There's actually a 4th possibility, and I would submit it seems more accurate than your #2. It is:
d) A third factor (maybe genetics, to make something up) causes both the raping and the porn addiction
After all, it's probably not like the rapist becomes addicted after raping someone, which is what your (b) would imply.
I somewhat agree... the message could have been more powerful if they had done something like that.
(Keep in mind that I can't actually verify that the Naval Academy shows it; I just saw that on the internet, and we all know everything there can be trusted.)
But they didn't really tackle any moral quandries.
"Who Watches the Watchers"? "First Contact" (the TNG episode, not movie)? "The Drumhead"? "The Defector"? "The Offspring"? "The Wounded"? "The Quality of Life"? "Tapestry"? "The Pegasus"? Many undergrad Artificial Intelligence classes routinely show "The Measure of a Man" to discuss sentience in manufactured beings. Hell, I've heard that the Naval Academy has shown "The First Duty" to incoming cadets as discussion about the honor code.
All of these episodes naturally could spawn discussions of a similar caliber to those mentioned in the summary for this/. article. A couple (particularly "First Contact" and those dealing with machine rights, which is admittedly many) aren't really applicable to the world today, but that's why we have an imagination. And only one of them is about Prime Directive violations, and it's one that Picard didn't cause. Hell, watch The Drumhead, from 1991, and tell me that that doesn't have eerie parallels to our terror hunt.
3.0 was relesed not long ago. In two months we'll get 3.1 which addresses more than 1000 issues.
But they're not addressing a lot of issues that people actually care about. This feature request is one of the most wanted features of writer (an equivalent to normal mode, or at least collapsible margins in page mode) with almost 20 pages of comments, most of which are saying how this issue is at least very important, and probably half of which are saying that it's a blocker for them or someone else using OO. (FWIW, I agree. None of Writer's features, nor them all together, make up for this in my mind.) The request has been outstanding for seven years, since two weeks after version 1.0 was released and there is very little visible progress on it and no target date.
Oh good... OO 3.1 sorts better. Whoopdie do.
(I'm probably understating the importance of the sorting thing, and there are things in the 3.1 update that I care about, like being able to accept or reject changes using change tracking through a right click instead of a dialog that is akward and annoying city. (Oh good, so Writer is now at Word 2000 level on that feature, and only 10 years later. Now all they need to do to make that feature good (instead of merely usable) is to put deleted text out in the margin so it doesn't mess with the page layout and disrupt reading.) But I still think they are leaving their main issues behind.)
If you use Office 2000, and someone sends you a 2003 or 2007 file, you're forced to upgrade.
To my knowledge, the DOC format didn't change between 2000 and 2003. (In fact, I'm pretty sure it didn't change from 97 to 2003.) Furthermore, regarding 2007 documents (docx), MS freely offers conversion filters for older versions all the way back to Office 97.
On this point, you're spouting FUD.
Futhermore, if you think DOCX hasn't really changed from the 97 format, I don't know what to tell you. DOCX is vastly different from the DOC file format.
On this point, of course, you are totally correct.
Calc also rocks, and is better then Excel for my usage pattern anyway.
To be honest, I don't use either Calc or Excel very much. The version of Excel I was using for a while started to piss me off for a couple dumb reasons (the main one was that it was sort of halfway between a SDI and MDI program, which meant that I was constantly doing the wrong thing) so I briefly switched to Calc, but it had some issues too (don't remember what they were) so I switched back. This was a while ago though.
So I probably shouldn't have been quite as categorical in my dismissal of OO outside of Writer, because Writer and Impress are the only ones I feel that I can speak to their quality.
I use Impressive now for all my presentations, no matter what program produced them...
Just looking at the front page, that looks pretty slick; I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the link....but most of my new presentations are being made with LaTeX Beamer.
[Not sure why I wrote all of this... whatever.]
Beamer is also pretty slick; I've used it a number of times. Both Beamer and PPT have a bunch of deficiencies relative to each other though, so which one I prefer varies. PPT, especially 2007:
Can easily create some pretty darn nice graphics, while about the nicest graphics I've seen produced in Latex are in the manual for the PGF package, and they aren't quite as nice.
