Cutting it in half is probably no where near enough. I would, at a minimum, cut it down to 10% because in the short time it takes for the gasoline to be pumped from the cool, underground tank the temperature probably doesn't raise 40 degrees, it's probably more like 4 degrees. That would be 7 cents per week (actually 7.4 cents per week to be more accurate) for your $36. Over the course of a year that would be approximately $3.49 in extra cost to you.
Well first off there never is and never was such a thing as pure gasoline. Gasoline is a mixture of a large range of hydrocarbons, with all sorts of additives such as anti-jelling agents, corrosion inhibiters, drying agents, detergents, and so on. The figure I quoted it typical of most gasoline mixtures out there and is a good ballpark figure for estimating the thermal expansion. Is it 100% accurate for every single brand and mix of gasoline? No, but it's probably close enough for an informal Slashdot discussion.
Is your figure 2.4% based on any sort of real figures or are you just pulling them out of your butt to be disagreeable?
At 67.4 degrees Fahrenheit that means a 0.39% increase in volume when compared to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. This means if the pump meters out 1 gallon based on 60 degrees Fahrenheit and the tank is 67.4 degrees Fahrenheit you are actually getting 0.996 gallons. If you do the math that means for every $50 of gas you get you are getting $49.80 worth of gas.
Yes maybe they should up the estimated temperature but installing more expensive metering equipment for such a small difference? Two dimes for every $50 spent? That's a bit of overkill and the extra cost of the metering equipment would just get passed on to the consumer in higher gasoline costs. I'd rather lobby to have the estimated temperature be set to 67.4 degrees Fahrenheit and be done with it.
You are probably spot-on here. I calculate that if the temperature of the fuel is 100 degrees Fahrenheit then we are talking about a 2.11% increase in volume. This is calculated by the following formula:
Vf = Vi x (1 + 950 x 10^-6 x (Tf - Ti))
Vf is final volume, Vi is initial volume, Tf is final temperature in Celsius, Ti is initial temperature in Celsius
However, as you said, the fuel is stored underground and in the time it takes for it to get pumped up and metered out it probably changes very little in temperature. The worst case is a 2.11% increase in volume but the reality is probably a minute fraction of that.
The best thing would be to have meters that measured by mass or by density and rate of flow instead of by volume. I'm not sure what sort of metering they are using for their measurement but it's probably a simple flow rate meter which assumes a certain density to calculate volume. That's one of the more simple and least costly designs to use.
The corporate "standard" is Microsoft Enterprise Windows Email Exchange Protocol Vista Ultimate Edition 2007, not one of those pesky "open" standards that anyone can implement. Only communists use POP and IMAP, you know. Personally I think it's kinda funny that the acronym for "Microsoft Enterprise Windows Email Exchange Protocol" is "ME WEEP". I'm sure it's unintentional but it's oh-so-relevant here!:)
In World of Warcraft you can make around 100 gold per hour of work at level 70. If you are decently geared and know some prime locations that can go up but 100 gold an hour is a good rule of thumb. Given the economy of some nations $1.25 US per hour is probably not that bad of a wage for the workers although it certainly is no get rich quick scheme.
There is a big difference between "a different interpretation of the facts" and outright misquoting, re-editing, timeshifting, misattributing, and other ways of taking completely valid events and making them say something completely different. Michael Moore doesn't just interpret the facts one way, he takes the facts and edits and moves them around to say something completely different.
That is not interpreting the facts differently, that is performing cut-and-paste to make up new facts to fit his opinion. If someone took a speech that you had made and changed it in such a way that you were attributed with saying things you never did say then you would be hopping mad.
If Moore had a leg to stand on and the guts to stand on it then he'd let the pure, unvarnished facts speak for themselves. The man is a hack journalist at best and he has to resort to cheap editing tricks to make his points.
Before you place too much stock in the supposed evidence that was in Fahrenheit 9/11 you really should take the time to read Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11. A large part of that movie was a complete misrepresentation of fact, so much so that I wouldn't have faith in anything that Michael Moore puts out.
You should also read Truth about Bowling to see another case of how Michael Moore blatantly distorts the facts in his "documentaries".
I agree, Michael Moore influences me all the time. He influences me to change the channel when one of his movies are on. He influences me to avoid the movie theaters that play his movies. He influences me to not watch any show he is a part of. You're right, what an influence he has!
