But how do you really stop [someone] from [something]
With a law.
If it was that simple, illegal drugs wouldn't be available, would they? Murder wouldn't happen, right?
We'd need enforcement to ensure compliance with said law, which means empowering the government to inspect private company data to make sure it's not the verboten kind of data we don't want them collecting. This would require congress to grant unprecedented powers to law enforcement, essentially rendering all privately held data subject to government inspection. If you're concerned about private companies having too much information or too much power, think about the ramifications of a government authorized to access (for "verification purposes only") any privately-held business data- I respectfully submit that this would be a worse problem than having private companies legally allowed to capture public data.
There's also the question of how to differentiate appropriate customer information from the kind you want to forbid: for example, my wife owns a small business and (like pretty much all business owners) she keeps track of her customers- this includes having phone numbers and addresses in a database. For a law to do what you're suggesting, there would need to be a legal distinction between the kind of data my wife's business keeps and the kind of data you don't want Google to have. IANAL, but I'm not sure that's legally possible.
Laws are designed to address practical and specific societal issues
They're also highly prone, just like software, to creating unintended consequences that may be less desirable than the problem they seek to correct. Some examples:
The income tax deduction, designed to make it less expensive to own a home, makes it more expensive for the majority of borrowers (for whom it's cheaper to take the standard deduction) to borrow, by artificially inflating the rate the market will bear.
The War on Drugs, designed to make drugs too expensive to be used/abused, has instead made drug trade profitable; it is now the funding source of choice for organized crime and we have just as many addicts today as we did when we started.
The law against hiring undocumented workers is intended to protect domestic labor; instead it creates conditions in which undocumented workers cannot demand comparable wages, depressing the wages domestic workers would theoretically command.
The income tax for businesses is designed to reduce the tax burden individuals (especially the very poor) pay, by making companies shoulder some of the costs. Companies pass this tax along in the form of higher prices, lower wages and reduced profit, which impact the very poor disproportionately.
The federal subsidy on food crops is intended to make food cheap and plentiful; however when US farmers undersell global market rates, they put foreign farmers out of work. Those workers then compete for manufacturing jobs in cities, driving down labor costs and putting US manufacturers out of work.
...when anyone blithely suggests 'making a law' to fix a problem, I generally wonder a) how we survived without one for so long, b)whether the right solution really is to expand the role of government in our lives, c) if this new law will be (like so many others) ignored, or d) if it will create worse problems than it solves.
In this situation, where the 'problem' is that a private company might have too much power, I'm suspicious of a solution that involves concentrating even more power in the hands of even fewer people.
Note that TFA suggests that celluolose is one of the polysaccharides this process is supposed to work with. Unless you're a ruminant, celluolose is not food.
what women don't want from IT jobs is being forced to hang out with all those nerd all day long
Based on the zoo this thread has already become, I'm surprised your post wasn't modded 'insightful' instead of 'funny'.
Let's face it, we (IT workers) can be awfully wierd, even without needing to parse the added contextual complexities introduced by adding the opposite gender to the mix- and we're not usually known for our social graces to begin with. That alone might be part of why there are fewer women even interested in IT careers. There's also the fact that IT is significantly gender-entrenched, and it's always tough to buck a trend. Think of it this way: how many of us (I'll assume the majority of/. readers are guys) wouldn't be a little daunted to go work in an all-female environment? What if you were hired into a new shop only to find that your boss and all your peers were women? That could be part of the calculus women make when considering where they want to be 8 hours a day- given all of these factors, is anyone surprised?
That said, I've had just as many female leads as male ones; maybe my perspective is uncommon, I don't know.
All DKIM, and similar solutions, does is to to prevent message and header manipulation in transit.
Identifying senders and sources won't prevent them sending spam, but it will make the existing rules much easier to enforce. It won't solve the problem, but it sure won't hurt- if anything, it'll reduce the number of variables involved in identifying and shutting down spam-sending boxes.
it's actually a pretty cool concept, tho (as with any good idea) it's been variously interpreted and applied.
from Wikipedia:
"... the concept of ubuntu defines the individual in terms of their several relationships with others [...] while the Zulu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ("a person is a person through (other) persons") may have no apparent religious connotations in the context of Western society, in an African context it suggests that the person one is to become by behaving with humanity is an ancestor worthy of respect or veneration."
