I prefer wiping the drive eleven times with cryptographically-sound random data, then grinding the entire computer to a fine talcum-powder consistency, mixing it thoroughly with twenty pounds of dry powdered cement, then stir in the water and gravel to make concrete. When it starts to get thick, start stirring in the ten pounds of small rare-earth magnets, one at a time. Let it set, then dip it repeatedly in molten steel. Finally, use a high-powered electromagnet to lift and drop the resulting brick into the hot part of an active volcano, then push the planet it's on into the nearest star.
I suppose an attacker *might* not be able to recover the data if you skipped the last step, but why take chances?
> we won't be seeing a mission to put a man on Mars anytime in the next 4 years.
We wouldn't be anyway. I'm not a big Obama fan, but the idea of sending humans to Mars within eight years, let alone four, is not realistic at this point. We have a ways to go before we're ready for that.
Among other things, a desert simulation doesn't really do a good job of simulating the lack of any significant amount of atmosphere on Mars. That's a pretty big deal. An orbiting space station is a much better simulation, despite the lack of much gravity.
But the real kicker is the whole "You're pretty much on your own for at least two years, longer if the next mission gets canned" thing. The closest we come to that now is the south pole base which is *difficult* (not impossible) to get supplies to in the winter. In a pinch we make overflights and drop packages in. It takes a couple of weeks to make it happen, due to the weather issues, but a couple of weeks is *not* the same thing as a couple of years.
And the south pole base takes advantage of the fact that it's *very* accessible in the summer, by building up supplies over the course of many trips over several months, to get enough stuff brought in to be prepared for the winter. A mars mission won't have that option. The team would only have what they bring with them.
These are not unsolvable problems, but they are problems that will require significant work to solve, and that can't be done overnight. Frankly, twenty years would be an optimistic timeframe. Four years is right out, even if funding were no problem at all.
> after all, we all know Galileo. But Harriot was first...
Umm, call me wacky, but I'm pretty sure Galileo is not widely known because he drew maps of the moon. Frankly, until today, I was not even aware that he _did_ that (although it's not at all surprising, given how obvious a thing the moon is to look at once you've got a telescope set up).
> So if you ask someone to "turn on the light," what are you referring to? The radio?;)
Actually, an incandescent lamp does produce radio waves, as well as other frequencies, IIRC. However...
> When pitting "light" against "radio" waves, the implication seems to be plain that he's talking about visible light.
Indeed. In context, it seems obvious that "light" here means visible light, which is after all by far the most common meaning of the word. Yes, the word "light" can also mean electromagnetic radiation in general, but for that matter it can also mean understanding or insight, and yet somehow it's obvious from context that these are not the intended meanings in this case.
> So the answer is to get government out of the business of taxation.
As good as that sounds, I'm afraid it's not terribly realistic.
Taking the discrimination based on marital status out of tax law might be a somewhat more viable option, but in that case I'd argue that we should *also* take the discrimination based on marital status out of welfare law (i.e., stop giving extra handouts to single mothers that wedded mothers can't get) at the same time.
Oh, get real. If 13% of US society were gay, I'd have encountered a few hundred more of them over the years. As it stands, I know (err, "know of" is closer actually) two (one male and one female, as it happens; the male is someone I've only met once, and the female is someone whose lesbianism *may* be an affectation, though it's hard to be sure), discounting national celebrities. Even if 99% of all gays are totally "in the closet", which may have made sense in the fifties but seems like an unrealistically high number these days... even then, they're still more like half a percent of the total population, using a *conservative* estimate of how many observably-heterosexual people I have encountered over the last three decades.
There are probably more celibates than gays. And if you think *they* don't experience discrimination...
> This is a gender issue. Men can marry women, but women can't. Therefore, men have a right that women don't have.
That's a specious sophistry. Men and women both can marry someone of the opposite gender, but not someone of the same gender. The only way you can get a right men have that women don't out of that is to *define* the right itself in terms of a specific gender. If you're going to do that, you may as well just say men have the legal right to swear under oath that they are genetically male, and women don't.