Has presenter view. I keep going back to this, but it's a very important feature to me most of the time. The alternative is to deal with paper printouts of presenter notes (or memorize, which is often a non-option), which just isn't anywhere close to as nice, even if they are ultimately generated from the same Beamer document. (A feature for Impressive that would get me to switch with almost no reservation would be to allow you to build two PDFs -- just the slides, and the notes -- and display them side by side, with a timer and such on the notes page. Or just a text document for the notes or something.) (Ironically, I'll be using PPT and/or Beamer slides more this semester than I ever have before, but since the A/V setup I'll be using sucks, I won't be able to use presenter mode anyway, which is the only reason that I may switch to Beamer and PGF pretty soon.)
Lets you embed things like movies, and lets you animate the objects in a slide. The latter especially is often used just for flash, but there are plenty of times that animation adds clarity. It's just too bad that it's a major PITA to do that sort of thing in PPT. The most animation that you can do in a Beamer document, at least to my knowledge, are slide transitions.
The sorts of presentations I'm doing this semester are often going to be very image/diagram heavy, and placement of those is much easier in PPT than Beamer.
By contrast, Beamer gives you:
In many ways, nicer presentations, but this is pretty dependent on the type of presentation too. If you don't have occasion to use things like their blocks, aren't doing a math-heavy presentation, and don't want the automatic navigation features like the bars at top and/or bottom, the differences are pretty minor. And if you start doing graphics not built with an external tool (and doing this has a lot of advantages), PPT's advantage starts to show up.
Makes math way better. (But I'm not doing much math stuff.)
Is programmable, which gives you things like PGF's tree library (which I probably will be using a lot).
Works way better with version control
So basically, if I'm doing a math-heavy presentation, Beamer is the only reasonable choice (maybe unless you get something like Aurora which lets you put Latex in Office documents); if you're doing text-heavy presentation, which is a better choice depends on whether you want presenter mode; if you're doing a graphics-heavy presentation, I think a lot of the time PPT is the better choice.
I would say it may have quite a lot to do with it... it's either a pretty big coincidence, or they are trying to bury the news by releasing it when the networks actually have something else to report on.
In particular, I recently had to open a MS Office 2007 document(docx), and rather than getting the filter into MS Word, I just loaded in into OO.org.
docx has probably received a ton more effort than pptx, but I just did a presentation in PowerPoint 2007, and for an experiment tried opening it in Impress 3, and it failed miserably; it's not even remotely usable.
This is a typical slide from the presentation I'm talking about; this is what it looks like in Impress 3. Even slides with just text render like someone crapped on the slide. (I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt about the fact that the text size changed in case there are font issues; I'm opening it in OO for Linux, not Windows. But the new borders on the text box? The date that flat out wasn't there in the original? The lack of the background color?)
It also didn't read my presenter notes.
As for non-MS Office compatibility features, the lack of a presenter view in Impress makes it a non-starter IMHO.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while Writer is damn good and I have only pretty minor complaints about it relative to Word, once you get outside Writer the comparative quality drops tremendously.
(While I'm at it, if OO wants to provide the PPT killer, provide a better animation system based on keyframing, like Flash or a 3D modeler or something. PowerPoint's is only slightly more fun to use than stabbing your eyes out with a fork for any animations that are intended to convey useful information.)
So in your first analogy, someone earning $60,000 gets cut down to $50,000, they are only losing $5,000.
They will be cut down to $55,000, not $50,000. (I suspect this is what you meant by saying they are only losing $5K.)
This is the point the grandparent was making.
What the parent said is "If it can knock you down into a lower tax bracket you can come out ahead" but this isn't true. The person making $60,000 will still have $5,000 more in take-home pay then someone making $50,000, it's just not proportionally larger. Again, all other things being equal (people making more may be able to pay someone better for tax advice or something), someone in the higher tax bracket will always have more than someone in the lower tax bracket.
(The US's AMT, which Delwin mentioned, is an exception, but it's kind of a special case.)
About the only way what the grandparent said could make sense is if you're looking at your hourly rate rather than total pay.
If it can knock you down into a lower tax bracket you can come out ahead.
