are all the platforms different, so you have to write different drivers and software for all of them? Is that really better?
What exactly do you think this ideal market should look like?
I don't think he's missing the point; *you* are.
Some (CC) licenses serve a purpose, such as the ones that are similar to the GPL.
Dvorak is remarking that some of them *don't* serve a purpose, such as the one for Public Domain works. Indeed, what *is* the purpose of a specific license to mark that a work is under public domain? Why not just say that in the first place?
His beef is not with the more useful licenses, but rather with the ones that are useless, like the public domain.
Oblig. grammar correction:
:P
*Fewer lawyers
*Fewer spammers
Dylan agreed to do a concert for us because he is one of our top selling artists period. And I say we, because yes I work for Amazon.com. He is not doing it because he "sold out to the man" but out of appreciation for our business. He's probably made many millions of dollars through sales on our website.
Just something to think about.
It exists and it's called XUL, used on the Mozilla platform.
World banks are actually very concerned that this might happen. However, our saving grace currently is that other countries have invested too much money in our economy. They can't withdraw their money; if they did then what you described would be very likely to occur.
As pointed out in popular movies such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Saudi money comprises a couple percent of the US economy. That's a lot. About as much as Wal-Mart.
If that money went away we'd be feeling it very hard. But, I think there's a 90% chance that doesn't happen.
Think of it as a game of chicken. The US and other countries are in a game of chicken. We all know that our currency is quickly losing real value, but people are too afraid and too dependent on the US economy to "pull out". Japan might be a big electronics buyer itself, but many more of its products are shipped overseas, primarily to the USA. If our market of consumers disappeared, so would their production economy.
The game of chicken continues until one of two things occurs. (1) Other countries pull out of the US. A cascade effect occurs and the world is in a depression. (2) Other countries don't pull out and slow, steady inflation causes US foreign debts to be effectively erased.
Lots of powerful companies are banking on #2 to happen. If #1 happens, everyone loses, but if #2 happens, it's really the poor people, the factory workers and sweatshop slaves, in 3rd world countries that lose out.
So don't use the personalized webpage, then? Or personalize it so it's simple?
On a side note, I learned the above from a class at Rice University last semester, and given what they know about quantum stuff, it must be true :-)
Perhaps, but information encrypted with quantum cryptography is un-interceptable. Because of the way a one time pad works, you have no way to verify that you've cracked a message -- any "decrypted" result is the same as any other.
This is distinct from other encryption methods, which use complicated math to encrypt and decrypt things.
A one-time pad is merely a block of random data. You XOR your pad with your plaintext to get ciphertext. With a given ciphertext block, you have no way to verify what the correct plaintext is. For example, if I have a ciphertext message: ABCD, that could just as equally be the plaintext HELO as ROFL.
Quantum cryptography is the usage of quantum mechanisms to generate the same random data at two different locations. Because of properties of quantum physics that I don't personally understand, interception of that quantum data is impossible.
But no, quantum cryptography is not breakable because it's impossible to know whether you have the correct plaintext, and it's impossible to get the one-time pad from the quantum transmission line (physics guarantees it). In other encryption systems, you know mathematically whether you have discovered the "key". The ciphertext of a one-time-pad, according to information theory (and the assumption that your pad is made of truly random data), provides you absolutely no information about the pad or the plaintext.
See more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography
Some example information:
http://www.ageofconsent.com/
Unfortunately you are incorrect. Rights are granted by default and only removed under certain conditions. Our society does not operate on social contract; we (the US) have codified it into law and a large part of it is called the Constitution.
Another part of our law is called Contact law, which states that no mutual obligations can exist between two people without being formed explicitly (written or verbal). I have made no such arrangements with any websites I visit.
I did not sign a document or even click an "I Agree" button to terms of service obligating me to look at their advertisements in exchange for their content. Therefore, it is my right and privilege not to look at their advertising; yes, I can modify their website in any way before viewing it. No laws or contracts prevent me from doing otherwise.
If website authors began switching to such systems, where users must agree to Terms of Service in order to view the site (which includes agreeing to download advertisements), I would sympathize with you. But that is not the situation. I am free to do what I want.
Google has been conducting its research extensively in the services area. Google labs contains a plethora of useful services Google's researching, with new ones coming almost every month. A few ones that interested me: Google sets allows users to enter a few items (apple, banana, orange) and Google will find more from that set (pear, kiwi). Google ride finder allows you to find taxis and limousines by tracking their positions in realtime. All of these services are available to the public so Google can get feedback on their "research".
As funny as that might seem, it's not too far from reality. Retailers are already pushing for RFID tags in everything. Once their presence becomes ubiquitous and appliances in the house recognize them (e.g., refrigerator for food or closet for clothes), it wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a house that can search for its contents. Once it's possible I'm sure Google will get into the market, too: "Download Google Dirty Socks Search today!" Or, perhaps, your girlfriend/wife could search for lingerie that isn't hers and nail your one-night-stand...