If you want to get upset about double standards, try this one: men can also go nude from the waist up in public (at least in most jurisdictions), and women aren't supposed to do that (same caveat). Of course, there are *reasons* (perhaps even good ones) why this is the way it is (though, frankly, I would not be in the least bothered by a law requiring everyone, including men, to wear clothes that cover the torso when going out in public), but it nonetheless *is* a legal restriction placed on women that's not placed on men.
> I think the tax breaks were originally written when the females didn't usually work,
In which case, it's not really relevant any more.
However, the tax breaks for being married are more than offset by the government handouts a woman gets if she has kids without being married. If we're going to do away with the one, we should nix the other as well.
> I think it is also supposed to be a cultural incentive for people > to get married and build the "ideal" American family. *shug*
That's *NOT* a good reason to get married.
I'm starting to think the ideal thing would be to declare that marriage is a religious practice and none of the government's %#@! business.
> But those who are in the market are most buying Vista.
*Buying*, Vista yes, because that's the only option in most cases. It's bundled with the hardware. How many of those people are *keeping* Vista, and how many are installing something else (e.g., XP)? That's harder to measure.
Yes, *if* you leave the stupid pointless unnecessary Aero Glass nonsense turned on. I suppose you use the Fisher-Price-esque theme in Windows XP too?
Meh. Switching to the classic appearance was already on my Windows deployment checklist (which I run through every time I deploy a new Windows system or do a reinstall on an old one) for XP, so Vista isn't really a change in that regard. I keep a set of.theme files in my standard_deploy folder (on the network fileshare, and there's also a copy on a USBMSD I carry around all the time) so we have visual uniformity for all our systems. One theme for normal user accounts, one for domain admin, and one for non-domain admin accounts (e.g., on systems that aren't part of the domain; the word "domain" here is used in the Windows NT sense, not the internet sense).
There are things I don't like about Vista, but really is the availability of a resource-intensive UI theme you don't have to use anyway that big a deal? Just turn it off.
> > Manufacturing is moving elsewhere in a rapid fashion." > Manufacturing moved elsewhere 20yrs ago.
These statements are both correct. Manufacturing has been moving out of the US since the middle of the twentieth century, has continued to do so in recent years, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
The reason for this is that American workers want to make more money than commodity manufactured goods can justify. There are various ways we could undo this...
1. Decrease the American standard of living and wage level to developing-country levels so that the labor will be affordable here. Stuff would be cheap (probably even cheaper than now, in absolute terms, because it wouldn't have to be shipped overseas), but you wouldn't make enough money to buy much of it, so it would seem more expensive.
2. Increase the standard of living and wage levels of the rest of the world so that the labor won't be any *more* affordable elsewhere than it is here. Stuff will cost a lot more, so you won't be able to buy as much of it, even if your income stays the same or goes up.
3. Call off the whole international-trade thing and go back to protectionism. Yeah, that would technically *work*, in the sense of keeping the domestic manufacturing sector in business, but if you think it wouldn't screw up our economy, you've been living under a rock for the last three centuries.
4. With sufficient automation, it might be possible to keep manufacturing here, but with very little labor.
But if we don't do anything along those lines, the manufacturing sector will continue to pack its bags and head for places where it can actually afford to operate.
Kinds of manufacturing that require recently developed technology are done here, but only as long as they still require recently developed technology. Once they become fully commoditized, it's cheaper to do them elsewhere.
For some reason, automobile manufacturing hasn't really become fully commoditized yet, perhaps because of continuously-changing consumer expectations (and regulatory requirements) for the product. We import a larger percentage of cars than we used to, yes, but most of them come from other first-world countries, most notably Japan. If China and India get to the point where they can make a car the US consumer wants to buy, the US auto companies will *have* to move their factories overseas, or move into the design business and sell their designs to the foreign companies (or, equivalently, outsource actual production to the foreign companies), or go out of business.
> A lot of the excessive nagging seems to come from older applications assuming they have free reign over the system
Right, that's why UAC was so necessary in the first place. (Well, it's one reason. The fact that security updates, both for Windows itself and for antivirus softwaree, require user interaction (WHY?) and therefore required a user to log in as admin occasionally under XP is another reason.) Windows XP was trying to retrain developers not to do that junk, but too many of them ignored the issue and just refused to support running in a limited user account at all. Vista forces the issue. That's a good thing.