You will never decrease your tax liability by making less enough to compensate for making less, all other things being equal, even under a system as complex as the US tax code. If you think it can, tax brackets don't work the way I suspect you think they do.
For instance, suppose in a hypothetical universe the brackets were set up so that $0-$50000 was taxed 0% and $50000+ was taxed 50%. If you made $60,000, people would say they fall into the upper bracket, but that doesn't mean they are paying $30,000 in taxes (which would imply that getting a $10,001 pay cut would increase take home pay by 20 grand). Rather, they pay 50% of the amount of money they make in excess of $50,000, meaning they will pay $5,000.
Continuing the analogy, if there was another bracket starting at $100,000 with 75% tax, someone making $200,000 would pay: * 0% of the first $50,000 * 50% of the next $50,000 (or $25,000) * 75% of the next $100,000 (or $75,000) giving a total tax liability of $100,000, rather than the $150,000 they would have to pay if they were paying 75% on everything.
Now, there are changes to your employment state that can have big consequences. I am a grad student, and am taking up a teaching position this semester. Before I was a research assistant. RAs are exempt from FICA taxes (this is at least true in my state, and I think is common) but as an instructor I won't be, so even though I will be getting a nice raise, I'll also essentially be taking an instant 7.5% pay cut too. There may be something similar going from part time to full time or something like that which would apply. But in any case, if taking a pay cut actually increases your take home pay, it is definitely not because it puts you into a different tax bracket.
I don't care, and my post is offtopic (as is this one, so feel free to mod it down too). I've got close to 4000 posts (I can't find the exact number since/. made their user pages suck ass), a fair percentage of which are modded up and almost none of which are modded down, so it's not as if I'm hurting for karma. I'm more annoyed at having to undo another moderation I made in this topic. Oh well, c'est la vie. Thanks for sticking up for me though.;-)
Just FYI, the delete trick works for the URL bar suggestions too... so if you visit pennyarcade.com instead of penny-arcade.com a couple times by accident, it won't sit at the top of the list when you type "pen."
Not pulling them off of their plane. But after that, at the very least compensating them for the loss which they caused, which was the difference in ticket prices. (Alternately, rebooking them on a later AirTran flight.)
Actually, it sounds like the airline gave them a refund right away.
They got a refund on their ticket purchase price, but not on the replacement tickets which they had to buy thanks to AirTran, likely at a substantially higher price than what they paid for the original AirTran tickets.
But our "see something, say something" mentality will ensure that this incident gets repeated again... I meant to downplay the uniqueness of the event more than the size of the injustice.
That's reasonable. Though at the same time, perhaps if we play up these events when they happen, it will help stop them from happening.
Anyway, the airline has since apologized and offered to fly them back home for free, and frankly I think that the whole thing got blown out of proportion.
Though at the same time, if it was in fact blown out of proportion (which I don't quite believe), I suspect that the only reason they got their refund and apology was because it was blown out of proportion.
With sudo you never see a question what exactly you are allowing or not allowing to be done......nor in UAC. Where on here or here (or any other screen shot you can find) does it tell you exactly what you are allowing or not allowing?
I think you may have a misunderstanding of UAC. UAC doesn't prompt for permissions to perform a particular action (e.g. "I want to write to C:\Windows\System32"), it prompts for permission to upgrade a process to essentially the effective UID root, and it will (if granted) have those rights for the duration of the process. Later, if it wants to perform a different privileged action (e.g. "I want to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry") it will already have root, so there will not be a second UAC prompt....you only have to verify that executable is the one you have started.
And, because of what I said above, this is also true of UAC. The only information the UAC prompt gives you is the executable name, which you can verify is what you intended. (Also the digital signature if present.)
With a proper (granted, not one that is usually set by default) configuration of sudo, all non-administrative utilities are allowed to be started with sudo in the first place, so user entering the password merely confirms that he intends to run administrative utility.
First, I would dispute your assertion that non-administrative utilities shouldn't be started with sudo. I think it's quite reasonable to run almost any of the most common utilities -- ls, cat, cp, mv, grep, find, etc. -- with sudo. I'm not a sysadmin, but coming from the perspective of a home user, it would irk me to no end if I couldn't do that. (Actually it wouldn't because of my aforementioned habit of keeping a root shell open at all times, but that's somewhat beside the point.) Outside of the home environment, sudo does have a couple significant advantages over UAC, most notably that UAC (AFAIK) requires the root password instead of the current user's password.