In other words, it's a contextual view of humanity as being constituted of relationships. We are the relationships we have.
Where I live it is perfectly legal to advertise prostitution.
Where I live it is not, but that doesn't stop it happening- it just means it goes under some handy euphemism, such as 'escort services' or 'massage with release' or 'happy ending' or what have you.
That's the result we can expect when we attempt to prohibit the sale of something for which there is demand- the sale usually doesn't get thwarted, the process merely becomes obfuscated.
Anybody who wanted to sell targeted advertising, for one.
Anybody who wanted to sell your information to others, for another.
Yes, the ability to learn more about you than you knew you were disclosing can be used for good or evil, and can be intensely profitable, and it's already been done. Gmail was invitation-based, ingeniously, because it not only gives Google a lot of data to mine, it also provides meta-information on how people are related. Who are the connectors in your social network? Who's interested in gore-tex sporting goods or is on the mailing list of the Green party? Google knows.
Google is not even the most evil one in the information warehousing/mining game. You are profiled more than you think already- don't believe for a second that if you're applying for a big loan or are being scrutinized for a big-deal job that every bit of your legal, financial, and public personal history isn't already available for a price.
Microsoft is playing catch-up in the realm of exploiting personal meta-data for profit....and if it turns out to be even half as profitable as Google's data-mining from Gmail, it will have been (from their perspective at least) a very good idea. Even if it turns out to have negative ramifications (and it might) it won't matter that much to Microsoft if they don't bear those costs directly.
Just another way of converting electrical energy into a form that can be used later.
We need to have a source of reliable cheap electricity to make the aluminum. And we don't at this time.
This is something of a chicken-and-egg situation. We have the potential- and part of what's holding that potential back is that we don't really have a good way to store surplus electricity, so why should we bother building out all that untapped capacity?
If TFA is accurate, the storage problem may be trivial, so long as we can figure out a way to crack the aluminum back out that will scale. This later point is where we'll end up putting the energy back into the equation, and this can be done asynchronously- meaning alternative energy like solar or wind or tidal or wave or geothermal could be used along with nuclear and hydro. This will definitely require more production capacity than we have today, but this also provides the demand to fulfill it: the ability to put it in our cars.
See, there's never really been an energy shortage- what there's been a shortage of is knowledge of how to capture, store, and direct the energy that's raining on our heads, blowing by, flowing down hills, and flying about untapped. If I could run my car by covering my roof with solar panels, I'd strongly consider it.
Hydrogen will never be a good replacement for gasoline.
And 640k should be enough for anyone, too.
It's unstable, highly reactive, hard to transport, and hard to produce in an efficient manner.
Gasoline had significant drawbacks as a fuel as well, that were also overcome - it's poisonous, explosive, tough to refine, and required significant technology to transport and store safely. If gasoline had to go through the same scrutiny hydrogen is being faced with today, it would never have been approved as a fuel, much less become widespread.
While I'm sympathetic to the biodiesel crowd, I wish they wouldn't mistake discouraging investments in hydrogen technology for promoting biodiesel investment. We should push forward on all of the above fronts.
Second, I don't think you have a very clear idea of what force is
Sure I do. "Do this or kiss your livelihood goodbye and work at McDonalds" Seems like force to me.
"Seems" is probably the key word here. I understand that it might honestly occur like force to you, but based on TFA, this is almost certainly consensual.
Nobody's forcing her to take the job, or even to apply- there's other jobs out there, after all- and if she doesn't want to be screened, she doesn't have to submit to the procedure.
There are always stipulations and requirements involved in every agreement, every deal, every transaction, every negotiation. You can't apply for this job without submitting to a vetting process- in the same way that paying money is a condition of buying a movie ticket- neither the buyer nor the seller is being coerced, but to get in the door, you pay your nine bucks or you let the nice man scan your fingerprints. If there was force involved, the submitter would not be asking the question- he would KNOW that something was off.
Who are the scientists that say we need more study before taking action?
Who said anything about needing more study before taking action? The parent simply disagrees with the assertion that the case is closed, which is not the same thing as saying action should be postponed.
This is a reasonable position to take, given the ongoing inquiry nature of science itself. Sure, there's a consensus, but it's all still theory and there's still a lot of good science to be done on this one....and oh yeah, you don't have to believe the consensus to align on the notion that we should do something about that polluting we've been up to, which seems to be the whole reason everybody's up in arms trying to convince us that we are the primary cause of global warming.
