Well, yes. Most of the time people think "Of course I want to do !" when they see a dialog, because they actually did intend to press that button at the time. But they do solve the problem of "Oh no, I didn't mean to click that!" (I've accidentally sent uncompleted emails an embarrassing number of times), and really are useful for things that cannot be undone. Such as, oh, I don't know, sending mass text messages.

This most certainly was an interface problem. If someone is intending to update a template, if they can accidentally send an uncompleted message to thousands of people, the interface designer horribly screwed up. Those options should be no where near each other. Humans routinely make small mistakes, and blaming the user for interface problems only makes things worse.

Well, yes... MONOPOLY for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store. But that's not what we're talking about.

You do know that SSL certificates are used by things other than browsers and for things other than HTTPS, right? The operating system keeps a list of valid root certificates so all applications can use them, not just IE. Or would you rather every application needs to know how to validate certificates on its own?

It's the equivalent of updating ca-certificates on Debian based systems. Which I'm really surprised hasn't happened as far as I can tell, even with the warning "Please note that certificate authorities whose certificates are included in this package are not in any way audited for trustworthiness and RFC 3647 compliance, and that full responsibility to assess them belongs to the local system administrator."

I know you were going for a joke, but that actually does work with "Subtract and branch if less than or equal to zero" and a couple other instructions. Obviously not practical, but see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer

Did you not even make it past the first sentence? "I volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students" means they don't work for a high school, not that most any high schools would have an "electrics" class anyways, or that your suggestion made any sense at all.

The counting portion of the problem is by far the easiest.

Surviving a lightning strike unscathed is a result of the conductive airframe acting as a Faraday cage, protecting the internal electronics. Very different than trying to protect against EM radiation generated from inside the plane.

I'm not commenting on the tubes/semiconductor debate because I don't know enough, but where are you going to get a good ground at altitude? You could have a common ground throughout the (metallic portions of the) plane, but that's a far cry from having the infinite source/sink that is an earth ground.

Man, that brings me back to the days when firefox was cool.

Sure there is, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Pretty much every website has that in their TOS.

All of the space scenes were silent, so perfectly realistic :)

Do you really think that taking desktop apps and shoving the on a phone will make for a good user experience? What ODT editor - are you going to shove OpenOffice onto a 4 inch touchscreen and expect it to be usable? While a lot of the technical components are there in free software, that's not the hard part. The hard part is the user and interface design, and that's what the proprietary systems you are railing against get far closer to correct.

And for "sans a few kinks", you've heard "the last 10% is 90% of the work"? That's an understatement.

Having software controlled parameters makes development easier, cheaper, and faster. Would you really like your phones to come out later and cost more because the designers had to try and protect against modified firmwares purposely pushing things out of spec? It's not like user level applications can do any of these things, which would be a real problem.

I could easily change the speed and voltage of my desktop's CPU in the motherboard's BIOS. Oh, and turn the fans off as well. I'm sure I could burn my CPU out if I pushed everything to the limit, but that would rightly void the warranty on my CPU. Are you arguing that these options should be taken out? Wouldn't that remove freedoms people have with their hardware?

I'm fine buying equipment that does exactly what it says. If I buy a system with the knowledge that it is designed for games, and isn't sold as a general purpose computing device, then I'll be perfectly happy that steps have been taken in order to prevent other uses. (If it's advertised as supporting other uses and then those uses are removed as with OtherOS, yes, I'd be pissed. That's a different story.)

With games, since one person using cheats can ruin other people's experiences, I expect that measures will be taken in order to prevent the execution of modified games during online play. I'd call this restriction a feature.

These days, autorun (at least without prompts) is a terrible idea. But back in the days when the main thing put into CD drives was pressed games with most of the content on the disk and malware was more for shits and giggles than true malicious intent, things seemed very different.

That said, I really appreciate the "what would you like to do?" dialog, or KDE's list of recently inserted media. Yes computer, I inserted some media, i'm probably going to want to do something with it. Completely ignoring my deliberate action and doing nothing is a bad interaction.