What monitor type are you using? Remember that most PC monitors are TN type, which have terrible vertical viewing angles. You don't normally notice vertical angles -- until you turn it sideways and discover massive color shifts. IPS screens (Dell has a whole line now) are vastly better.

Which is part of the Entertainment and Devices divison of MS, for some crazy reason.

Many "normal" cars that are meant to be even vaguely sporty or fun to drive run a degree or two of negative camber as well. It's pretty much vital for reasonable cornering.

Classic Sun style move. There are plenty of open source textbook efforts out there. Instead of contributing to them, start a new effort, pull a bunch of media hype, and generally sabotage everyone else without even acknowledging them -- all while providing mediocre results. Sun did it for twenty years and I guess it's a McNealy signature.

This tech is already in the Xbox 360, and has been from the day it launched. It's used slightly differently, mainly to prevent firmware downgrades. But it seems likely that hardware fuses are quietly tripped when you mod the console so that MS can do their mass bannings. So claims that users will accidentally trip it are perhaps far-fetched.

I have a Google account and a Google Apps account. The extent to which these two work varies, with Google Docs failing miserably about a third of the time. It gets supremely confused by this and invariably tries to access Apps with my public Google account.

Now imagine Ballmer looked at these awful apps like iTunes degrading his platform, and announced all Windows apps must be in C++ or C#.

I'm shocked, shocked to find out people are writing tech columns just for page views.

Yep, right until the NEXT feature comes out that breaks the OS that says it can handle the truth. Now you need TWO "don't lie to me" commands. Repeat ad infinitum.

Yeah, I think this might actually be the literal definition of FUD. We could just go over to UrbanDictionary and add an entry with a link back to this story.

Agreed -- it IS rather bad, but generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN. As Windows vulnerabilities go, this isn't horrible in a practical sense.

Actually, quite a few companies ship laptops in this configuration. It allows them to advertise the 4 GB, and very nearly none of their audience will ever be wise to it. The last time I saw this was with a machine purchased literally two weeks ago. It's now happily churning along with Win7 x64, no functionality missing.

I don't think you quite understand. These people didn't go to some torrent site and download Windows. They took Windows XP, built an illicit distribution with the activation bits etc removed, and sent that around -- probably for money. IOW, they enabled millions of other people to run stolen copies of Windows XP, possibly without even realizing it (third rate vendors have a nasty habit of using these bootleg Windows copies on their machines).

I think there are some subtleties here that are not being correctly addressed. Specifically, what's legitimate from the viewpoint of the kernel, versus what is legitimate from the viewpoint of C.

On these systems it is perfectly valid (and correct) C to define a structure which has the layout of the attached devices and then cast 0 to a pointer to this structure and use that for I/O.

No, it isn't "valid", per se. It is how you get the desired effect, and might work fine on said device -- but it's a blatant violation of the rules of C.

Remember that C, like most languages, makes some very basic assumptions about the underlying platform and require certain things of it. One of these is you can't dereference NULL legally, end of story. From the kernel's point of view, strictly by the rules of the underlying processor and machine, this might be totally legal. But the C standard says quite explicitly that you can't be doing this under any condition. Not only that, it's undefined behavior -- you're in a particularly bad no man's land.

Legal in C and legal on the machine are NOT the same thing. Please remember that difference. C still has rules and assumptions that you have to follow, and when you don't, things like this happen. That's why the code behind this vulnerability is NOT correct. It obeys machine rules but not C's stricter rules.

The FedEx system doesn't handle hand written letters though, does it? You have to do a shipping label for most (all?) packages, with a digital bar code. USPS runs some very powerful OCR systems; maybe they're making the transactions so expensive. Just a thought.