Puttering along at near-light-speed in a universe 14 billion light years across would only remind you of how isolated we really are.

Not if you were on the ship. There's this fancy thing called "relativity" that would make time fly by if you were traveling at 0.999999999c. If you can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light, you can get anywhere in the universe in seconds.

Dang Slashdot without an edit button. I meant to include this link:
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/US-Economy/PublishingImages/20120229_EssentialEcon9.jpg

It shows the sources of the current budget deficits. Keep in mind Paul Ryan, famed serious "fiscal conservative," voted for every single thing in green.

Obama promised a surge into Afghanistan. He promised an eventual pullout from Iraq, and it looks like he's following through - on Bush's schedule.

Congress shut down Obama's attempts to close Gitmo and forbade him from using any federal funds to do just about anything with it. While I wish he'd tried harder, he did attempt it. I'd be more concerned about the continued NSA wiretapping.

The President is not a dictator. People tend to radically overestimate how much the President can really do.

And yes, the same is true for Bush. Bush couldn't have gone to war without Congress. He couldn't have passed the Patriot Act without Congress. He couldn't have passed No Child Left Behind without Congress. He couldn't have racked up massive deficits without Congress. Heck, even today, virtually our entire deficit (that comes from government policy and not the recession) comes from the Bush tax cuts Congress (including Paul Ryan) passed and the wars.

In history? I don't know. I imagine the South Sea Company or the East India Company are among the contenders. Companies like Standard Oil would also crush Apple. General Electric, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco both hit, in modern times, higher market caps than Apple.

Here's what I got from a quick Google.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/08/22/a-history-of-ridiculously-big-companies.aspx

Point taken, but Apple is not the most valuable corporation "in the history of the world." Even assuming market cap is an accurate representation of value, that's only true for Apple if you don't adjust for inflation.

Thanks. I had not seen that. I have actually seen that notification in IE9 before, actually.

A hash doesn't identify an executable unless you have a list of the hashes of every executable rather than just a blacklist of malware hashes.

And again, this applies only to files downloaded with IE.

And again, the logs are wiped on a regular basis.

Even ignoring all this, you've yet to explain why it is the common man understands perfectly the ramifications of downloaded from an app store, but not that of SmartScreen. Especially when SmartScreen's potential problems are explained.

OK. Care to show me what about that statement is untrue?

What? Can you cite a source that says it works via reputation and not by a simple black list?

What difference does that make from a privacy perspective? How do I legitimately install apps on my (imaginary) iPhone outside of Apple's install channel?

Again, Microsoft is not reporting what you install. It is sending a filename and hash of executables you download via IE to Microsoft to compare against a blacklist.

This is on top of the regular SmartScreen filter, which reports URLs to Microsoft to compare against a blacklist and which has been pretty uncontroversial for years, same as Chrome. (I still disagree with it.)

So you don't like it? Well, there's a big notice explaining what it does giving you the option to disable it. Or you could use Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or whatever and it gets reported to Google instead of Microsoft.

So much users are too dumb to understand the simple description of SmartScreen, but bright enough to think through the implications of downloading apps through the Microsoft Store?

Microsoft doesn't "scan your computers for apps." They compare the filename and hash of executables downloaded with Internet Explorer with a known blacklist.

Nope. I'd rather have a local database, even though I assume that's more difficult to keep up-to-date with what I imagine are rapidly changing blacklists. Firefox, for example does this.

But this behavior is (unfortunately) pretty bog standard, and in the case of IE, it's nothing new, so it seems a little bizarre to get all outraged about it now when all Microsoft has added is a check on file download hashes.

Flip the checkbox to turn SmartScreen off then.

It's equally as simple. Probably simpler - never used an Android phone. Both are opt-out from your description, and the SmartScreen functionality seems to be outright presented as an option on installation.

I am also pretty sure that Chrome does, in fact, come standard on Chrome OS and I assume that the default web browser on Androids is Chrome or some variant thereof that sends your URLs to Google same as Chrome does.

Should Linux repositories, the Apple App Store, the Google Store, and the Microsoft store provide a similar warning, since they actually glean more information from what you download there?

I mean, all Microsoft gets from this is a filename and a hash. Unless Microsoft has a hash of every program in existence, that doesn't do them much good for spying purposes. On the other hand, they know everything about the app you're downloading from their store.