The individual citizen is always going to be drowned out in a democracy. The biggest gang wins. That what Democracy is.
There's a saying that goes, "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
Hell, I'd still be using W2K except I have one or two apps that won't run under it. I actually downgraded from 7 last year after determining that 7 did absolutely nothing I needed that XP didn't, and had plenty of quirks that drove me crazy.
UAC is to Vista/Windows 7 what sudo is to Unix. It was a function that was a glaring omission from NT up through XP, and if you think any operating system is better without a function to temporarily elevate a limited user to admin you're nuts.
If you think XP's default behavior of setting up everyone to run as a full administrator account to run day-to-day tasks 24/7 you're even more nuts.
That's a far cry from a "scam".
(And why on earth would you trust some random guy on the internet in the first place?)
Why do you think there's a trust issue in the first place? It's open source. If you're that paranoid go look under the hood, see if you can find anything objectionable.
Well, first of all, everybody using Steam should know going-in this one simple fact:
There is no customer service. Repeat it with me: Steam has no customer service.
It needs to be pointed out that whatever experience you may have had with Steam's customer service (have you had any?) is not indicative and does not represent all of the quality of Steam's support.
I had my account hacked some time ago (my own fault, wasn't paying attention and got myself redirected to a trojan page by another friend's hacked account), and my experience getting my access restored was not only successful, but very easy overall (despite my own nervous twitching and facepalming over the matter).
There should also be a distinction between what the publisher does, and what Steam is responsible for. Kral was annoyed that his game was automatically patched, and while Steam is responsible for that action it was the publisher who made the patch, that caused the issue. Also, applying updates and patches isn't mandatory on Steam, you absolutely can opt out of any game updates as set in the properties of the games list. While I'm sure Kral didn't appreciate the outcome of this particular patch, this sort of thing is an isolated incident. Overall, it's better to keep your games patched and up to date.
"To make matters worse, others are reporting that downgrading to an earlier version of Windows doesn't fix the problem."
Hey, guess what. If the problem persists in another operating system, the original operating system wasn't at fault. The only possible way Win7 could be the problem here is if it managed to physically damage the battery, which is just shy of being completely impossible.
The shortest distance between two points is under construction. -- Noelie Alito