he is hidden behind a parked van and will not actually be visible
Alternatively, if the van was self-driving, it could park in a place where it is not obstructing useful visibility, and then come driving back when needed. Imagine getting rid of garages and instead having local car parks with modest parking fees. Put your kitchen/pantry in the old garage space for dropping off regular food supplies.
Use a search anonymizer. Replace your Google search provider in the browser with a less intrusive data-mining version of the service. Use it for patient searches instead of direct Google. Done.
Not to mention the other uses besides the biological intake. People forget that the US Constitution is written on hemp parchment. The list of uses for hemp fibers is astounding, and for us to shoot ourselves in the foot by denying ourselves use of such a prolific crop is a huge disadvantage economically. It's almost as stupid as if we were to ban silicon chips and thus electronics because kids get fat playing video games.
Say - the cop was actually innocent, he's a human and not just another cop. Now, he'll have a hard time supporting his family because no one wants to hire someone busted on the job.
One would hope a bit of judicious word choice would be employed as appropriate. I do have to wonder how often the undeserved negatives you're concerned about would actually be found here - if it's a real problem, that would be the real story IMHO. These are offenses which even the Blue Line has not protected them from, let's recall. I don't like the idea of throwing a good cop under the bus for something minor, but if it was a firing infraction I'd say name-and-shame is the right way to counteract the hubris and "Judge Dredd" attitude a lot of cops seem to have.
Being a cop is hard. It's a calling many are not up to. And yes, they all make mistakes at some point. But the reason it's hard is because it's so important to get it right. You screw it up bad enough to get fired over it - sorry, but your best use is as an example to the remaining officers, and prospective officers, of what they're not going to get away with. "Who watches the watchers?" It has to be us, or there is no accountability, without which the regular citizens become second-class victims-to-be.
I've attempted my own research on this and discovered that I could not count on official statistics at all. A lot of the issues you mention make direct comparisons difficult to useless. It takes, as far as I can tell, an in-depth and frankly professional (as in, paying someone with an actual degree in statistics) analysis to make anything compare properly.
My greatest frustration is with the NRA's influence having caused the (I could be misremembering which department) CDC to be unable to record/publish relevant information on a national level. I'm almost certain the NRA general constituency believe the stats will bear out firearms as a safe factor overall, yet the lobby prevents the actual numbers from being available, aside from the FBI stats which from what I've been able to tell are constantly redefined/recategorized to make historical comparisons impossible (a necessary component of evaluating trends following the passage/sunsetting of legislation).
I've had to resort to philosophical reasoning rather than real evidence to come to my conclusions. A proper analysis would be invaluable, and explaining the intricacies of the other flawed methodologies and why they need to be discarded would probably require a full book. One which I would most likely buy, if I could vet the author well enough to believe the relevant biases have been accounted for.
No, McAfee started sucking well before the Intel acquisition. It had more to do with the OEM ISP bundling deals and the flaky HTML interface since about '06-'08 as I recall
God I remember all the Norton Internet Security 2004 installs that would bork in the firewall and take down the entire network connection. I hate them for buying Sygate and locking it up but I am sure not going to miss that headache.
Exactly. Give me a secure dock for a Nexus device and call it a day. Auto manufacturers may be the only bunch worse than carriers at updating OS and software elements. I got a Nexus 7 (1st gen) with the express intention of hack-retrofitting a pogo pin dock into the dash and being able to remove the most expensive part and take it with me when I leave the vehicle. It's replaceable, upgrade-able, and has no retarded app availability issues, and comes without the ridiculous price premium. Installed media widget and active visualizer wallpaper; done.
The real irony here is the original justification of outlawing pot in the first place. "Gateway drug" to harder stuff was the original argument.