I think the main thing I have against him is his blatant massaging of the truth. He's just like the pop journalists only a thousand times worse. Just watch one of his movies if you want to see really great examples of how to take quotes out of context, how to rearrange video clips to misrepresent what actually happened, and how to simply make stuff up to support any paranoid fantasy that might cross your mind.
I think the man does far more to hurt the issues he champions than he does to further them. If he simply made an honest and truthful presentation he would be a lot more effective, instead he's the laughingstock of the documentary world - well, except for the few other rabid paranoid freaks who adore him.
Personally I think the d6 system that West End Games had for the original Star Wars RPG was close to perfect. It was simple, fun, and didn't get in the way of storytelling. Here's an article on the system: Star Wars role-playing game (WEG)
It was easy as a Game Master to assign difficulty numbers to actions and have the characters roll against them. The die rolling was fun (everyone loves lots of dice) and the wild die added an element of excitement to the roll. I once had a player roll the wild die 4 times! Everyone around the table was going crazy, especially since that roll saved their butts.
Advancement was easy and made sense, the skills system worked well, and the source material was amazing. The source material was so good that Lucasfilm considered it an authoritative source for Timothy Zahn when he was writing Thrawn Trilogy.
I have tried playing the Star Wars d20 system and I have come to the conclusion that there is no point in playing anything but the West End Games d6 version. They got it right the first time and there is really no reason to switch to the flavor of the week.
Yep, if it comes in as anything besides plain text I don't bother with it. I don't want my e-mail to be formatted in some odd way or to have tons of multimedia. I just want to be able to read the text. If there are attachments such as pictures, sound, or video I want to be able to save them where I want them and view them in an external viewer, after verifying them of course.
Whoever it was that came up with the idea of using HTML in e-mails is a total idiot. If you really need formatted text then make a PDF or zip up a HTML page and send it as an attachment and ALWAYS have a plain text alternative so that your message actually gets read under all circumstances.
This is why there are guidelines on how to write a good news article. You use plain language, this is not some bit of fluff poetry. You write in an inverted pyramid, a person should get the most basic and central information first and in later paragraphs you can elaborate. You attempt to answer who, what, where, when, why, and how in the first paragraph or two.
If you take a look at this site you will see a very good article on how to properly report the news. It makes me sick when I read some of today's major news outlets who treat the news as some sort of art project rather than simply reporting the facts.
If you are doing serious industrial work do not attempt to roll your own unless you absolutely have to. The money you save on professional instrumentation will be wasted in downtime and glitches.
There are plenty of professional solutions out there, from gas flow monitors to automated valve systems to integrated industrial process monitoring and control systems. If you are looking to control fuel and oxygen supplies then you need to get stuff that is blastproof so that a stray spark can't set anything off.
Start off with a major supplier like Grainger Industrial Supply. There are tons of components there that might suit your situation. Particularly look at their process monitoring section.
Ive noticed all companies, including apple, whose products i use, are giving you only a black and white choice. you either have the computer awake or its fully asleep.
i'd like to have a low power transfer mode, where the cpu is reduced (to 1 core at say 500 mhz), the monitor is turned off, and as much memory as possible is dedicated to the apps which are doing intensive file reads/writes. this will allow the hard drives to be used less by caching the files in ram and pulsing the hard disk.
Just a snippet from that page:
Some models support the Automatic setting, which allows your computer to switch rapidly back and forth between the Highest and Reduced settings to optimize energy use, depending on how much work the processor is doing. This is basically what you are asking for. Your computer will automatically scale the processors according to the tasks you have running. I believe just about all modern Macintoshes support the Automatic setting.
I care because it is a waste of coding effort and time. I also care because it is being used to misrepresent what the actual article is about. The "defectivebydesign" tag that was being discussed further up in this thread is a good example of that.
How many times have you seen an article tagged with "yes", "no", "maybe" and all other sort of contradictory nonsense. Tags literally mean nothing when this sort of thing happens and they now serve no purpose other than being a kind of high-tech graffiti that gets sprayed onto the article. If people want to comment on the submission then do so in the comments, if you want a quick idea of what the submission is about then read the title, summary, or look at what sections it is in.
Tags as they are now serve no good purpose other than being part of the "Web 2.0" fad that is in vogue right now. I was kind-of hoping that Slashdot wouldn't get sucked into its void.