> The only other times I've seen it I would have also had to use sudo on Unix.
Like when you're actually installing something, yes.
I have also seen it in one other instance, which involved visiting a website in IE. Apparently the website believed, deep in its heart, that I really really needed to install some random plugin or another, probably so the website could show me annoying advertisements more efficiently. (It wasn't actually needed to view the site. I was looking at the site just fine.) I had to cancel the UAC prompt three times in under a minute. Why did I get prompted the second time, much less the third? I'd already said no.
But this is a relatively minor complaint. UAC is on the whole a very good and necessary measure.
> You are incorrect saying "not because I visited a website, or because I connected a photo frame to my PC... > Vista will not pop up a UAC dialog in any of those cases (have you used it?).
I have seen Vista pop up a UAC dialog just because the user is visiting a website. Now, granted, not just any website will cause this, only ones that think it's any of their business what software I have installed on my computer. Nonetheless, I had to click cancel three times in under a minute because of this issue, just the other day. (I don't normally use IE, but I was testing issues related to its Compatibility View, because I maintain a website and needed to know how certain things would be handled in IE.) I don't know or care what it was that the site wanted to install, but the installation certainly wasn't a user-initiated action. I didn't even take action do download anything installable, much less actually launch it. Windows *should* just deny the privilege in that case, without bothering the user.
But, I think UAC is an important step in the right direction. Application developers need to learn not to unnecessarily do things in a way that requires admin privileges. Far too many applications won't run properly out of a limited user account, and UAC is an important step toward getting that fixed.
> I can guarantee you XP does not have 99x the marketshare of Vista, by any measurement.
I don't know. I have, to date, seen exactly three Vista systems. One of them was in a traveling Microsoft demo van at an IT trade show. I bet I've seen more than three hundred WinXP systems over the years.
Okay, so that's *historical* market share, not an instantaneous snapshot of right now. By now XP probably no longer has quite 99x the deployment of Vista. But your phone support data are also historical, stretched out over the entire time you've been doing that job.
UAC works well if you set the system up correctly, so that the user has to type a password each time they want to do an administrative action. But I don't know whether the major OEMs set it up that way out of the box, and if the user can just click "yes", you know what's going to happen.
> UAC requires user education. You need to train your users (family, > friends, etc) that when you see a UAC dialog, they better think.
Yeah, good luck with that.
A more effective approach, IMO, is to set them up with a non-admin account, so that UAC prompts them for a *password*. End users *HATE* typing passwords, so they'll generally just cancel the stupid thing. This is what you want.
You do still need a little user training, to teach them that they *should* type in the password for certain things (notably, security updates). But this is about eight orders of magnitude easier than trying to undo the 10+ years of constant training that have taught them to instinctively click "yes" on every dialog box they see.
With a password-prompt UAC, there's no "yes" to click, so they go for "cancel". Automatically. Instinctively. With no special training.
If you set up their account correctly, they have to type in a password in order to activate the "yes" option. Faced with this, they just cancel, unless it's something they actually need or want to do, because typing in a password annoys them every single time they do it. If they can just cancel and still keep using the system, that's what they do. (These are the same people who used to cancel the login box for Windows 98, remember that?) Pretty soon you've got them trained to automatically mindlessly cancel dialog boxes, instead of automatically mindlessly approving everything. From a security perspective, that's probably an improvement.
> I'd say it was worse than "rushed out before ready." Maybe more like "pushed out even though their was no point."
Fundamentally, Microsoft didn't care about Windows Me or need it to succeed. It wasn't part of their agenda. They only even made to placate the OEMs who were pressuring them to reconsider their decision to discontinue the Win9x product line. "We can't sell Windows 2000 computers to home users! That's business-PC stuff! You've got to update Windows 98!"
"We're telling you for real", Microsoft sys, "the Win9x codebase is a mess and the design is wrong for a modern network-oriented OS and you're really going to need to move over to the NT product line eventually."
"We don't care, people won't buy NT, just make a new version from Windows 98."
Okay, fine, Microsoft says, we'll make a successor to Windows 98. It'll be junk, but we'll make it.
