This happens because an application aborts the shutdown. The normal use would be, an user has an open document, the application prompts them to save, don't save and exit, or cancel. If the user clicks cancel, the shutdown needs to be aborted so they can do whatever they needed to do that made them click cancel. Because MS has no means of telling what mechanism an application will use to present this kind of choice (or if it needs to at all), any application can do it at will. Some applications abuse this, and do it without giving any clear indication why. I think an event may be logged saying what application stopped it, but it might require you to turn the logging up to see it normally.

If you really, really want to shut down, without any pesky apps stopping you, make a batch file with the following command "shutdown -s -f -t 0". This will do a forced shutdown that won't stop for anything. Just don't blame anyone but yourself when the you lose that document you forgot to save before shutting down.

The better thing would be to record it, and grow the fuck up and realize that two people talking about how the stewardess is a hot piece of ass while the autopilot is on is not a big deal. Make a rule the FCC will bleep out non-relevant/personal conversation before releasing it to media if you really need to, but acting like two adults won't ever think or say anything foolish or "inappropriate" is silly. You couldn't hold Priests to that standard, much less airline pilots (many of whom are ex-military and been exposed to far worse). So rather then pretend we are all perfect saints until we get caught, accept the fact that pilots will make a sexist, racist, or otherwise offensive joke every now and then, like most other people, and just ignore it if it isn't relevant to flying a plane, which is after all, their job.

Allowing secret ballots (No one except you knows who you voted for) and ballots that can't be cheated on is nigh impossible. It can't be done even for paper ballots, so why should a machine with thousands of parts involved be able to do it? The only difference with electronic ballots is because people can not see and understand the processes that go on inside them, it is easier for a smaller group of people to alter them without being caught. If someone is molesting paper ballots in some way, it is obvious to anyone who sees it. If someone molests voting machines in some way, it will be undetectable to anyone but a trained expert with prolonged access to the machine.

You can't make a piece of electronics that can't be modified by someone who has physical access to it. You can make it more difficult then it is on modern machines (where it is almost excruciatingly simple) but you still have the problem. At least with paper ballots, the number of people that must be involved to cause large scale manipulation is much larger, and thus much more likely to be caught. Electronic voting machines are a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. They aren't any more efficient then paper ballots, their only benefit is they can give results very quickly, which is a benefit to the news media, not anyone else. Does it really matter if it takes an extra day to determine who won an election?

The shuttles are a definitely not the best possible design, we know that now, but at the time they were built they seemed like a good idea. Either way, just because the shuttles aren't the ideal vehicle doesn't mean we should toss the whole program away, which is what we are doing. I live in Floida, and visit the space coast often and know a lot of the "little people" in the space program. They are insanely dedicated, even the people who do jobs others would consider demeaning or unimportant. They knew the people who died in the various NASA accidents way better then the engineers in Houston did, and they work every day to keep the astronauts safe. The majority of them can and will get better paying jobs in the private sector, many of them routinely turned down offers when economic times were better (no one is getting rich at NASA).

There is a ridiculous amount of institutional knowledge in the shuttle program, as well as a culture the defies all the regular government stereotypes. Once the team is disbanded and goes their separate ways we will have lost our best shot as a country at safe sustained manned space flight. We should have had a next generation vehicle ready to transition them too, but politics and the vague promise that somehow commercial space flight will fill in has killed it. Apparently as a country we no longer want to lead in the realms of science and engineering, and are content to have our only government funded innovations come in the form of new banking procedures to steal from the poor and give to the rich.

This is my experience as well. The old "use an up to date AV and don't browse porn sites" line is completely outdated. The modern source of infection is either through using exploits in rarely patched software (Adobe, Flash, Java, etc.) combined with using SEO techniques to boost malware sites to the top of google rankings for big breaking news stories, infecting wordpress and other blog systems en masse, and infecting the servers used to host advertising on major sites (or just buying the advertising straight up and redirecting it to malware after it goes live). A lot of them don't even rely on an exploit, they just make it appear that a site they trust is telling them they need to download something, so they do.

The variants change multiple times a day, and no AV product can keep up. Once installed they install rootkits that hide them from the AV. The rootkit part normally fails on Vista/Win 7, but the usermode still runs, and users will happily click an escalation prompt. The only defense is to lock machines down tight enough nothing unauthorized can be run on them and users don't have admin rights (note that I didnt say don't run as admin. Sudo won't help you here. They will enter the admin credentials anyways, because users are dumb and don't read things) . I've taken to doing some forensics on some of the pc's that come by me with fake av, and about 90% of the time, at the time of the infection they were reasonably up to date, had working AV, and from the browser history were on normal, everyday sites like msn.com or whatever immediately before being infected.

AV is useless for the new generation of exploits, at least in it's current form.

It's generally referred to as the JTAG hack. It requires minor soldering and modification of the 360. It does not work on every revision of the 360 currently. Frankly, if you are not savvy enough to find the info with Google, you are better off not bothering or paying someone else to do it.

The 360 has been hacked for a long time, and has a thriving homebrew scene. I currently have a completely redone dashboard (that replaces the MS one) and a ton of arcade and console emulators on mine. Previous to the current hack (that allows unsigned code execution) their was a hack for the DVD-Rom firmware that allowed you to play with burned disks.