We should take action *and* do more study- and we should do our best to make irrelevant the folks who want to dogmatize science.
I can guarantee you that their salaries are on par with their American counterparts.
Bullshit! It's supply and demand people, supply and F*ing demand. You cannot flood the IT field with foreign labor and still claim the US workers make what they used to[...]
...unless demand has gone up more than supply has. (which would drive prices up despite increased supply)
You're 100% correct about one thing- supply and demand IS at play here. I think there's more to it than just how more workers impact the IT labor market tho. Remember when an "html guru" commanded $100/hr? Then came a flood of tools that churned out HTML cheaply, which made HTML abundant and cheap. Remember making networks work before DDNS? Remember when you couldn't reasonably expect to plug a card into a computer and have it just work? These are all examples which illustrate the declining value of the same work over time as it is commoditized.
I.T. doesn't exist to provide jobs, it exists to get stuff done- and it's the nature of IT to reduce its own costs and invent new efficiencies. I'm not sure we can safely conclude that H1-b workers in the labor market are responsible for drops in IT labor prices until we can factor out how much the cost of IT labor has gone down due to advances in technology, figure how much actual demand there is for IT labor, and how that's trended over time, factor in whether or not new problems created by old solutions call for added labor or not, etc. etc. etc.
Re:Tag this article deathofcreationism
on
The Human Mutation
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· Score: 1
In fact it is exactly the opposite: for all we know, they are wrong
I understand and don't disagree, but you're also illustrating my prior point.
You can't overturn an ontology with epistemology, simply because your epistemology must have a context (an ontology) in order to be relevant. Your world view comes before (and informs) all your subsequent thinking. You couldn't do an epistemological analysis of the value of "God" without a way of ordering the world for yourself- and if the way you already view the world is from the presupposition that God created it, analysis from a different ontological view won't make sense.
I'm merely pointing out that the same stuff in different contexts will mean different things. By relating to the world in a particular way, we bring our own contexts to it- and this informs our interpretations of it. We can talk about delusions all day, but in a certain sense, we're just saying that our delusion is better than theirs.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they often are not. Law and code have a shared characteristic: unintended consequences can make a good idea (in theory) into an unmitigated disaster (in practice).
The law is littered with unintended outcomes:
The income tax deduction for interest paid on home mortgages actually drives up the rate the market will bear, making it more expensive for non-itemizers to borrow than it otherwise would be. The mortgage interest deduction was intended to promote home ownership by making it cheaper, but for the majority of people (who do not itemize) it makes it more expensive.
It's illegal to hire undocumented workers. These laws are intended to protect domestic workers, but they actually create a black market of undocumented labor that can't negotiate fair wages for fear of being deported, which undercuts the prices domestic labor would theoretically command.
Making drugs illegal was intended, in theory, to marginalize their use by making them too expensive or risky. Instead, pot is our #1 cash crop and the funding source of choice for organized crime.
We subsidize farmers to make food plentiful and cheap. They then sell their (cheap) crops on the world market, putting farmers around the world out of work. The farmers go to cities to compete for manufacturing jobs, producing cheap manufactured goods for import back into the US at rates cheaper than US workers can compete with, putting US manufacturers out of work.
We also subsidize farmers to protect their way of life. This attracts corporations who compete for the tax subsidies and benefits available to farmers, crowding family farmers out of the business.
I might go so far as to speculate that the ratio of unintended consequences to intended ones for any given law is postive. Doubly so if the law tries to thwart economic reality.
Re:Tag this article deathofcreationism
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Science won't ever disprove religion because religion begins a priori from the premise of [insert faith-based foundation of religion here]. You could prove pretty much any scientific fact to most religious folks and they'll relate to it in one of 3 ways:
1) they'll regard it as a new revelation of [God]'s mystery
2) they'll regard it as neat information about the world, but irrelevant to their faith because their faith isn't derived from anything in the physical world, or
3) they'll regard it as a test of their faith
Thoreau once said, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." There's a lesson in there: there's no other possible world available to you than the one you've made space for in your mind. The religious are awake to their kind of day, and you and I are awake to a different kind of day based on different logical, rational, or asserted postulates (from which all else follows pretty rationally once you accept the prior postulate).
