As I understand it, basically the virtual texturing is how they organize the chunks of megatextures (upwards of billions of pixels in size) so that they can be streamed into memory in an effective manner even while the textures reside on media. This is targeted at the XBOX 360 for example where the textures might still reside on the game disc and you'd want to avoid game stutter from loading those huge textures on the fly.

Is that really all the vital though? The problem that has most people concerned is not accepting erroneous SSNs that are made up, but perfectly valid SSNs being used fraudulently in identity theft, is it not?

If it was stored in the same physical footprint of a typical bit, I'd agree.

That sound you hear is several FBI vans and helicopters surrounding your house.

You may have plenty of hard drive space, but I doubt you actually want the performance and memory hit of loading reusable components several times over.

I'd rather have the Windows UI components and libraries shared and loaded in memory once than bloat memory space by requiring programs to have their own copy many times over.

Shared libraries are important. A problem maybe, related to your concern, is that some software shouldn't be making everything shared and in the core system especially when they don't clean up after themselves. Basic UI and runtime libraries? Definitely want them shared. PDF reader routines? How often are those required by anything other than the reader itself? I don't see why browser plugins can't just use libraries installed in the program's directory instead of the system directory. They have to put their hooks into the browser either way.