Second, I could say the same thing about UAC that you say second: acknowledging the UAC prompt merely confirms that the user wants to run the administrative utility.
I'm still not seeing anything more than a minor difference (that at least I would put pretty firmly in favor of UAC) unless you are actually misunderstanding UAC's behavior as I suggested above.
It's left to the user to determine if it's supposed to be valid or not, and user usually has no idea how to determine that.
The user has about as much information as you do for sudo, at least as most users are concerned....so user only has to check if executable name matches.
Which is basically the same as UAC prompts. They give you the executable name (though "helpfully" the full path is shortened with "..." if it's too long to fit in the window) which you can check.
In fact, for most users, you will often get way more information than you get with sudo: the name of the application (in human-readable form, rather than just the exe name) and publisher, with electronic signature verified. Checking that you're running/usr/bin/cat or whatever is certainly a good idea so you don't pick up something else in your $PATH, but even that doesn't give you that level of authentication.
I'm not the original poster, but I really wish Apple would let me. But they insist on selling OS X only with their own hardware, and then don't make hardware I both want and can afford. To my eyes, iMacs are stupid because it doesn't make sense to throw away a hundred or two hundred dollar monitor when you get a new computer. Hell, the bulk of my current system is about a year old, but I have components in there from 2004, and that's just what's in the main case. The Mac mini is probably even less upgradable than the iMac, and has for a moderately powerful system today is an underpowered processor and small amount of RAM. (For about $200 less what I paid for my current over a year ago, you get (1) dual core processor instead of quad core, (2) the same amount of RAM, (3) basically integrated graphics shared with main RAM instead of an 8800GTS. Wow, great deal.) Now at the other end is the Mac Pro. Beautiful systems, but start at twice the cost of my current system (this time I think about comparable in power), which is well out of my price range. Then you add on top of that the fact that I like to build my own system, and Apple has put itself out of my market. But I very well might actually get one if it weren't for those other problems.
On the laptop side, last I checked they're in the same ballpark as a Thinkpad, so that's not so bad. But if I were to buy a laptop now, I'd probably get either like a netbook or a tablet... again, neither of which Apple sells.
So from my standpoint, I'd love to run OS X... but I'm not going to pirate it, I'm not going to give Apple if they are going to call me a criminal for hacking it to run, I'm not going to buy Apple hardware, and Apple won't let me run it otherwise, so I'm out of luck on that point.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 3 possibilities here:
There's actually a 4th possibility, and I would submit it seems more accurate than your #2. It is:
d) A third factor (maybe genetics, to make something up) causes both the raping and the porn addiction
After all, it's probably not like the rapist becomes addicted after raping someone, which is what your (b) would imply.
I somewhat agree... the message could have been more powerful if they had done something like that.
(Keep in mind that I can't actually verify that the Naval Academy shows it; I just saw that on the internet, and we all know everything there can be trusted.)
But they didn't really tackle any moral quandries.
"Who Watches the Watchers"? "First Contact" (the TNG episode, not movie)? "The Drumhead"? "The Defector"? "The Offspring"? "The Wounded"? "The Quality of Life"? "Tapestry"? "The Pegasus"? Many undergrad Artificial Intelligence classes routinely show "The Measure of a Man" to discuss sentience in manufactured beings. Hell, I've heard that the Naval Academy has shown "The First Duty" to incoming cadets as discussion about the honor code.
All of these episodes naturally could spawn discussions of a similar caliber to those mentioned in the summary for this /. article. A couple (particularly "First Contact" and those dealing with machine rights, which is admittedly many) aren't really applicable to the world today, but that's why we have an imagination. And only one of them is about Prime Directive violations, and it's one that Picard didn't cause. Hell, watch The Drumhead, from 1991, and tell me that that doesn't have eerie parallels to our terror hunt.
3.0 was relesed not long ago. In two months we'll get 3.1 which addresses more than 1000 issues.