Hey, for all we know, they might be right. (May his noodly gloriousness be merciful when the rapture comes, if that's the case.)
Although maybe that's what it is,/. is full of geeky science types who 'actually do something' and we get annoyed at freeloading arts types demanding to be paid for what is, in effect, busywork.
If their work is of such low value, you probably don't want to consume it then. Oh, wait. You DO value it enough to consume it. Just not enough to pay for it.
...that you then accuse THEM of being money grubbing freeloaders is a nice touch. classy, even.
You can't freaking open the Control Panel without a UAC prompt.
Actually, you can....but that wasn't your point.
Your point is that people are too dumb to make security decisions, so it's a bad design to require them to make them. Of course, the flip-side of this argument is that unless users are given the opportunity to make a choice, what's available is the same as no choice.
The notion that users can't make good security choices may have some merit, but the idea that disabling UAC is somehow good security advice is backwards- disabling UAC (and therefore running with a full token) is exactly the same as clicking every prompt that comes your way indiscriminately. Ironically, your advice is worse than the problem you're complaining about. OK OK, you *really* just want something better than UAC. Welcome to the club, we all want magical better security.
Security in a world of users who are trained to think that security somehow doesn't involve them will never work. Microsoft helped create that illusion, and it's bitten them hard. You might see this as blame-shifting, but I see it differently: it's pain-shifting. And it's about time. People (and the folks who write their software) have to start being responsible for their own security, and annoying tho it might be, UAC is a step in the right direction. Let's hope we start seeing software designs that don't require elevated privileges, let's look forward to users with a clue about what executing code means. Let's let Microsoft choke a little bit on how much their legacy of interoperability-over-security has cost them....and let's see how it goes. Will users revolt, and switch to linux en masse? Will there be much rejoicing? Or will the next version be better? Or will users get it?
What you buy in China is subject to Chinese law. (not US law).
If you then import one of those pirated chinese disks to the US, (where piracy is not legal and stuff) it wouldn't be legal. Odds are against the law being enforced either way, but if it is enforced either way, odds are you won't like it one bit.
I don't think jobs are the problem, but the supply of food.
Actually, famine nowadays is rarely a function of food supply alone.
per Wiki:
Modern famines have often occurred in nations that, as a whole, were not initially suffering a shortage of food. The largest famine ever (proportional to the affected population) was the Irish Potato Famine, which began in 1845 and occurred as food was being shipped from Ireland to England because the English could afford to pay higher prices. The largest famine ever (in absolute terms) was the Chinese famine of 1959-60 that occurred as a result of the Great Leap Forward. In a similar manner, the 1973 famine in Ethiopia was concentrated in the Wollo region, although food was being shipped out of Wollo to the capital city of Addis Ababa where it could command higher prices. In contrast, at the same time that the citizens of the dictatorships of Ethiopia and Sudan had massive famines in the late-1970s and early-1980s, the democracies of Botswana and Zimbabwe avoided them, despite having worse drops in national food production.
According to Nobel-peace prize winning economist Amartya Sen
quoted here, there is without exception a political component involved that allows the food shortage to progress beyond food insecurity:
I have discussed elsewhere the remarkable fact that, in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China's 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famine of 1958-61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for three full years.
It's kind of unfortunate that the Glass effect is transparent. If you take a screenshot of a single window, it will pick up whatever is behind the window.
(I don't have Vista, but surely there's a way to turn off Aero if it's that big a deal?)
Yes, there is. You can enable or disable transparency altogether, and you can control the transparency such that varying degrees of transparency are available: there's a slider with which to adjust the color intensity, and sliders with which you can adjust hue, saturation, and brightness. this article goes into more detail than I needed, but if you look halfway down the page there's a screenshot with a checkbox titled 'Enable Transparency'.
Slashdot Mirror
We'd need enforcement to ensure compliance with said law, which means empowering the government to inspect private company data to make sure it's not the verboten kind of data we don't want them collecting. This would require congress to grant unprecedented powers to law enforcement, essentially rendering all privately held data subject to government inspection. If you're concerned about private companies having too much information or too much power, think about the ramifications of a government authorized to access (for "verification purposes only") any privately-held business data- I respectfully submit that this would be a worse problem than having private companies legally allowed to capture public data.