This is why the whole tags system is worthless. The article has already been placed into one or more sections and has thus been "tagged" by the administrators. You have the title and the article itself to get more information about the article. Having user-applied tags is superfluous and can be misleading - either by accident or on purpose.
Personally I ignore all tags and I think it's a waste of time to have the whole tagging system. Either the moderators should tag the article or there should be no tagging. User-applied tags are just extra fluff that have little relevance to the actual article.
I mean what the hell is up with Apple users and their inferiority/persecution complexes?
Oh I dunno, maybe because they HAVE BEEN persecuted for quite some time now?
I'd say most Apple users just quietly use their Macintoshes and don't make a big deal about it but there are some very vocal zealots who make the rest of us look like lunatics. I'm sure you will find the same about Linux and Windows, maybe in different amounts or more or less vocal about it. Don't judge an entire population of Mac users by the vocal minority.
One other thing is that Microsoft is famous for doing these sort of things in order to discourage competition. This has made it very easy to see everything they do as a way of getting back at their competitors. Maybe the virtualization thing is for genuine security issues and maybe it's aimed directly at Apple, we don't know exactly but given the past actions of Microsoft you can't help but wonder about it.
Simple, make it a setting just like autofilling the user name is now. Create a preference setting that you can turn on or off depending on if you want it to automatically log you in each time. In an internet cafe setup you turn off the automatic log-in setting and thus each person has to enter in their name and password every time they want to log in.
Both of these are not exactly true. First of all Mac OS X has a better security model to start with than Windows. Ports are closed by default, Mac OS X uses a ton of open source tools as its foundation (more secure because they are peer reviewed more often), Apple is very on top of fixing vulnerabilities, a very comprehensive system of privilege separation, and there is no ActiveX so a browser exploit is very unlikely to take over the operating system. Even though Mac OS X is not invulnerable it is a much harder nut to crack than Windows.
The small market-share does help a bit but Apple has been a pretty big target over the last few years due to its grabbing headlines and the "smugness" of the users. There are hackers trying to break into Mac OS X because of this, so far they are unsuccessful but it's not for a lack of trying. I'm sure one day there will be a vulnerability but there is currently much less hassle when it comes to adware, spyware, and viruses on the Mac and I'm pretty sure it will be that way for a good while.
As far as the price of a Mac verses a Windows machine it's not so far off as you may think. A similarly-equipped machine from Dell or another manufacturer is going to be about the same price as a Mac. I'm talking about machines that feature-for-feature are very close, not some box that lacks stuff that comes standard on a Mac like Firewire ports and a real video card instead of some on-board integrated video crap.
If you are talking about a machine you build yourself then sure you'll save some cash. You'll also be spending your time pricing parts, waiting on deliveries, putting the machine together, and installing software. Time is money so don't count that as costing nothing. There is also the matter of things that go wrong with how the various parts interact and the lack of a comprehensive warranty for the entire system. Sometimes you waste a lot of money by trying to save money, I've built quite a few of my own machines and there are a lot of hidden costs involved.
I'm not saying that Apple is the second coming or anything like that, just that it deserves a good looking into if you are in the market for a new machine. There are a lot of positives about Mac OS X and there are many reasons some heavy hitters in the tech industry are buying them for their own personal uses.
Cute, but this is just social engineering and can be done just as easily with the password system that is currently in-place.
My idea is that Blizzard should try to have people enter their passwords as little as possible because each time you type in a password that's one more chance for a keylogger to capture your password. By only requiring people to enter their passwords the initial time you log in you make it so that a keylogger only has one chance to get your password rather than a chance every single time you log in.
As for the social engineering aspect you will never fully eliminate stupid people doing dumb things like responding to e-mails with sensitive information. The best Blizzard can do is to profile an account and attempt to identify whether or not the owner of the account is using the account. This could be done through the use of unique identifiers to the machine (MAC addresses, IP addresses, hardware TPM info, etc.) but it would have side-effects such as the account not being easily portable between locations.
There will always be some way to take over another person's account, the thing is to take reasonable steps to make this difficult. Only requiring a password once and then keeping an encrypted version of that password for later login sessions will help make it harder to compromise an account.