Here we are some years on and we can review and see that even if that theory was good (it's not), the price we pay to draw that line in the sand is way too high. I can grow coffee plants on my own land for noncommercial purposes that have more dangerous effect, and yet we're willing to let people break down your door, shoot your dog, and give your whole family PTSD you just might need drugs to help with, if only there was a miracle crop that could safely reduce anxiety... (seriously, have you *seen* the list of uses hemp has? The original US Constitution document was written on hemp parchment, among many other things)... oh, look at that house of cards collapse. Intent is a pretty stupid thing to consider without speaking to some more serious crime (i.e. first degree murder vs. manslaughter). I'm not saying you're wrong, but you really shouldn't be right in a just world.
Honestly, there's no moral theory that makes the law reasonable, particularly given how racist the enforcement tends to be, now that we have actual data on how the "war on drugs" is prosecuted. We'd save a boatload on prison spending if we legalized it across the board, to say nothing of restoring the actual freedom politicians like to reference but have gone AWOL in the last few decades, and maybe give the US some of its international dignity back.
As I recall, MS made the decision to save money by not including codec licenses with every Windows install. Instead, they want you to purchase the media pack upgrade - a pretty sour move, I'll agree.
Just one more reason to hate Windows 8, along with the fact that if something goes wrong and you need to boot Safe Mode: good luck.
If you're familiar with previous versions of Windows like Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP, you may remember that you could force the loading of what was then called the Advanced Boot Options menu by pressing F8. This is no longer possible in Windows 8.
In fact, even the widely publicized SHIFT+F8 option, which supposedly works to force Advanced Startup Options to appear (and ultimately Startup Settings and Safe Mode), only works on very slow computers. The amount of time that Windows 8 looks for SHIFT+F8 is so small on most Windows 8 devices and PCs that it borders on impossible to get it to work.
Same story every time MS launches an OS. Windows releases, includes drivers currently in the development channel, then around a year later new hardware is being produced and the drivers slowly become less and less available out of the box. Any day now, if you go to install Windows 8 with a generic install disk on a new computer (say, to clean off all the bundled crapware), you'll have the same problem. Hell I'm probably going to face that situation with one of my clients in the next month.
I figure the Linux devs have more of a big-picture concept of their work, vs. the Windows guys who have a very specific version they are targeting. Not that I give them any slack for it, but their priorities are probably different. You can blame MS for their driver signing process not including certain interoperability features I suppose, but let's not forget that chipsets do evolve and change as time goes on. I love an excuse to slam MS but it's been like this for over a decade.
I can say the above link matches very closely my own experience: having attempted the e-match thing myself once upon a time, I saved myself some major depression by giving up on it. Seriously, it truly is a soul-crushing experience if you aren't the lucky 10% or so of most-attractive contestants looking for the "typical" match. Also note that not everybody is comfortable with doing deeply personal things on the internet, for good reason (see: almost every Facebook story ever) - some of the smartest people won't be found online.
My recommendation: expand your interests a little, and get out somewhere that you are exposed to new people. Take up Tai Chi. Join a book club. Take a course or two of something new at a community college. Sure, there can be some money involved here, but you're likely to get a much higher class of results. Most importantly, keep in close contact with the better people you know. I met my current SO at a friend's house out of the blue.
This may be moderately true in the US - for now. It is certainly not true overseas, particularly Europe. They are up in arms over there, and it's going to be really bad for American business. It has already begun. Once business starts crashing, and the jobs are lost, we're going to discover we really do care. How much we care is going to depend on how many people can follow the chain of consequences, rather than just watching MTV or whatever the kids are doing these days, but inevitably Senators are going to be listening to their campaign contributors if nobody else.
What does "environmental enrichment" mean? Better nutrition? A nanny called GLaDOS? Your link does not say, and I'm rather skeptical of your argument. Given the vocabulary and glut of random facts I have picked up from reading, I'd say TFS's reported result is hardly surprising, but still significant to keep in mind for educational purposes
Is there any data that you want to be **completely unavailable** to law enforcement with **proper warrant**?