There's also the question of how to differentiate appropriate customer information from the kind you want to forbid: for example, my wife owns a small business and (like pretty much all business owners) she keeps track of her customers- this includes having phone numbers and addresses in a database. For a law to do what you're suggesting, there would need to be a legal distinction between the kind of data my wife's business keeps and the kind of data you don't want Google to have. IANAL, but I'm not sure that's legally possible.
They're also highly prone, just like software, to creating unintended consequences that may be less desirable than the problem they seek to correct. Some examples:
In this situation, where the 'problem' is that a private company might have too much power, I'm suspicious of a solution that involves concentrating even more power in the hands of even fewer people.
Note that TFA suggests that celluolose is one of the polysaccharides this process is supposed to work with. Unless you're a ruminant, celluolose is not food.
Based on the zoo this thread has already become, I'm surprised your post wasn't modded 'insightful' instead of 'funny'.
Let's face it, we (IT workers) can be awfully wierd, even without needing to parse the added contextual complexities introduced by adding the opposite gender to the mix- and we're not usually known for our social graces to begin with. That alone might be part of why there are fewer women even interested in IT careers. There's also the fact that IT is significantly gender-entrenched, and it's always tough to buck a trend. Think of it this way: how many of us (I'll assume the majority of
That said, I've had just as many female leads as male ones; maybe my perspective is uncommon, I don't know.
from Wikipedia: In other words, it's a contextual view of humanity as being constituted of relationships. We are the relationships we have.
That's the result we can expect when we attempt to prohibit the sale of something for which there is demand- the sale usually doesn't get thwarted, the process merely becomes obfuscated.
Anybody who wanted to sell your information to others, for another.
Yes, the ability to learn more about you than you knew you were disclosing can be used for good or evil, and can be intensely profitable, and it's already been done. Gmail was invitation-based, ingeniously, because it not only gives Google a lot of data to mine, it also provides meta-information on how people are related. Who are the connectors in your social network? Who's interested in gore-tex sporting goods or is on the mailing list of the Green party? Google knows.
Google is not even the most evil one in the information warehousing/mining game. You are profiled more than you think already- don't believe for a second that if you're applying for a big loan or are being scrutinized for a big-deal job that every bit of your legal, financial, and public personal history isn't already available for a price.
Microsoft is playing catch-up in the realm of exploiting personal meta-data for profit.
If TFA is accurate, the storage problem may be trivial, so long as we can figure out a way to crack the aluminum back out that will scale. This later point is where we'll end up putting the energy back into the equation, and this can be done asynchronously- meaning alternative energy like solar or wind or tidal or wave or geothermal could be used along with nuclear and hydro. This will definitely require more production capacity than we have today, but this also provides the demand to fulfill it: the ability to put it in our cars.
See, there's never really been an energy shortage- what there's been a shortage of is knowledge of how to capture, store, and direct the energy that's raining on our heads, blowing by, flowing down hills, and flying about untapped. If I could run my car by covering my roof with solar panels, I'd strongly consider it.
While I'm sympathetic to the biodiesel crowd, I wish they wouldn't mistake discouraging investments in hydrogen technology for promoting biodiesel investment. We should push forward on all of the above fronts.
Nobody's forcing her to take the job, or even to apply- there's other jobs out there, after all- and if she doesn't want to be screened, she doesn't have to submit to the procedure.
There are always stipulations and requirements involved in every agreement, every deal, every transaction, every negotiation. You can't apply for this job without submitting to a vetting process- in the same way that paying money is a condition of buying a movie ticket- neither the buyer nor the seller is being coerced, but to get in the door, you pay your nine bucks or you let the nice man scan your fingerprints. If there was force involved, the submitter would not be asking the question- he would KNOW that something was off.
This is a reasonable position to take, given the ongoing inquiry nature of science itself. Sure, there's a consensus, but it's all still theory and there's still a lot of good science to be done on this one.
We should take action *and* do more study- and we should do our best to make irrelevant the folks who want to dogmatize science.
You're 100% correct about one thing- supply and demand IS at play here. I think there's more to it than just how more workers impact the IT labor market tho. Remember when an "html guru" commanded $100/hr? Then came a flood of tools that churned out HTML cheaply, which made HTML abundant and cheap. Remember making networks work before DDNS? Remember when you couldn't reasonably expect to plug a card into a computer and have it just work? These are all examples which illustrate the declining value of the same work over time as it is commoditized.