But they're not addressing a lot of issues that people actually care about. This feature request is one of the most wanted features of writer (an equivalent to normal mode, or at least collapsible margins in page mode) with almost 20 pages of comments, most of which are saying how this issue is at least very important, and probably half of which are saying that it's a blocker for them or someone else using OO. (FWIW, I agree. None of Writer's features, nor them all together, make up for this in my mind.) The request has been outstanding for seven years, since two weeks after version 1.0 was released and there is very little visible progress on it and no target date.
Oh good... OO 3.1 sorts better. Whoopdie do.
(I'm probably understating the importance of the sorting thing, and there are things in the 3.1 update that I care about, like being able to accept or reject changes using change tracking through a right click instead of a dialog that is akward and annoying city. (Oh good, so Writer is now at Word 2000 level on that feature, and only 10 years later. Now all they need to do to make that feature good (instead of merely usable) is to put deleted text out in the margin so it doesn't mess with the page layout and disrupt reading.) But I still think they are leaving their main issues behind.)
Which matters more, the motivation or the result?
Yeah, because after all, "tasked" isn't a word, and the verb form certainly doesn't date form 1598.
The thing I linked to wasn't exactly what I meant to, though it's still relevant. What I meant to link to was this, which actually integrates it into Office. This does not work with Office 97, though it does with 2000.
If you use Office 2000, and someone sends you a 2003 or 2007 file, you're forced to upgrade.
To my knowledge, the DOC format didn't change between 2000 and 2003. (In fact, I'm pretty sure it didn't change from 97 to 2003.) Furthermore, regarding 2007 documents (docx), MS freely offers conversion filters for older versions all the way back to Office 97.
On this point, you're spouting FUD.
Futhermore, if you think DOCX hasn't really changed from the 97 format, I don't know what to tell you. DOCX is vastly different from the DOC file format.
On this point, of course, you are totally correct.
Calc also rocks, and is better then Excel for my usage pattern anyway.
To be honest, I don't use either Calc or Excel very much. The version of Excel I was using for a while started to piss me off for a couple dumb reasons (the main one was that it was sort of halfway between a SDI and MDI program, which meant that I was constantly doing the wrong thing) so I briefly switched to Calc, but it had some issues too (don't remember what they were) so I switched back. This was a while ago though.
So I probably shouldn't have been quite as categorical in my dismissal of OO outside of Writer, because Writer and Impress are the only ones I feel that I can speak to their quality.
I use Impressive now for all my presentations, no matter what program produced them...
Just looking at the front page, that looks pretty slick; I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the link. ...but most of my new presentations are being made with LaTeX Beamer.
[Not sure why I wrote all of this... whatever.]
Beamer is also pretty slick; I've used it a number of times. Both Beamer and PPT have a bunch of deficiencies relative to each other though, so which one I prefer varies. PPT, especially 2007:
By contrast, Beamer gives you:
So basically, if I'm doing a math-heavy presentation, Beamer is the only reasonable choice (maybe unless you get something like Aurora which lets you put Latex in Office documents); if you're doing text-heavy presentation, which is a better choice depends on whether you want presenter mode; if you're doing a graphics-heavy presentation, I think a lot of the time PPT is the better choice.
I would say it may have quite a lot to do with it... it's either a pretty big coincidence, or they are trying to bury the news by releasing it when the networks actually have something else to report on.
What's your bet on?
In particular, I recently had to open a MS Office 2007 document(docx), and rather than getting the filter into MS Word, I just loaded in into OO.org.
docx has probably received a ton more effort than pptx, but I just did a presentation in PowerPoint 2007, and for an experiment tried opening it in Impress 3, and it failed miserably; it's not even remotely usable.
This is a typical slide from the presentation I'm talking about; this is what it looks like in Impress 3. Even slides with just text render like someone crapped on the slide. (I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt about the fact that the text size changed in case there are font issues; I'm opening it in OO for Linux, not Windows. But the new borders on the text box? The date that flat out wasn't there in the original? The lack of the background color?)
It also didn't read my presenter notes.
As for non-MS Office compatibility features, the lack of a presenter view in Impress makes it a non-starter IMHO.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while Writer is damn good and I have only pretty minor complaints about it relative to Word, once you get outside Writer the comparative quality drops tremendously.