(Meanwhile, we'll put our marketing department on the task of figuring out why ordinary consumers don't like Windows 2000, so we can fix that in Whistler.)
> Does that mean that we age slower compared to the people in Andromeda?
That would only follow if there were humans in Andromeda, or something biologically *extremely* similar to humans, right down to how aging works and how long it takes (if you put them side-by-side with us in the same reference frame, e.g., on the surface of the same planet). You always see lots of humans (possibly with weird forehead ridges) in sci-fi, but that's just because it makes casting easier. Although sometimes there's also an in-universe explanation, even if it's a retcon. Known Space (Ringworld universe), Stargate, and Star Trek (TNG: The Chase) all explain it by indicating a shared origin. Come to think of it, shared origin would be the Mormon doctrinal position, as well. Most Christian denominations assume de facto that there's no intelligent biological life outside the solar system, but this usually doesn't have the force of actual written doctrine. The Bible says nothing directly on the subject. Anyway, my point is, even if you assume there's intelligent life out there, there's no particular reason to believe it would be humanoid at all, much less age in close enough to the same fashion as humans to make the above comparison meaningful. And that's *assuming* there's even life in any form we would recognize outside of our own solar system, which is flagrant speculation in the first place.
Even if there *were* humans in Andromeda, aging rates would still be relative to your reference frame, because time is relative to your reference frame.
We only need dark matter if we're determined to believe certain traditional ideas (most notably, the big bang). If we're willing to accept that there's stuff we don't know and we might have been wrong about some of that stuff, dark matter becomes optional.
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I prefer wiping the drive eleven times with cryptographically-sound random data, then grinding the entire computer to a fine talcum-powder consistency, mixing it thoroughly with twenty pounds of dry powdered cement, then stir in the water and gravel to make concrete. When it starts to get thick, start stirring in the ten pounds of small rare-earth magnets, one at a time. Let it set, then dip it repeatedly in molten steel. Finally, use a high-powered electromagnet to lift and drop the resulting brick into the hot part of an active volcano, then push the planet it's on into the nearest star.
I suppose an attacker *might* not be able to recover the data if you skipped the last step, but why take chances?
> we won't be seeing a mission to put a man on Mars anytime in the next 4 years.
We wouldn't be anyway. I'm not a big Obama fan, but the idea of sending humans to Mars within eight years, let alone four, is not realistic at this point. We have a ways to go before we're ready for that.
Among other things, a desert simulation doesn't really do a good job of simulating the lack of any significant amount of atmosphere on Mars. That's a pretty big deal. An orbiting space station is a much better simulation, despite the lack of much gravity.
But the real kicker is the whole "You're pretty much on your own for at least two years, longer if the next mission gets canned" thing. The closest we come to that now is the south pole base which is *difficult* (not impossible) to get supplies to in the winter. In a pinch we make overflights and drop packages in. It takes a couple of weeks to make it happen, due to the weather issues, but a couple of weeks is *not* the same thing as a couple of years.
And the south pole base takes advantage of the fact that it's *very* accessible in the summer, by building up supplies over the course of many trips over several months, to get enough stuff brought in to be prepared for the winter. A mars mission won't have that option. The team would only have what they bring with them.
These are not unsolvable problems, but they are problems that will require significant work to solve, and that can't be done overnight. Frankly, twenty years would be an optimistic timeframe. Four years is right out, even if funding were no problem at all.
> This adventurer is from anywhere but from Zork -- not with that torch in his hand.
Maybe his lantern ran out of oil, although one wonders why he didn't just frotz it.
> after all, we all know Galileo. But Harriot was first...
Umm, call me wacky, but I'm pretty sure Galileo is not widely known because he drew maps of the moon. Frankly, until today, I was not even aware that he _did_ that (although it's not at all surprising, given how obvious a thing the moon is to look at once you've got a telescope set up).
> So if you ask someone to "turn on the light," what are you referring to? The radio? ;)
Actually, an incandescent lamp does produce radio waves, as well as other frequencies, IIRC. However...
> When pitting "light" against "radio" waves, the implication seems to be plain that he's talking about visible light.
