The United States is such a thing. The Federal government routinely issues mandatory directives to the states, and any disputes are decided by the federal government alone.

Yes Minister is a British show. What does that have to do with France?

The reason that Hulu is only available in the US is that international TV licensing is a nightmarish legal morass from which no man emerges fully sane.

It would also be better if we didn't need policemen and lawyers, but that's not going to happen either. In any reasonable future there will be computer security threats.

Is it Microsoft's fault that you are ignorant of the many automation tools that are included or available as a free download for Windows?

I think the causes of bloodier wars are more about money than weapons. Modern states engage in bloody wars because they can afford to send a large number of their citizens off to die and they can afford to give them large amounts of supplies. In subsistence economies there are few non-essential workers that can be used for war, and the armies have to either feed themselves by plundering the locals or by very limited supply chains that put hard limits on army size.

If war was more civilized in 17th and 18th century Europe it was because rulers believed that land and the peasants that worked it was the only source of wealth, so their generals generally tried to avoid hurting the land they were fighting over. The modern view is that the wealth of a nation is (generally) decided by productivity, not acreage, so the huge sums invested in wars would have been better invested in infrastructure and industry. To the aristocratic rulers this was the domain of common merchants, not of nobles.

It is your IT dept that is crazy. The XP life-cycle was announced when it was released so they had to know this would happen. They should have switched to Vista.

Windows 7 already does all that.

If you are not running as administrator you have to enter the password of an administrator. It's people who run as an admin who get the click trough dialogs. Problem is that the Windows installer still doesn't try to suggest that users should run as a mormal user. By default it should create both an admin and normal user during install and tell you to use the normal user in everyday use. Maybe even hide the admin user in the login screen.

Then no one would do it at all, which is, in my view, not a desirable outcome.

Only a moron would be logged in as a admin for day-to-day usage. This applies to any desktop OS.

Most European schools teach British English while most English media non-British Europeans consume is from America. This tends to result in a mess when people have to write or speak English themselves. This is my experience in the Finnish education system, at least.

There is also great diversity within England. In practice everyone knows that "British English" means some mix of Receieved Pronunciation and London English.

What? The language of Madrid is Castilian. Galician is a separate language, closer to Portuguese than Castilian, spoken in Galicia on the Northwest coast of Spain.

I think your problem is that you are running McAfee.