YES. We should not attempt to bend the rules of physics or disrupt the working structures that hold our society together simply for the benefit of our nation's police forces, at any level. I don't care who they get to sign off on it, building a time machine to go back in time and snoop on any documents that have historically been un-snoopable (even if it were possible) is not the way to fight nebulous enemies of the state. The difference between an invisible time machine, and blanket surveillance of all communications "which isn't looked at until there is a warrant" is essentially the same. We wouldn't give anyone the state-sanctioned ability to go back in time and use infrared cameras to peep through bedroom windows of even Marilyn Monroe, because it's simply not ethical; if they can do it to her, they can do it to anyone. And here we are, doing it to everyone, recording the whole thing, and calling it OK because hey, it wasn't a human being behind the telescope.
Look, I don't dispute that there are bad people attempting to do bad things. The question is really one of cost, and there's a popular Benjamin Franklin quote going around I could refer you to. My own take is that, if you give up the freedoms that have made America the best country on earth, you are sacrificing the parts which most make America worth defending in the first place. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Secret power is a dangerous society-killing drug: just say no.
I recall reading that spam makes up some 70% of internet traffic. Get your keywords into spam, and your noise propagation will massively skyrocket. Can you take over a botnet and repurpose it? That should be your goal, if so. If not, you might get involved with encryption of some kind. There's plenty of room for extra noise in encryption streams; throw in a few keywords into headers or tack it onto hash algorithms and you might have something as well.
I don't think you're going to get much traction with getting people to add something new to their work routine; at the scale we need, you're not even going to be above the noise floor. We already have noise generators which are of dubious effectiveness (mind you I run that one anyway).
Alternatively, do something to improve Linux usage in general. Once it becomes more widely used by Grandmas of the world, it's easier to close holes that allow the NSA to do what it does, or for knowledgeable people to write high-level versions of the kind of programs you're talking about. Think of having Tor relays on by default in more or less every neighborhood in the US. It's already a thorn in the side of snoopers; if it becomes a default option in for example Ubuntu, then the wider Linux is deployed, the greater effectiveness that change will have.
Sadly, I have little hope for change on the grassroots front. Specific projects like the Truecrypt code review and similar things no doubt happening en mass in Linux are going to be the major drivers for change as far as I can tell
Well, the analogy is flawed. Putting your data on someone else's server is not like putting your own valuables in your own car, it's like putting it in somebody else's car. Sure, you might have some of it in your car, but Facebook's car has a delivery service that's going to give it to anybody in your friends list that asks for it, and is probably going to keep it in their warehouse. The trade-off is, you never know if Facebook's car stops by the police station to scan/search for dangerous things, who handles or sees it along the way, etc. You may have some expectations due to the nature of the service, but you never have full control or who knows what about your stuff afterwards, and if they fail your standards, well... it was a free service, after all.
I'm going to have to object strenuously to this. All software? All operating systems? You're talking about planned obsolescence - Microsoft will love the idea if they can avoid the user-fed blowback. But, you're talking about not only forcing upgrades at regular intervals, you're talking about the end of software entering public domain as its copyright expires. The copyright will obviously still expire, but if it's un-hack-ably prevented from being able to run, it might as well cease to exist altogether. And that's ignoring the utter impossibility of such draconian DRM being so bulletproof and usable before the cutoff date.
Granted, it takes a long time for copyright to expire even as it is, but what would have happened if Pong, Super Mario Bros., and other classic games that people still look back to were to just up and vanish? Maybe you don't play games, and that's OK. But to say that future generations could not look back at what was created before, and learn firsthand the joys and sorrows of early game design and see how it affects modern game development is asking digital society never to learn from its past, to say nothing of more serious applications that are created every day. Not to mention business-critical software tied to industrial machinery. The only way to make this practical is to put exceptions in the policy big enough to invalidate the whole concept.