Indeed. In context, it seems obvious that "light" here means visible light, which is after all by far the most common meaning of the word. Yes, the word "light" can also mean electromagnetic radiation in general, but for that matter it can also mean understanding or insight, and yet somehow it's obvious from context that these are not the intended meanings in this case.
> So the answer is to get government out of the business of taxation.
As good as that sounds, I'm afraid it's not terribly realistic.
Taking the discrimination based on marital status out of tax law might be a somewhat more viable option, but in that case I'd argue that we should *also* take the discrimination based on marital status out of welfare law (i.e., stop giving extra handouts to single mothers that wedded mothers can't get) at the same time.
> At 10-13% of US society
Oh, get real. If 13% of US society were gay, I'd have encountered a few hundred more of them over the years. As it stands, I know (err, "know of" is closer actually) two (one male and one female, as it happens; the male is someone I've only met once, and the female is someone whose lesbianism *may* be an affectation, though it's hard to be sure), discounting national celebrities. Even if 99% of all gays are totally "in the closet", which may have made sense in the fifties but seems like an unrealistically high number these days... even then, they're still more like half a percent of the total population, using a *conservative* estimate of how many observably-heterosexual people I have encountered over the last three decades.
There are probably more celibates than gays. And if you think *they* don't experience discrimination...
> This is a gender issue. Men can marry women, but women can't. Therefore, men have a right that women don't have.
That's a specious sophistry. Men and women both can marry someone of the opposite gender, but not someone of the same gender. The only way you can get a right men have that women don't out of that is to *define* the right itself in terms of a specific gender. If you're going to do that, you may as well just say men have the legal right to swear under oath that they are genetically male, and women don't.
If you want to get upset about double standards, try this one: men can also go nude from the waist up in public (at least in most jurisdictions), and women aren't supposed to do that (same caveat). Of course, there are *reasons* (perhaps even good ones) why this is the way it is (though, frankly, I would not be in the least bothered by a law requiring everyone, including men, to wear clothes that cover the torso when going out in public), but it nonetheless *is* a legal restriction placed on women that's not placed on men.
> I think the tax breaks were originally written when the females didn't usually work,
In which case, it's not really relevant any more.
However, the tax breaks for being married are more than offset by the government handouts a woman gets if she has kids without being married. If we're going to do away with the one, we should nix the other as well.
> I think it is also supposed to be a cultural incentive for people
> to get married and build the "ideal" American family. *shug*
That's *NOT* a good reason to get married.
I'm starting to think the ideal thing would be to declare that marriage is a religious practice and none of the government's %#@! business.
> Do the math and you will see that a national
> constitutional amendment would pass very easily.
It would only pass easily if you let the general public vote on it. I'm not convince the politicians would ever let that happen.
> Once passed it would be very hard to get ride of.
But if it does happen, can we next go for an amendment to make marriage last until death by definition?
> Um... I type my root password in Linux more often then I hit UAC in Vista
I generally just keep a root prompt window open. (It uses different colors, though, so I don't mistake it for a regular-user one.) Works for me. YMMV.
> But those who are in the market are most buying Vista.
*Buying*, Vista yes, because that's the only option in most cases. It's bundled with the hardware. How many of those people are *keeping* Vista, and how many are installing something else (e.g., XP)? That's harder to measure.
> Id' say it's roughly half the speed of XP.
.theme files in my standard_deploy folder (on the network fileshare, and there's also a copy on a USBMSD I carry around all the time) so we have visual uniformity for all our systems. One theme for normal user accounts, one for domain admin, and one for non-domain admin accounts (e.g., on systems that aren't part of the domain; the word "domain" here is used in the Windows NT sense, not the internet sense).
Yes, *if* you leave the stupid pointless unnecessary Aero Glass nonsense turned on. I suppose you use the Fisher-Price-esque theme in Windows XP too?
Meh. Switching to the classic appearance was already on my Windows deployment checklist (which I run through every time I deploy a new Windows system or do a reinstall on an old one) for XP, so Vista isn't really a change in that regard. I keep a set of
There are things I don't like about Vista, but really is the availability of a resource-intensive UI theme you don't have to use anyway that big a deal? Just turn it off.
> > Manufacturing is moving elsewhere in a rapid fashion."
> Manufacturing moved elsewhere 20yrs ago.