(While I'm at it, if OO wants to provide the PPT killer, provide a better animation system based on keyframing, like Flash or a 3D modeler or something. PowerPoint's is only slightly more fun to use than stabbing your eyes out with a fork for any animations that are intended to convey useful information.)
So in your first analogy, someone earning $60,000 gets cut down to $50,000, they are only losing $5,000.
They will be cut down to $55,000, not $50,000. (I suspect this is what you meant by saying they are only losing $5K.)
This is the point the grandparent was making.
What the parent said is "If it can knock you down into a lower tax bracket you can come out ahead" but this isn't true. The person making $60,000 will still have $5,000 more in take-home pay then someone making $50,000, it's just not proportionally larger. Again, all other things being equal (people making more may be able to pay someone better for tax advice or something), someone in the higher tax bracket will always have more than someone in the lower tax bracket.
(The US's AMT, which Delwin mentioned, is an exception, but it's kind of a special case.)
About the only way what the grandparent said could make sense is if you're looking at your hourly rate rather than total pay.
If it can knock you down into a lower tax bracket you can come out ahead.
You will never decrease your tax liability by making less enough to compensate for making less, all other things being equal, even under a system as complex as the US tax code. If you think it can, tax brackets don't work the way I suspect you think they do.
For instance, suppose in a hypothetical universe the brackets were set up so that $0-$50000 was taxed 0% and $50000+ was taxed 50%. If you made $60,000, people would say they fall into the upper bracket, but that doesn't mean they are paying $30,000 in taxes (which would imply that getting a $10,001 pay cut would increase take home pay by 20 grand). Rather, they pay 50% of the amount of money they make in excess of $50,000, meaning they will pay $5,000.
Continuing the analogy, if there was another bracket starting at $100,000 with 75% tax, someone making $200,000 would pay:
* 0% of the first $50,000
* 50% of the next $50,000 (or $25,000)
* 75% of the next $100,000 (or $75,000)
giving a total tax liability of $100,000, rather than the $150,000 they would have to pay if they were paying 75% on everything.
Now, there are changes to your employment state that can have big consequences. I am a grad student, and am taking up a teaching position this semester. Before I was a research assistant. RAs are exempt from FICA taxes (this is at least true in my state, and I think is common) but as an instructor I won't be, so even though I will be getting a nice raise, I'll also essentially be taking an instant 7.5% pay cut too. There may be something similar going from part time to full time or something like that which would apply. But in any case, if taking a pay cut actually increases your take home pay, it is definitely not because it puts you into a different tax bracket.
Microsoft isn't rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Vista is soaring! If anything, Microsoft is rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg!
(With apologies to Stephen Colbert.)
...the idea that I'm paying a university to let me create ideas for them is disgusting.
This guy was a grad student at MIT. I'd bet $100 that MIT was paying him.
I don't care, and my post is offtopic (as is this one, so feel free to mod it down too). I've got close to 4000 posts (I can't find the exact number since /. made their user pages suck ass), a fair percentage of which are modded up and almost none of which are modded down, so it's not as if I'm hurting for karma. I'm more annoyed at having to undo another moderation I made in this topic. Oh well, c'est la vie. Thanks for sticking up for me though. ;-)
Just FYI, the delete trick works for the URL bar suggestions too... so if you visit pennyarcade.com instead of penny-arcade.com a couple times by accident, it won't sit at the top of the list when you type "pen."
[posting to undo moderation... I chose the wrong post]
Not pulling them off of their plane. But after that, at the very least compensating them for the loss which they caused, which was the difference in ticket prices. (Alternately, rebooking them on a later AirTran flight.)
Actually, it sounds like the airline gave them a refund right away.
They got a refund on their ticket purchase price, but not on the replacement tickets which they had to buy thanks to AirTran, likely at a substantially higher price than what they paid for the original AirTran tickets.
But our "see something, say something" mentality will ensure that this incident gets repeated again... I meant to downplay the uniqueness of the event more than the size of the injustice.
That's reasonable. Though at the same time, perhaps if we play up these events when they happen, it will help stop them from happening.
Anyway, the airline has since apologized and offered to fly them back home for free, and frankly I think that the whole thing got blown out of proportion.