Just a fine point of detail, here: Windows 8 Pro has the downgrade option to Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate. Core edition has no downgrade rights. So, chances are, the machine you're purchasing will not be downgradable. That said, there are several systems (Lenovo in particular) which are downgraded out of the box. As you note, Windows 7 is also available for purchase as well, although this will probably be eliminated as Microsoft's SOP is to keep the last-gen OS around as long as it's only 1 generation behind. Once Windows 8.2 or 9 or whatever its name will be comes out, 7 will vanish from the regular channels.
I recall having tried Comodo some time ago, and found that it actually had more options than I wanted. Not that control is a bad thing, but going through a training process where you get interrupted every 5 minutes for a couple weeks by processes asking for permission to run is more trouble than it's worth for me. I like that feature in a firewall, but not so much an AV.
However, I do most of my security on the browser side with NoScript/NotScripts/AdBlock where most of the garbage doesn't even get onto the machine. All I really need from my AV is a red flag to wave if something should somehow get through and halt at run-time until I decide if I want it to run or not.
I don't expect my clients to deal with any of it, either. They're mostly in the "barely functional" category of technical literacy. So, relative to Avira (which works, but pops up a "Upgrade to our e-mail filter service!" message every day/boot last time I installed it), Avast is a good balance of effectiveness vs. hassle. I mean, the sandbox gets in the way once in awhile, but all you have to do is wait 15 seconds and then Avast restarts the process normally. That's within my tolerance; daily ads, particularly for my clients, are not.
How does complete unification solve the basic lunacy of bad government? Federal politics is already a big-business game that only well-moneyed candidates can participate in; dissolving all internal borders would be subjecting every level to this stupidity. Not to mention, if you think it's hard as an individual to participate in e.g. elections and effect any kind of change, at least you can make some kind of difference on local/state level if you really try; if nothing else, you can vote with your feet (and sales tax dollars). Federal politics is well beyond the average citizen, a drop in the ocean really.
Federalization is exactly the wrong direction. We need to have "all other rights are reserved to the States" back in force. One size does not fit all.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem.
See also: Roving Bug
This just in: Alienware machines are overpriced.
Details at 11
he is hidden behind a parked van and will not actually be visible
Alternatively, if the van was self-driving, it could park in a place where it is not obstructing useful visibility, and then come driving back when needed. Imagine getting rid of garages and instead having local car parks with modest parking fees. Put your kitchen/pantry in the old garage space for dropping off regular food supplies.
On Killing and On Combat are probably what it's based on
Use a search anonymizer. Replace your Google search provider in the browser with a less intrusive data-mining version of the service. Use it for patient searches instead of direct Google. Done.
Not to mention the other uses besides the biological intake. People forget that the US Constitution is written on hemp parchment. The list of uses for hemp fibers is astounding, and for us to shoot ourselves in the foot by denying ourselves use of such a prolific crop is a huge disadvantage economically. It's almost as stupid as if we were to ban silicon chips and thus electronics because kids get fat playing video games.
Say - the cop was actually innocent, he's a human and not just another cop. Now, he'll have a hard time supporting his family because no one wants to hire someone busted on the job.
One would hope a bit of judicious word choice would be employed as appropriate. I do have to wonder how often the undeserved negatives you're concerned about would actually be found here - if it's a real problem, that would be the real story IMHO. These are offenses which even the Blue Line has not protected them from, let's recall. I don't like the idea of throwing a good cop under the bus for something minor, but if it was a firing infraction I'd say name-and-shame is the right way to counteract the hubris and "Judge Dredd" attitude a lot of cops seem to have.
Being a cop is hard. It's a calling many are not up to. And yes, they all make mistakes at some point. But the reason it's hard is because it's so important to get it right. You screw it up bad enough to get fired over it - sorry, but your best use is as an example to the remaining officers, and prospective officers, of what they're not going to get away with. "Who watches the watchers?" It has to be us, or there is no accountability, without which the regular citizens become second-class victims-to-be.
I've attempted my own research on this and discovered that I could not count on official statistics at all. A lot of the issues you mention make direct comparisons difficult to useless. It takes, as far as I can tell, an in-depth and frankly professional (as in, paying someone with an actual degree in statistics) analysis to make anything compare properly.