I don't want to get into a huge pissing contest about what operating system is best, whatever you like to use is great, however I honestly don't understand how anyone can run an operating system that gets exploited constantly. I know that Windows is the big target and Mac OS X is not completely invulnerable to being exploited but the fact is that right now there are no exploits in the wild for Mac OS X.
I use both Windows (I manage a bunch of Windows boxes at work) and Mac OS X and it is such a headache on the Windows side. You need to run several spamware/adware/virus protection programs, you have to completely lock down everything on a system, even updating a Windows machine is a huge hassle to do. Now maybe that will be the future of Mac OS X but so far it's been a cake walk - everything just works, updating is a snap, and I don't run ANY additional software to secure my system. I'm sure that I will have to some day but overall Mac OS X seems to be better thought-out when it comes to security than Windows.
I know that Vista has supposedly changed the Windows security model so that Windows is less exploitable but I've seen some serious nightmares in upgrading to Vista so I think it's generally agreed that you are better off waiting for Vista to mature before people start mass adopting it. If you are in the market for a new computer why not simply adopt Mac OS X instead? It's mature, stable, works easily, and if you get an Intel Mac you can always switch to Vista at a later date if you want to.
Anyways, use whatever operating system you like best. The best thing about having multiple, viable operating systems around is that it encourages competition and innovation which is great for the consumer.
You should only have to enter your account name and password once, the first time you log onto the account. Blizzard could then encrypt your password along with some details unique to your computer system and use that to automatically verify your account the next time you log in.
If for some reason Blizzard needs to re-create the stored, encrypted password then it could ask you for the password again but with a statement to the effect of "Blizzard can no longer find your stored password. Verify that your computer is not compromised before you re-enter your password."
Also I think that the password you use for your World of Warcraft forum access should be required to be different than the in-game password. That way it would be harder for a keylogger to get your password when you log into the forums. They'll get your forum password but not your account password so all they will be able to do is troll the forums with your characters.
Well I think that you have to understand just who is going to be vocal on the support forums. Is it going to be the people that the update worked flawlessly or is it going to be people who encountered problems? Obviously most people visit support forums to complain about problems so you are going to get a much larger ratio of "it's broke" to "it works".
For what it's worth the update worked flawlessly for me on several systems I have that use wireless. I'm not saying that there is no problem for other people but I have everything working just fine. That being said any time I have had a problem with Apple's stuff they have fixed it fairly promptly. I hope the same happens with you.
Slashdot Mirror
Cutting it in half is probably no where near enough. I would, at a minimum, cut it down to 10% because in the short time it takes for the gasoline to be pumped from the cool, underground tank the temperature probably doesn't raise 40 degrees, it's probably more like 4 degrees. That would be 7 cents per week (actually 7.4 cents per week to be more accurate) for your $36. Over the course of a year that would be approximately $3.49 in extra cost to you.
Well first off there never is and never was such a thing as pure gasoline. Gasoline is a mixture of a large range of hydrocarbons, with all sorts of additives such as anti-jelling agents, corrosion inhibiters, drying agents, detergents, and so on. The figure I quoted it typical of most gasoline mixtures out there and is a good ballpark figure for estimating the thermal expansion. Is it 100% accurate for every single brand and mix of gasoline? No, but it's probably close enough for an informal Slashdot discussion.
Is your figure 2.4% based on any sort of real figures or are you just pulling them out of your butt to be disagreeable?
At 67.4 degrees Fahrenheit that means a 0.39% increase in volume when compared to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. This means if the pump meters out 1 gallon based on 60 degrees Fahrenheit and the tank is 67.4 degrees Fahrenheit you are actually getting 0.996 gallons. If you do the math that means for every $50 of gas you get you are getting $49.80 worth of gas.
Yes maybe they should up the estimated temperature but installing more expensive metering equipment for such a small difference? Two dimes for every $50 spent? That's a bit of overkill and the extra cost of the metering equipment would just get passed on to the consumer in higher gasoline costs. I'd rather lobby to have the estimated temperature be set to 67.4 degrees Fahrenheit and be done with it.
You are probably spot-on here. I calculate that if the temperature of the fuel is 100 degrees Fahrenheit then we are talking about a 2.11% increase in volume. This is calculated by the following formula:
Vf = Vi x (1 + 950 x 10^-6 x (Tf - Ti))
Vf is final volume, Vi is initial volume, Tf is final temperature in Celsius, Ti is initial temperature in Celsius
However, as you said, the fuel is stored underground and in the time it takes for it to get pumped up and metered out it probably changes very little in temperature. The worst case is a 2.11% increase in volume but the reality is probably a minute fraction of that.