I.T. doesn't exist to provide jobs, it exists to get stuff done- and it's the nature of IT to reduce its own costs and invent new efficiencies. I'm not sure we can safely conclude that H1-b workers in the labor market are responsible for drops in IT labor prices until we can factor out how much the cost of IT labor has gone down due to advances in technology, figure how much actual demand there is for IT labor, and how that's trended over time, factor in whether or not new problems created by old solutions call for added labor or not, etc. etc. etc.
You can't overturn an ontology with epistemology, simply because your epistemology must have a context (an ontology) in order to be relevant. Your world view comes before (and informs) all your subsequent thinking. You couldn't do an epistemological analysis of the value of "God" without a way of ordering the world for yourself- and if the way you already view the world is from the presupposition that God created it, analysis from a different ontological view won't make sense.
I'm merely pointing out that the same stuff in different contexts will mean different things. By relating to the world in a particular way, we bring our own contexts to it- and this informs our interpretations of it. We can talk about delusions all day, but in a certain sense, we're just saying that our delusion is better than theirs.
The law is littered with unintended outcomes:
- The income tax deduction for interest paid on home mortgages actually drives up the rate the market will bear, making it more expensive for non-itemizers to borrow than it otherwise would be. The mortgage interest deduction was intended to promote home ownership by making it cheaper, but for the majority of people (who do not itemize) it makes it more expensive.
- It's illegal to hire undocumented workers. These laws are intended to protect domestic workers, but they actually create a black market of undocumented labor that can't negotiate fair wages for fear of being deported, which undercuts the prices domestic labor would theoretically command.
- Making drugs illegal was intended, in theory, to marginalize their use by making them too expensive or risky. Instead, pot is our #1 cash crop and the funding source of choice for organized crime.
- We subsidize farmers to make food plentiful and cheap. They then sell their (cheap) crops on the world market, putting farmers around the world out of work. The farmers go to cities to compete for manufacturing jobs, producing cheap manufactured goods for import back into the US at rates cheaper than US workers can compete with, putting US manufacturers out of work.
- We also subsidize farmers to protect their way of life. This attracts corporations who compete for the tax subsidies and benefits available to farmers, crowding family farmers out of the business.
I might go so far as to speculate that the ratio of unintended consequences to intended ones for any given law is postive. Doubly so if the law tries to thwart economic reality.- 1) they'll regard it as a new revelation of [God]'s mystery
- 2) they'll regard it as neat information about the world, but irrelevant to their faith because their faith isn't derived from anything in the physical world, or
- 3) they'll regard it as a test of their faith
Thoreau once said, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." There's a lesson in there: there's no other possible world available to you than the one you've made space for in your mind. The religious are awake to their kind of day, and you and I are awake to a different kind of day based on different logical, rational, or asserted postulates (from which all else follows pretty rationally once you accept the prior postulate).Hey, for all we know, they might be right. (May his noodly gloriousness be merciful when the rapture comes, if that's the case.)
Your point is that people are too dumb to make security decisions, so it's a bad design to require them to make them. Of course, the flip-side of this argument is that unless users are given the opportunity to make a choice, what's available is the same as no choice.
The notion that users can't make good security choices may have some merit, but the idea that disabling UAC is somehow good security advice is backwards- disabling UAC (and therefore running with a full token) is exactly the same as clicking every prompt that comes your way indiscriminately. Ironically, your advice is worse than the problem you're complaining about. OK OK, you *really* just want something better than UAC. Welcome to the club, we all want magical better security.
Security in a world of users who are trained to think that security somehow doesn't involve them will never work. Microsoft helped create that illusion, and it's bitten them hard. You might see this as blame-shifting, but I see it differently: it's pain-shifting. And it's about time. People (and the folks who write their software) have to start being responsible for their own security, and annoying tho it might be, UAC is a step in the right direction. Let's hope we start seeing software designs that don't require elevated privileges, let's look forward to users with a clue about what executing code means. Let's let Microsoft choke a little bit on how much their legacy of interoperability-over-security has cost them.
What you buy in China is subject to Chinese law. (not US law).
If you then import one of those pirated chinese disks to the US, (where piracy is not legal and stuff) it wouldn't be legal. Odds are against the law being enforced either way, but if it is enforced either way, odds are you won't like it one bit.
Cromulent! This discourse embiggens the soul.