My greatest frustration is with the NRA's influence having caused the (I could be misremembering which department) CDC to be unable to record/publish relevant information on a national level. I'm almost certain the NRA general constituency believe the stats will bear out firearms as a safe factor overall, yet the lobby prevents the actual numbers from being available, aside from the FBI stats which from what I've been able to tell are constantly redefined/recategorized to make historical comparisons impossible (a necessary component of evaluating trends following the passage/sunsetting of legislation).
I've had to resort to philosophical reasoning rather than real evidence to come to my conclusions. A proper analysis would be invaluable, and explaining the intricacies of the other flawed methodologies and why they need to be discarded would probably require a full book. One which I would most likely buy, if I could vet the author well enough to believe the relevant biases have been accounted for.
No, McAfee started sucking well before the Intel acquisition. It had more to do with the OEM ISP bundling deals and the flaky HTML interface since about '06-'08 as I recall
God I remember all the Norton Internet Security 2004 installs that would bork in the firewall and take down the entire network connection. I hate them for buying Sygate and locking it up but I am sure not going to miss that headache.
Exactly. Give me a secure dock for a Nexus device and call it a day. Auto manufacturers may be the only bunch worse than carriers at updating OS and software elements. I got a Nexus 7 (1st gen) with the express intention of hack-retrofitting a pogo pin dock into the dash and being able to remove the most expensive part and take it with me when I leave the vehicle. It's replaceable, upgrade-able, and has no retarded app availability issues, and comes without the ridiculous price premium. Installed media widget and active visualizer wallpaper; done.
The real irony here is the original justification of outlawing pot in the first place. "Gateway drug" to harder stuff was the original argument.
Here we are some years on and we can review and see that even if that theory was good (it's not), the price we pay to draw that line in the sand is way too high. I can grow coffee plants on my own land for noncommercial purposes that have more dangerous effect, and yet we're willing to let people break down your door, shoot your dog, and give your whole family PTSD you just might need drugs to help with, if only there was a miracle crop that could safely reduce anxiety... (seriously, have you *seen* the list of uses hemp has? The original US Constitution document was written on hemp parchment, among many other things)... oh, look at that house of cards collapse. Intent is a pretty stupid thing to consider without speaking to some more serious crime (i.e. first degree murder vs. manslaughter). I'm not saying you're wrong, but you really shouldn't be right in a just world.
Honestly, there's no moral theory that makes the law reasonable, particularly given how racist the enforcement tends to be, now that we have actual data on how the "war on drugs" is prosecuted. We'd save a boatload on prison spending if we legalized it across the board, to say nothing of restoring the actual freedom politicians like to reference but have gone AWOL in the last few decades, and maybe give the US some of its international dignity back.
As I recall, MS made the decision to save money by not including codec licenses with every Windows install. Instead, they want you to purchase the media pack upgrade - a pretty sour move, I'll agree.
Just one more reason to hate Windows 8, along with the fact that if something goes wrong and you need to boot Safe Mode: good luck.
If you're familiar with previous versions of Windows like Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP, you may remember that you could force the loading of what was then called the Advanced Boot Options menu by pressing F8. This is no longer possible in Windows 8.
In fact, even the widely publicized SHIFT+F8 option, which supposedly works to force Advanced Startup Options to appear (and ultimately Startup Settings and Safe Mode), only works on very slow computers. The amount of time that Windows 8 looks for SHIFT+F8 is so small on most Windows 8 devices and PCs that it borders on impossible to get it to work.
Same story every time MS launches an OS. Windows releases, includes drivers currently in the development channel, then around a year later new hardware is being produced and the drivers slowly become less and less available out of the box. Any day now, if you go to install Windows 8 with a generic install disk on a new computer (say, to clean off all the bundled crapware), you'll have the same problem. Hell I'm probably going to face that situation with one of my clients in the next month.