The best thing would be to have meters that measured by mass or by density and rate of flow instead of by volume. I'm not sure what sort of metering they are using for their measurement but it's probably a simple flow rate meter which assumes a certain density to calculate volume. That's one of the more simple and least costly designs to use.
Here's a link for replacing the kernel panic image in Mac OS X:
A New Screen of Death for Mac OS X
In World of Warcraft you can make around 100 gold per hour of work at level 70. If you are decently geared and know some prime locations that can go up but 100 gold an hour is a good rule of thumb. Given the economy of some nations $1.25 US per hour is probably not that bad of a wage for the workers although it certainly is no get rich quick scheme.
There is a big difference between "a different interpretation of the facts" and outright misquoting, re-editing, timeshifting, misattributing, and other ways of taking completely valid events and making them say something completely different. Michael Moore doesn't just interpret the facts one way, he takes the facts and edits and moves them around to say something completely different.
That is not interpreting the facts differently, that is performing cut-and-paste to make up new facts to fit his opinion. If someone took a speech that you had made and changed it in such a way that you were attributed with saying things you never did say then you would be hopping mad.
If Moore had a leg to stand on and the guts to stand on it then he'd let the pure, unvarnished facts speak for themselves. The man is a hack journalist at best and he has to resort to cheap editing tricks to make his points.
Before you place too much stock in the supposed evidence that was in Fahrenheit 9/11 you really should take the time to read Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11. A large part of that movie was a complete misrepresentation of fact, so much so that I wouldn't have faith in anything that Michael Moore puts out.
You should also read Truth about Bowling to see another case of how Michael Moore blatantly distorts the facts in his "documentaries".
I agree, Michael Moore influences me all the time. He influences me to change the channel when one of his movies are on. He influences me to avoid the movie theaters that play his movies. He influences me to not watch any show he is a part of. You're right, what an influence he has!
I think the main thing I have against him is his blatant massaging of the truth. He's just like the pop journalists only a thousand times worse. Just watch one of his movies if you want to see really great examples of how to take quotes out of context, how to rearrange video clips to misrepresent what actually happened, and how to simply make stuff up to support any paranoid fantasy that might cross your mind.
I think the man does far more to hurt the issues he champions than he does to further them. If he simply made an honest and truthful presentation he would be a lot more effective, instead he's the laughingstock of the documentary world - well, except for the few other rabid paranoid freaks who adore him.
Personally I think the d6 system that West End Games had for the original Star Wars RPG was close to perfect. It was simple, fun, and didn't get in the way of storytelling. Here's an article on the system: Star Wars role-playing game (WEG)
It was easy as a Game Master to assign difficulty numbers to actions and have the characters roll against them. The die rolling was fun (everyone loves lots of dice) and the wild die added an element of excitement to the roll. I once had a player roll the wild die 4 times! Everyone around the table was going crazy, especially since that roll saved their butts.
Advancement was easy and made sense, the skills system worked well, and the source material was amazing. The source material was so good that Lucasfilm considered it an authoritative source for Timothy Zahn when he was writing Thrawn Trilogy.
I have tried playing the Star Wars d20 system and I have come to the conclusion that there is no point in playing anything but the West End Games d6 version. They got it right the first time and there is really no reason to switch to the flavor of the week.
Yep, if it comes in as anything besides plain text I don't bother with it. I don't want my e-mail to be formatted in some odd way or to have tons of multimedia. I just want to be able to read the text. If there are attachments such as pictures, sound, or video I want to be able to save them where I want them and view them in an external viewer, after verifying them of course.
Whoever it was that came up with the idea of using HTML in e-mails is a total idiot. If you really need formatted text then make a PDF or zip up a HTML page and send it as an attachment and ALWAYS have a plain text alternative so that your message actually gets read under all circumstances.
This is why there are guidelines on how to write a good news article. You use plain language, this is not some bit of fluff poetry. You write in an inverted pyramid, a person should get the most basic and central information first and in later paragraphs you can elaborate. You attempt to answer who, what, where, when, why, and how in the first paragraph or two.
