Maybe you can smell like a hobo and not be a public health hazard, but... you still have hobo-stank all over you.

But that's arguably what the supreme court is for. If the court hadn't overturned democratic majority rule in the 60's then there would still be white and black segregated schools. Only in this case the SCOTUS decided to overturn decades of legal precedent, having the effect of short circuiting any sort of limitation or regulation in election campaigning system.

There's a saying that goes, "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."

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.

I have no problem going from a 4:3 or 5:4 screen to a 16:10, but unless you're getting a significantly larger screen there is no benefit whatsoever in going from a 16:10 to a 16:9.

Moreover, the manufacturers are pushing 16:9 screens because it's marketable (they can attach all sorts of useless buzzwords to it like TRUE HD 1080p), and because they're cheaper, effectively giving less pixel space in some cases. And as with cheap monitors, most do not come with a stand that supports a swivel to portrait.

Widescreen in general is good for movies, games, and little else. Practically all document creation and all web content progresses vertically, not horizontally, so going to a widescreen standard that gives you less height is completely nonsensical for a huge portion of what computers are used for today.

Unironically carpet-bomb the location to hell and back.

How much you wanna bet the school regularly serves greasy pizza for lunch (some schools serve it for lunch and breakfast!) which all falls neatly under the current state nutritional guidelines?
These administrators have a serious case of plank-in-the-eye.

The push for 3D right now is because Avatar made money hand over fist over hand over fist over ad infinitum, and the rest of the studios all hopped on the bandwagon (aside from Dreamworks who were already inside the bandwagon wishing they could lure in some friends.)

Then it's a poorly supported OSS project, of which there are thousands.

That's a far cry from a "scam".

If someone takes an open source project and removes some components for privacy concerns, which obviously appeals to a certain audience, who cares if he has ads on his webspace for it? Should his bandwidth be free out of the goodness of his heart?

(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.

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.

NM, answered below

What game was this, exactly?

"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 most pressing argument would be that XP is a ridiculously outdated OS, well over a DECADE old at this point, and that XP's default security configuration is absolutely atrocious. Because it needed to be compatible with the programs from the Win9x era, by default it sets up every user as an administrator(root), which everyone who has ever used a Unix-like OS will recognize as a cardinal sin. XP probably wouldn't have had half the viruses, trojans, and overall security threats if it had gone the route of every other sane and modern OS on the planet and set up its users as regular limited accounts. This was practically impossible in the early years of XP of course, as thanks to lazy programming which demanded admin rights nearly 100% of the time, running as limited user meant you could scarcely run an application to play an audio CD.

Later on, MS patched in the "runas" command, a function analogous to Unix "su", making it possible to run admin commands through an administrator account without having to log out completely. This was a good thing, and while it greatly eased the hassle of running a limited account, it was still not as robust as the Unix "sudo" command. While su runs as another user, sudo elevates the current user to administrative privilege, meaning if you install a program, the installer will make changes to your own profile if necessary, instead of to a different administrator's account as the runas command would do.

Windows didn't gain true sudo functionality until Vista introduced UAC, and as much as people bemoan having to click OK whenever running a task requiring admin privilege, this is exactly how a properly security multi-user OS is supposed to function. Running as a limited account in Vista/Win7 is the default operation and it is a sane, standardized security protocol. Running all the time as an administrator is a stupid, risky, boneheaded thing to do, but unfortunately in XP the only alternative is to put up with the frustration of running a semi-functional limited account.