I figure the Linux devs have more of a big-picture concept of their work, vs. the Windows guys who have a very specific version they are targeting. Not that I give them any slack for it, but their priorities are probably different. You can blame MS for their driver signing process not including certain interoperability features I suppose, but let's not forget that chipsets do evolve and change as time goes on. I love an excuse to slam MS but it's been like this for over a decade.
This issue has been addressed here previously on slashdot.
I can say the above link matches very closely my own experience: having attempted the e-match thing myself once upon a time, I saved myself some major depression by giving up on it. Seriously, it truly is a soul-crushing experience if you aren't the lucky 10% or so of most-attractive contestants looking for the "typical" match. Also note that not everybody is comfortable with doing deeply personal things on the internet, for good reason (see: almost every Facebook story ever) - some of the smartest people won't be found online.
My recommendation: expand your interests a little, and get out somewhere that you are exposed to new people. Take up Tai Chi. Join a book club. Take a course or two of something new at a community college. Sure, there can be some money involved here, but you're likely to get a much higher class of results. Most importantly, keep in close contact with the better people you know. I met my current SO at a friend's house out of the blue.
Yeah, there's even an account of them swallowing an entire alien invasion fleet "due to a terrible miscalculation of scale."
This may be moderately true in the US - for now. It is certainly not true overseas, particularly Europe. They are up in arms over there, and it's going to be really bad for American business. It has already begun. Once business starts crashing, and the jobs are lost, we're going to discover we really do care. How much we care is going to depend on how many people can follow the chain of consequences, rather than just watching MTV or whatever the kids are doing these days, but inevitably Senators are going to be listening to their campaign contributors if nobody else.
What does "environmental enrichment" mean? Better nutrition? A nanny called GLaDOS? Your link does not say, and I'm rather skeptical of your argument. Given the vocabulary and glut of random facts I have picked up from reading, I'd say TFS's reported result is hardly surprising, but still significant to keep in mind for educational purposes
Is there any data that you want to be **completely unavailable** to law enforcement with **proper warrant**?
YES. We should not attempt to bend the rules of physics or disrupt the working structures that hold our society together simply for the benefit of our nation's police forces, at any level. I don't care who they get to sign off on it, building a time machine to go back in time and snoop on any documents that have historically been un-snoopable (even if it were possible) is not the way to fight nebulous enemies of the state. The difference between an invisible time machine, and blanket surveillance of all communications "which isn't looked at until there is a warrant" is essentially the same. We wouldn't give anyone the state-sanctioned ability to go back in time and use infrared cameras to peep through bedroom windows of even Marilyn Monroe, because it's simply not ethical; if they can do it to her, they can do it to anyone. And here we are, doing it to everyone, recording the whole thing, and calling it OK because hey, it wasn't a human being behind the telescope.
Look, I don't dispute that there are bad people attempting to do bad things. The question is really one of cost, and there's a popular Benjamin Franklin quote going around I could refer you to. My own take is that, if you give up the freedoms that have made America the best country on earth, you are sacrificing the parts which most make America worth defending in the first place. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Secret power is a dangerous society-killing drug: just say no.
I recall reading that spam makes up some 70% of internet traffic. Get your keywords into spam, and your noise propagation will massively skyrocket. Can you take over a botnet and repurpose it? That should be your goal, if so. If not, you might get involved with encryption of some kind. There's plenty of room for extra noise in encryption streams; throw in a few keywords into headers or tack it onto hash algorithms and you might have something as well.
I don't think you're going to get much traction with getting people to add something new to their work routine; at the scale we need, you're not even going to be above the noise floor. We already have noise generators which are of dubious effectiveness (mind you I run that one anyway).
Alternatively, do something to improve Linux usage in general. Once it becomes more widely used by Grandmas of the world, it's easier to close holes that allow the NSA to do what it does, or for knowledgeable people to write high-level versions of the kind of programs you're talking about. Think of having Tor relays on by default in more or less every neighborhood in the US. It's already a thorn in the side of snoopers; if it becomes a default option in for example Ubuntu, then the wider Linux is deployed, the greater effectiveness that change will have.