Deep packet inspection of large amounts of traffic was not possible until fairly recently. The technology did not exist to allow ISP's to treat traffic differently. The peering agreements between providers were born out of the difficulty of accurately accounting and billing for traffic. It was cheaper for everyone with roughly similar amounts of traffic to agree to pass each others traffic for free then to spend millions on systems to try to figure out who was owed what. The only reason this hasn't been an issue until now is purely technical in nature. Because of the huge investment to enter the market, plus the network effect and economies of scale inherent, plus the corruption of politicians, make the telecom industry a natural oligopoly, if not a natural monopoly. WIthout regulation, they will abuse their customers to the maximum extent possible, because their customers have little if any choice. Choosing an ISP is like choosing between getting in a cage with a hungry lion or a hungry bear, either way the outcome is unpleasant, just in slightly different ways. There is no avoiding it in the current environment, every business in this situation is going to act this way. The only solution is to either artificially break them up into small pieces, or to artificially regulate their behavior. I'm willing to bet the companies involved would prefer the latter to the former.

The "if you don't like it, switch to another provider" argument is ridiculous if you look at the reality of the situation. There is no true commodity market for internet access, major markets have 2, maybe 3 options, smaller markets only have 1. Of those 2, they will often rely on different technology, so only one may actually meet your needs. Furthermore the costs to switch can be very large, especially for large companies. Furthermore, it will be mostly invisible to the average end user. The costs are going to be born by the websites that want to get their traffic to the customer (using the connection the customer has paid for). If you are Google, having your search results artifically delayed to be slower then Bing results will cost you Money. If you are trying to run a voip service, and the QoS applied by the ISP artificially slows your packets while giving another service priority, your service will be spotty and drop lots of calls, while the other service will work great, even though you both are using the exact same infrastructure.

Allowing ISP's to treat packets differently is giving them a license for legal extortion. They can abuse the fact that to the end-user slowness caused by their ISP and slowness caused by the site itself is indistinguishable to extort money. Furthermore, they can give sites they have a financial interest in priority, without spending a dime on increasing capacity. Furthermore, it creates a barrier to entry to new players that do not have the funds to pay off the ISP's to carry their traffic.

Neutrality to traffic is a fundamental aspect of the internet that is part of why it has been so successful. Allowing protocols, services, and sites, to live and die on their merits without artificial limitation is what has led the boom of internet development. Imagine if in those early days of servers in cases made of LEGO, Google had to negotiate an agreement with every ISP to carry their traffic to their users before they could offer services. And at any time, someone with a bigger warchest could have offered more money to keep them off.

Congress and the FCC have created these monsters, constantly pouring government funds, preferential treatment, monopoly agreements, etc. into them to keep any real competition from occurring. If they don't have the right to place limits on their abuses of the oligopoly position they gave them, who does?

It wasn't what he said, it was the way he said it, and the irony of this old, clueless man, who held an extremely important committee seat, blathering on about something he clearly didn't understand. It sounded like he was repeating an explanation some slick lobbyist had used to explain it to him, that he only half remembered. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that Ted Stevens was not a 100%, bought and paid for shill to industry, with no ethics or redeeming value. He treated congress like a smash and grab for money for his supporters. I'm sad he died in a plane crash instead of prison where he would have been if it weren't for the ineptitude of the prosecutors of his corruption investigation.

Windows does allow services to run as different users. it has since at least windows 2000, probably since NT. Services that interact with the network by default login as network service, which has limited permissions compared to the local system account. In a locked down environment (ie an internet facing or dmz server) you can use even more restricted accounts. A poorly configured Linux server is easy to exploit, in the same way a poorly configured Windows server is easy to exploit. The only difference is there's a larger pool of people with jobs as windows administrators without the skills and knowledge to back it up. As linux becomes ever more popular, expect to see the same thing to happen to it.

Presumably pirates will not have internet access on their long plundering trips across the ocean, and not be able to access the new content as it is released.

That's probably why he is an artist, and not a mason.

I used 64-bit XP for years (skipping Vista completely) on my home machine. I never had a problem with drivers. I never get this idea that gets spouted every time it comes up. Even my printer had a driver. Even most apps that require a driver I never had problems finding 64-bit versions for. Granted, I built my machine myself, using parts from vendors with a reputation with supporting their hardware, so if you bought a box from Dell filled with cheapest parts they could get that week, your experience may have varied. I think a lot of people tried xp64 right after it came out, and couldn't find drivers, and gave up. Of course any MS OS is going to be short on drivers at the start.

Firefox started as the browser that wasn't for your grandma. It had rough edges, pages didn't always display properly, but it was fast and tabbed an light weight with an installer in the single digits. This is how it grew it's user base, Trying to shoehorn it into the browser for grandma is retarded (Chrome already is better for that, by a good margin). Fuck your grandma, I don't want to use the best browser for your grandma. Our requirements are completely different. I want Firefox to be the best browser for me. I want separate url and search fields because I know exactly what I am trying to accomplish. If I want to stick some search terms through google I will, if I want to go to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org I had a specific reason. I want the url bar to make a best effort at turning what I entered into a working url with as little guessing as possible and run with it.

Let chrome be the browser for grandma, they have the resources and the marketing power behind them. Leave Firefox pure to the roots it came from, and focus on technical aspects. If people want to change the ui, the wonderful extension system lets them do just that.