If you take a look at this site you will see a very good article on how to properly report the news. It makes me sick when I read some of today's major news outlets who treat the news as some sort of art project rather than simply reporting the facts.
Take a look at the ISA CSE License. There might be other certifications and licenses but the CSE License is a major one for sure.
(ISA is the Instrument Society of America, CSE is Control Systems Engineers)
If you are doing serious industrial work do not attempt to roll your own unless you absolutely have to. The money you save on professional instrumentation will be wasted in downtime and glitches.
There are plenty of professional solutions out there, from gas flow monitors to automated valve systems to integrated industrial process monitoring and control systems. If you are looking to control fuel and oxygen supplies then you need to get stuff that is blastproof so that a stray spark can't set anything off.
Start off with a major supplier like Grainger Industrial Supply. There are tons of components there that might suit your situation. Particularly look at their process monitoring section.
You mean something like this?
http://docs.info.apple.com/jarticle.html?path=Mac
Just a snippet from that page: Some models support the Automatic setting, which allows your computer to switch rapidly back and forth between the Highest and Reduced settings to optimize energy use, depending on how much work the processor is doing. This is basically what you are asking for. Your computer will automatically scale the processors according to the tasks you have running. I believe just about all modern Macintoshes support the Automatic setting.
I care because it is a waste of coding effort and time. I also care because it is being used to misrepresent what the actual article is about. The "defectivebydesign" tag that was being discussed further up in this thread is a good example of that.
How many times have you seen an article tagged with "yes", "no", "maybe" and all other sort of contradictory nonsense. Tags literally mean nothing when this sort of thing happens and they now serve no purpose other than being a kind of high-tech graffiti that gets sprayed onto the article. If people want to comment on the submission then do so in the comments, if you want a quick idea of what the submission is about then read the title, summary, or look at what sections it is in.
Tags as they are now serve no good purpose other than being part of the "Web 2.0" fad that is in vogue right now. I was kind-of hoping that Slashdot wouldn't get sucked into its void.
This is why the whole tags system is worthless. The article has already been placed into one or more sections and has thus been "tagged" by the administrators. You have the title and the article itself to get more information about the article. Having user-applied tags is superfluous and can be misleading - either by accident or on purpose.
Personally I ignore all tags and I think it's a waste of time to have the whole tagging system. Either the moderators should tag the article or there should be no tagging. User-applied tags are just extra fluff that have little relevance to the actual article.
Oh I dunno, maybe because they HAVE BEEN persecuted for quite some time now?
I'd say most Apple users just quietly use their Macintoshes and don't make a big deal about it but there are some very vocal zealots who make the rest of us look like lunatics. I'm sure you will find the same about Linux and Windows, maybe in different amounts or more or less vocal about it. Don't judge an entire population of Mac users by the vocal minority.
One other thing is that Microsoft is famous for doing these sort of things in order to discourage competition. This has made it very easy to see everything they do as a way of getting back at their competitors. Maybe the virtualization thing is for genuine security issues and maybe it's aimed directly at Apple, we don't know exactly but given the past actions of Microsoft you can't help but wonder about it.
Simple, make it a setting just like autofilling the user name is now. Create a preference setting that you can turn on or off depending on if you want it to automatically log you in each time. In an internet cafe setup you turn off the automatic log-in setting and thus each person has to enter in their name and password every time they want to log in.
Both of these are not exactly true. First of all Mac OS X has a better security model to start with than Windows. Ports are closed by default, Mac OS X uses a ton of open source tools as its foundation (more secure because they are peer reviewed more often), Apple is very on top of fixing vulnerabilities, a very comprehensive system of privilege separation, and there is no ActiveX so a browser exploit is very unlikely to take over the operating system. Even though Mac OS X is not invulnerable it is a much harder nut to crack than Windows.
The small market-share does help a bit but Apple has been a pretty big target over the last few years due to its grabbing headlines and the "smugness" of the users. There are hackers trying to break into Mac OS X because of this, so far they are unsuccessful but it's not for a lack of trying. I'm sure one day there will be a vulnerability but there is currently much less hassle when it comes to adware, spyware, and viruses on the Mac and I'm pretty sure it will be that way for a good while.
