Diamonds are only that valuable because of the De Beers monopoly. Still at highest quality diamonds, assuming with just a whiff of delusion that these diamonds could be sold for $80k per gram no matter what, then sure, you could probably make a profit. $80 million per kg is a pretty good price for payload.

And when you don't buy what they are offering they'll run to their government lackeys crying "Our sales are dropping! It must be those awful Internet Pirates! Please pass this new law which will give us massively increased powers of control over regular users' lives or we might just stop producing such fine works as Pointless Sequel 7 or Brainless Action Movie 12.

Have you ever seen a frozen waterfall? The water falls from a high energy position to a low energy position. There is certainly a "design" created. The trip from high to low energy doesn't have to be linear.

It is true, I stopped servicing my Dad's computer, put him on a user account on windows told him to use it and didn't do anything. Well, he figured it out, that windows sucks and is inheritantly broken if one as a policy doesn't buy anything for it....even the stuff we had bought was at this point broken... /.... and he didn't figure it out he just plays solitaire and checks email... dunno, hope this Ubuntu 64-bit computer ups his ante and teaches him google-fu, probably not, but you know at least I'll have the TOOLS to actually do something for&with the system, on the system, and by the system,

All it will prove is that these machines are hard to hack for outsiders. But the number one threat is that of insiders; mainly the government in place (who has most to lose in an election) and corrupt programmers at the company making the voting computers.

Actually you left out other wrinkles in the version trail. Windows 2.0 morphed into Windows 286 and Windows 386. Windows 386 was the precursor to Windows 3.0. Then after Windows 3.11 came Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Then there were the various SP updates to XP: SP2 was as big a change as the 3.0 to 3.1 switch.

If anyone still has a Windows 3.11 or Windows 3.1 system, they can use its calculator applet to compute the difference between those versions. Just use it to calculate 3.11 - 3.1 and be amazed by the answer.

Ah. Wishful thinking. Try to keep on that track as long as possible. Consider it a second childhood.

We have to deal with the mess we have. Yeah, Win* is a sloppy slut. I don't use it. Still, the net's polluted with Win* crap and I'll bet most of those on /. (have to|want to) use it every day. So, whether MS are incompetent idiots or not is irrelevant. We're in quicksand; what do we do? Just blame MS and go home?

For me, it's astounding to hear that Win 7 is still crackable days after release. This from the company that's been supplying business with software all these years. They still can't even figure out how to secure their binaries. How can we expect different from them in the rest of their realm?

HTH did we get from Wallace to malware?!? Probably my fault.

Still doesn't answer the question. We've email admins around the planet fighting this !@#$, and I still see some every day (yes, I know procmail & bogofilter, thanks).

I'm hoping Darknet shows up any day now, and any packets with MS signatures in them will be summarily dropped when detected.

Again, wishful thinking.

It may be that I am not directly affected in some cases, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to hit a wall sometime trying to figure out whether the uri in some cryptographic siggy is valid or not.

I do work for Vestas in the UK, you are exactly right. Blade building is currently very labour intensive, I've actually worked on the shop floor for a week. There were protests at the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight when it was closed down, even though it clearly didn't make economic sense to builds the blades in the UK with high labour costs while almost all the blades (for V82 1.6MW turbines) are sold to the USA and China. So Vestas decided to build new factories in the US and China instead.

The bigger question is, why is Vestas, a Danish Company, the biggest wind turbine producer in the world with ~25-30% market share? How come countries like the USA, Germany who gave billions to Boeing, Siemens, GE and the like for wind turbine research and had nothing to show for it, and everyone ended up using the iconic three bladed "Danish" design?

The answer boils down to having smart people in the government, avoiding overly ambitious expensive projects that often ended in failure, having a long turn vision in providing continued support in good times and bad times.