These statements are both correct. Manufacturing has been moving out of the US since the middle of the twentieth century, has continued to do so in recent years, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
The reason for this is that American workers want to make more money than commodity manufactured goods can justify. There are various ways we could undo this...
1. Decrease the American standard of living and wage level to developing-country levels so that the labor will be affordable here. Stuff would be cheap (probably even cheaper than now, in absolute terms, because it wouldn't have to be shipped overseas), but you wouldn't make enough money to buy much of it, so it would seem more expensive.
2. Increase the standard of living and wage levels of the rest of the world so that the labor won't be any *more* affordable elsewhere than it is here. Stuff will cost a lot more, so you won't be able to buy as much of it, even if your income stays the same or goes up.
3. Call off the whole international-trade thing and go back to protectionism. Yeah, that would technically *work*, in the sense of keeping the domestic manufacturing sector in business, but if you think it wouldn't screw up our economy, you've been living under a rock for the last three centuries.
4. With sufficient automation, it might be possible to keep manufacturing here, but with very little labor.
But if we don't do anything along those lines, the manufacturing sector will continue to pack its bags and head for places where it can actually afford to operate.
Kinds of manufacturing that require recently developed technology are done here, but only as long as they still require recently developed technology. Once they become fully commoditized, it's cheaper to do them elsewhere.
For some reason, automobile manufacturing hasn't really become fully commoditized yet, perhaps because of continuously-changing consumer expectations (and regulatory requirements) for the product. We import a larger percentage of cars than we used to, yes, but most of them come from other first-world countries, most notably Japan. If China and India get to the point where they can make a car the US consumer wants to buy, the US auto companies will *have* to move their factories overseas, or move into the design business and sell their designs to the foreign companies (or, equivalently, outsource actual production to the foreign companies), or go out of business.
> All filesystems fragment over time. NTFS more than others.
In my experience, FAT fragments worse than NTFS, especially if the volume is most of the way full. This is a purely anecdotal observation, of course.
> A lot of the excessive nagging seems to come from older applications assuming they have free reign over the system
Right, that's why UAC was so necessary in the first place. (Well, it's one reason. The fact that security updates, both for Windows itself and for antivirus softwaree, require user interaction (WHY?) and therefore required a user to log in as admin occasionally under XP is another reason.) Windows XP was trying to retrain developers not to do that junk, but too many of them ignored the issue and just refused to support running in a limited user account at all. Vista forces the issue. That's a good thing.
> The only other times I've seen it I would have also had to use sudo on Unix.
Like when you're actually installing something, yes.
I have also seen it in one other instance, which involved visiting a website in IE. Apparently the website believed, deep in its heart, that I really really needed to install some random plugin or another, probably so the website could show me annoying advertisements more efficiently. (It wasn't actually needed to view the site. I was looking at the site just fine.) I had to cancel the UAC prompt three times in under a minute. Why did I get prompted the second time, much less the third? I'd already said no.
But this is a relatively minor complaint. UAC is on the whole a very good and necessary measure.
> You are incorrect saying "not because I visited a website, or because I connected a photo frame to my PC...
> Vista will not pop up a UAC dialog in any of those cases (have you used it?).
I have seen Vista pop up a UAC dialog just because the user is visiting a website. Now, granted, not just any website will cause this, only ones that think it's any of their business what software I have installed on my computer. Nonetheless, I had to click cancel three times in under a minute because of this issue, just the other day. (I don't normally use IE, but I was testing issues related to its Compatibility View, because I maintain a website and needed to know how certain things would be handled in IE.) I don't know or care what it was that the site wanted to install, but the installation certainly wasn't a user-initiated action. I didn't even take action do download anything installable, much less actually launch it. Windows *should* just deny the privilege in that case, without bothering the user.
But, I think UAC is an important step in the right direction. Application developers need to learn not to unnecessarily do things in a way that requires admin privileges. Far too many applications won't run properly out of a limited user account, and UAC is an important step toward getting that fixed.
> I can guarantee you XP does not have 99x the marketshare of Vista, by any measurement.
I don't know. I have, to date, seen exactly three Vista systems. One of them was in a traveling Microsoft demo van at an IT trade show. I bet I've seen more than three hundred WinXP systems over the years.