Sadly, I have little hope for change on the grassroots front. Specific projects like the Truecrypt code review and similar things no doubt happening en mass in Linux are going to be the major drivers for change as far as I can tell
Well, the analogy is flawed. Putting your data on someone else's server is not like putting your own valuables in your own car, it's like putting it in somebody else's car. Sure, you might have some of it in your car, but Facebook's car has a delivery service that's going to give it to anybody in your friends list that asks for it, and is probably going to keep it in their warehouse. The trade-off is, you never know if Facebook's car stops by the police station to scan/search for dangerous things, who handles or sees it along the way, etc. You may have some expectations due to the nature of the service, but you never have full control or who knows what about your stuff afterwards, and if they fail your standards, well... it was a free service, after all.
I'm going to have to object strenuously to this. All software? All operating systems? You're talking about planned obsolescence - Microsoft will love the idea if they can avoid the user-fed blowback. But, you're talking about not only forcing upgrades at regular intervals, you're talking about the end of software entering public domain as its copyright expires. The copyright will obviously still expire, but if it's un-hack-ably prevented from being able to run, it might as well cease to exist altogether. And that's ignoring the utter impossibility of such draconian DRM being so bulletproof and usable before the cutoff date.
Granted, it takes a long time for copyright to expire even as it is, but what would have happened if Pong, Super Mario Bros., and other classic games that people still look back to were to just up and vanish? Maybe you don't play games, and that's OK. But to say that future generations could not look back at what was created before, and learn firsthand the joys and sorrows of early game design and see how it affects modern game development is asking digital society never to learn from its past, to say nothing of more serious applications that are created every day. Not to mention business-critical software tied to industrial machinery. The only way to make this practical is to put exceptions in the policy big enough to invalidate the whole concept.
Just a fine point of detail, here: Windows 8 Pro has the downgrade option to Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate. Core edition has no downgrade rights. So, chances are, the machine you're purchasing will not be downgradable. That said, there are several systems (Lenovo in particular) which are downgraded out of the box. As you note, Windows 7 is also available for purchase as well, although this will probably be eliminated as Microsoft's SOP is to keep the last-gen OS around as long as it's only 1 generation behind. Once Windows 8.2 or 9 or whatever its name will be comes out, 7 will vanish from the regular channels.
I recall having tried Comodo some time ago, and found that it actually had more options than I wanted. Not that control is a bad thing, but going through a training process where you get interrupted every 5 minutes for a couple weeks by processes asking for permission to run is more trouble than it's worth for me. I like that feature in a firewall, but not so much an AV.
However, I do most of my security on the browser side with NoScript/NotScripts/AdBlock where most of the garbage doesn't even get onto the machine. All I really need from my AV is a red flag to wave if something should somehow get through and halt at run-time until I decide if I want it to run or not.
I don't expect my clients to deal with any of it, either. They're mostly in the "barely functional" category of technical literacy. So, relative to Avira (which works, but pops up a "Upgrade to our e-mail filter service!" message every day/boot last time I installed it), Avast is a good balance of effectiveness vs. hassle. I mean, the sandbox gets in the way once in awhile, but all you have to do is wait 15 seconds and then Avast restarts the process normally. That's within my tolerance; daily ads, particularly for my clients, are not.
This.
How does complete unification solve the basic lunacy of bad government? Federal politics is already a big-business game that only well-moneyed candidates can participate in; dissolving all internal borders would be subjecting every level to this stupidity. Not to mention, if you think it's hard as an individual to participate in e.g. elections and effect any kind of change, at least you can make some kind of difference on local/state level if you really try; if nothing else, you can vote with your feet (and sales tax dollars). Federal politics is well beyond the average citizen, a drop in the ocean really.
Federalization is exactly the wrong direction. We need to have "all other rights are reserved to the States" back in force. One size does not fit all.