As far as the price of a Mac verses a Windows machine it's not so far off as you may think. A similarly-equipped machine from Dell or another manufacturer is going to be about the same price as a Mac. I'm talking about machines that feature-for-feature are very close, not some box that lacks stuff that comes standard on a Mac like Firewire ports and a real video card instead of some on-board integrated video crap.
If you are talking about a machine you build yourself then sure you'll save some cash. You'll also be spending your time pricing parts, waiting on deliveries, putting the machine together, and installing software. Time is money so don't count that as costing nothing. There is also the matter of things that go wrong with how the various parts interact and the lack of a comprehensive warranty for the entire system. Sometimes you waste a lot of money by trying to save money, I've built quite a few of my own machines and there are a lot of hidden costs involved.
I'm not saying that Apple is the second coming or anything like that, just that it deserves a good looking into if you are in the market for a new machine. There are a lot of positives about Mac OS X and there are many reasons some heavy hitters in the tech industry are buying them for their own personal uses.
Cute, but this is just social engineering and can be done just as easily with the password system that is currently in-place.
My idea is that Blizzard should try to have people enter their passwords as little as possible because each time you type in a password that's one more chance for a keylogger to capture your password. By only requiring people to enter their passwords the initial time you log in you make it so that a keylogger only has one chance to get your password rather than a chance every single time you log in.
As for the social engineering aspect you will never fully eliminate stupid people doing dumb things like responding to e-mails with sensitive information. The best Blizzard can do is to profile an account and attempt to identify whether or not the owner of the account is using the account. This could be done through the use of unique identifiers to the machine (MAC addresses, IP addresses, hardware TPM info, etc.) but it would have side-effects such as the account not being easily portable between locations.
There will always be some way to take over another person's account, the thing is to take reasonable steps to make this difficult. Only requiring a password once and then keeping an encrypted version of that password for later login sessions will help make it harder to compromise an account.
I agree with you about Windows and exploits.
I don't want to get into a huge pissing contest about what operating system is best, whatever you like to use is great, however I honestly don't understand how anyone can run an operating system that gets exploited constantly. I know that Windows is the big target and Mac OS X is not completely invulnerable to being exploited but the fact is that right now there are no exploits in the wild for Mac OS X.
I use both Windows (I manage a bunch of Windows boxes at work) and Mac OS X and it is such a headache on the Windows side. You need to run several spamware/adware/virus protection programs, you have to completely lock down everything on a system, even updating a Windows machine is a huge hassle to do. Now maybe that will be the future of Mac OS X but so far it's been a cake walk - everything just works, updating is a snap, and I don't run ANY additional software to secure my system. I'm sure that I will have to some day but overall Mac OS X seems to be better thought-out when it comes to security than Windows.
I know that Vista has supposedly changed the Windows security model so that Windows is less exploitable but I've seen some serious nightmares in upgrading to Vista so I think it's generally agreed that you are better off waiting for Vista to mature before people start mass adopting it. If you are in the market for a new computer why not simply adopt Mac OS X instead? It's mature, stable, works easily, and if you get an Intel Mac you can always switch to Vista at a later date if you want to.
Anyways, use whatever operating system you like best. The best thing about having multiple, viable operating systems around is that it encourages competition and innovation which is great for the consumer.
Even easier - stop having people log in.
You should only have to enter your account name and password once, the first time you log onto the account. Blizzard could then encrypt your password along with some details unique to your computer system and use that to automatically verify your account the next time you log in.
If for some reason Blizzard needs to re-create the stored, encrypted password then it could ask you for the password again but with a statement to the effect of "Blizzard can no longer find your stored password. Verify that your computer is not compromised before you re-enter your password."
Also I think that the password you use for your World of Warcraft forum access should be required to be different than the in-game password. That way it would be harder for a keylogger to get your password when you log into the forums. They'll get your forum password but not your account password so all they will be able to do is troll the forums with your characters.
Well I think that you have to understand just who is going to be vocal on the support forums. Is it going to be the people that the update worked flawlessly or is it going to be people who encountered problems? Obviously most people visit support forums to complain about problems so you are going to get a much larger ratio of "it's broke" to "it works".
For what it's worth the update worked flawlessly for me on several systems I have that use wireless. I'm not saying that there is no problem for other people but I have everything working just fine. That being said any time I have had a problem with Apple's stuff they have fixed it fairly promptly. I hope the same happens with you.