Though at the same time, if it was in fact blown out of proportion (which I don't quite believe), I suspect that the only reason they got their refund and apology was because it was blown out of proportion.
With sudo you never see a question what exactly you are allowing or not allowing to be done... ...nor in UAC. Where on here or here (or any other screen shot you can find) does it tell you exactly what you are allowing or not allowing?
I think you may have a misunderstanding of UAC. UAC doesn't prompt for permissions to perform a particular action (e.g. "I want to write to C:\Windows\System32"), it prompts for permission to upgrade a process to essentially the effective UID root, and it will (if granted) have those rights for the duration of the process. Later, if it wants to perform a different privileged action (e.g. "I want to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry") it will already have root, so there will not be a second UAC prompt. ...you only have to verify that executable is the one you have started.
And, because of what I said above, this is also true of UAC. The only information the UAC prompt gives you is the executable name, which you can verify is what you intended. (Also the digital signature if present.)
With a proper (granted, not one that is usually set by default) configuration of sudo, all non-administrative utilities are allowed to be started with sudo in the first place, so user entering the password merely confirms that he intends to run administrative utility.
First, I would dispute your assertion that non-administrative utilities shouldn't be started with sudo. I think it's quite reasonable to run almost any of the most common utilities -- ls, cat, cp, mv, grep, find, etc. -- with sudo. I'm not a sysadmin, but coming from the perspective of a home user, it would irk me to no end if I couldn't do that. (Actually it wouldn't because of my aforementioned habit of keeping a root shell open at all times, but that's somewhat beside the point.) Outside of the home environment, sudo does have a couple significant advantages over UAC, most notably that UAC (AFAIK) requires the root password instead of the current user's password.
Second, I could say the same thing about UAC that you say second: acknowledging the UAC prompt merely confirms that the user wants to run the administrative utility.
I'm still not seeing anything more than a minor difference (that at least I would put pretty firmly in favor of UAC) unless you are actually misunderstanding UAC's behavior as I suggested above.
It's left to the user to determine if it's supposed to be valid or not, and user usually has no idea how to determine that.
The user has about as much information as you do for sudo, at least as most users are concerned. ...so user only has to check if executable name matches.
Which is basically the same as UAC prompts. They give you the executable name (though "helpfully" the full path is shortened with "..." if it's too long to fit in the window) which you can check.
In fact, for most users, you will often get way more information than you get with sudo: the name of the application (in human-readable form, rather than just the exe name) and publisher, with electronic signature verified. Checking that you're running /usr/bin/cat or whatever is certainly a good idea so you don't pick up something else in your $PATH, but even that doesn't give you that level of authentication.
I'm not the original poster, but I really wish Apple would let me. But they insist on selling OS X only with their own hardware, and then don't make hardware I both want and can afford. To my eyes, iMacs are stupid because it doesn't make sense to throw away a hundred or two hundred dollar monitor when you get a new computer. Hell, the bulk of my current system is about a year old, but I have components in there from 2004, and that's just what's in the main case. The Mac mini is probably even less upgradable than the iMac, and has for a moderately powerful system today is an underpowered processor and small amount of RAM. (For about $200 less what I paid for my current over a year ago, you get (1) dual core processor instead of quad core, (2) the same amount of RAM, (3) basically integrated graphics shared with main RAM instead of an 8800GTS. Wow, great deal.) Now at the other end is the Mac Pro. Beautiful systems, but start at twice the cost of my current system (this time I think about comparable in power), which is well out of my price range. Then you add on top of that the fact that I like to build my own system, and Apple has put itself out of my market. But I very well might actually get one if it weren't for those other problems.
On the laptop side, last I checked they're in the same ballpark as a Thinkpad, so that's not so bad. But if I were to buy a laptop now, I'd probably get either like a netbook or a tablet... again, neither of which Apple sells.
So from my standpoint, I'd love to run OS X... but I'm not going to pirate it, I'm not going to give Apple if they are going to call me a criminal for hacking it to run, I'm not going to buy Apple hardware, and Apple won't let me run it otherwise, so I'm out of luck on that point.
If you want to nitpick, at least do it right: it's "virii".
Maybe you should instead.