Okay, so that's *historical* market share, not an instantaneous snapshot of right now. By now XP probably no longer has quite 99x the deployment of Vista. But your phone support data are also historical, stretched out over the entire time you've been doing that job.
UAC works well if you set the system up correctly, so that the user has to type a password each time they want to do an administrative action. But I don't know whether the major OEMs set it up that way out of the box, and if the user can just click "yes", you know what's going to happen.
> UAC requires user education. You need to train your users (family,
> friends, etc) that when you see a UAC dialog, they better think.
Yeah, good luck with that.
A more effective approach, IMO, is to set them up with a non-admin account, so that UAC prompts them for a *password*. End users *HATE* typing passwords, so they'll generally just cancel the stupid thing. This is what you want.
You do still need a little user training, to teach them that they *should* type in the password for certain things (notably, security updates). But this is about eight orders of magnitude easier than trying to undo the 10+ years of constant training that have taught them to instinctively click "yes" on every dialog box they see.
With a password-prompt UAC, there's no "yes" to click, so they go for "cancel". Automatically. Instinctively. With no special training.
If you set up their account correctly, they have to type in a password in order to activate the "yes" option. Faced with this, they just cancel, unless it's something they actually need or want to do, because typing in a password annoys them every single time they do it. If they can just cancel and still keep using the system, that's what they do. (These are the same people who used to cancel the login box for Windows 98, remember that?) Pretty soon you've got them trained to automatically mindlessly cancel dialog boxes, instead of automatically mindlessly approving everything. From a security perspective, that's probably an improvement.
> I'd say it was worse than "rushed out before ready." Maybe more like "pushed out even though their was no point."
Fundamentally, Microsoft didn't care about Windows Me or need it to succeed. It wasn't part of their agenda. They only even made to placate the OEMs who were pressuring them to reconsider their decision to discontinue the Win9x product line. "We can't sell Windows 2000 computers to home users! That's business-PC stuff! You've got to update Windows 98!"
"We're telling you for real", Microsoft sys, "the Win9x codebase is a mess and the design is wrong for a modern network-oriented OS and you're really going to need to move over to the NT product line eventually."
"We don't care, people won't buy NT, just make a new version from Windows 98."
Okay, fine, Microsoft says, we'll make a successor to Windows 98. It'll be junk, but we'll make it.
(Meanwhile, we'll put our marketing department on the task of figuring out why ordinary consumers don't like Windows 2000, so we can fix that in Whistler.)
Meh. Beatles, Mozart, Britney Spears, ... a bunch of modern drivel. All the best music was written by 1750. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
> It means exactly what it says. Our Solar System is rotating at 965,600 km/h.
That's... ambiguous, at best. km/h is not a unit of angular/rotational velocity.
> Does that mean that we age slower compared to the people in Andromeda?
That would only follow if there were humans in Andromeda, or something biologically *extremely* similar to humans, right down to how aging works and how long it takes (if you put them side-by-side with us in the same reference frame, e.g., on the surface of the same planet). You always see lots of humans (possibly with weird forehead ridges) in sci-fi, but that's just because it makes casting easier. Although sometimes there's also an in-universe explanation, even if it's a retcon. Known Space (Ringworld universe), Stargate, and Star Trek (TNG: The Chase) all explain it by indicating a shared origin. Come to think of it, shared origin would be the Mormon doctrinal position, as well. Most Christian denominations assume de facto that there's no intelligent biological life outside the solar system, but this usually doesn't have the force of actual written doctrine. The Bible says nothing directly on the subject. Anyway, my point is, even if you assume there's intelligent life out there, there's no particular reason to believe it would be humanoid at all, much less age in close enough to the same fashion as humans to make the above comparison meaningful. And that's *assuming* there's even life in any form we would recognize outside of our own solar system, which is flagrant speculation in the first place.
Even if there *were* humans in Andromeda, aging rates would still be relative to your reference frame, because time is relative to your reference frame.
We only need dark matter if we're determined to believe certain traditional ideas (most notably, the big bang). If we're willing to accept that there's stuff we don't know and we might have been wrong about some of that stuff, dark matter becomes optional.