A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Well. What to say about this? Reading this may be too geeky for many, but the upshot is that that Microsoft looks more and more to the Chief like being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Satanic Enterprises Un-ltd. Unfortunately, the lead header about “obscuring the view” is literally true!

Fortunately, one can get the gist from the “Executive Summary” and “Executive Executive Summary” which constitute a sort of abstract of the whole deal:

Executive Summary

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

May it be so!

As far as the Chief is concerned – he plans on avoiding VISTA now, and if possible, forever. Time to learn LINUX I guess.

The real deal?
Against the grain: Some scientists deny global warming exists

Firstly, the logic behind the Orthodox Church of the Warming Globe:

Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, one of Israel’s top young scientists, describes the logic that led him — and most everyone else — to conclude that SUVs, coal plants and other things man-made cause global warming.

Step One Scientists for decades have postulated that increases in carbon dioxide and other gases could lead to a greenhouse effect.

Step Two As if on cue, the temperature rose over the course of the 20th century while greenhouse gases proliferated due to human activities.

Step Three No other mechanism explains the warming. Without another candidate, greenhouses gases necessarily became the cause.

Sounds simple, right? That’s the beauty of it – but wait! It turns out to not quite so simple after all:

Dr. Shariv’s digging led him to the surprising discovery that there is no concrete evidence — only speculation — that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming. Even research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change– the United Nations agency that heads the worldwide effort to combat global warming — is bereft of anything here inspiring confidence. In fact, according to the IPCC’s own findings, man’s role is so uncertain that there is a strong possibility that we have been cooling, not warming, the Earth. Unfortunately, our tools are too crude to reveal what man’s effect has been in the past, let alone predict how much warming or cooling we might cause in the future.

So, if not human activity, what’s causing changes? Hmmmm. Not only the sun, but stellar cosmic rays seem to have effects:

However, Dr. Shaviv not only believes there are credible “other suspects,” he believes that at least one provides a superior explanation for the 20th century’s warming.

“Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming,” he states, particularly because of the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere. So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that “it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist.”

Catch that? Not just the sun, but also cosmic ray flux! So what about the evil CO2 being released by the dastardly, evil, capitalist corporations?

The sun’s strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can’t have much of an influence on the climate — that C02 et al. don’t dominate through some kind of leveraging effect that makes them especially potent drivers of climate change. The upshot of the Earth not being unduly sensitive to greenhouse gases is that neither increases nor cutbacks in future C02 emissions will matter much in terms of the climate.

There’s more noted in the rest of this piece – including some more on just how something as seemingly disconnected as cosmic rays apparently significantly affect the climate.

Chicken Little IS right: the sky IS falling, in the form of cosmic rays, and solar radiation.