Not only are most "secret question" answers easily guessable for anyone you know well, it's also a security risk not unlike reusing the same password on multiple sites.

If I sign up at banks A and B and provide truthful answers to security questions, then any employee of bank A can authenticate /as me/ to bank B, and the reverse as well, on top of anyone that knows me well who could likely pull it off with both banks.

I store secret questions picked and that sites answers along with the rest in my password manager.

If I ever expect to possibly one day maybe need it for say phone verification, I'll put 3-5 seconds of thought into what in-context would be the most off-topic, shocking, and hilarious answers possible that can be spoken over the phone.
Otherwise nonsensical random words are used just like you did.

aka, when signing up for a bank loan, perhaps:
Q: What is the name of the first street you lived on?
A: The corner of blackjack rd and slot-machine ave, next to "i don't have a problem" park.

Not coincidentally my sorrow at seeing the shack gone actually started about 20 years ago :P

Wait a sec, you mean to say there isn't really a bunch of hot godaddy girls waiting on the edge of their seats just to talk to me??

*dejected face*

Replacing the Microsoft SecureBoot key with my own PKI key is perhaps #3 on the list of things I do when configuring a new computer before ever installing a hard drive or OS - following enabling vPro AMT and then the BMC manager if present.

If I am unable to replace the master SecureBoot key with my own, that machine is getting packed up and sent right back to the OEM as defective.

I only buy OEM systems for work and build systems for home use. But the HP account for work sees a couple hundred computers a year, which isn't all that many when speaking "volume purchasing", but will instantly become zero if they choose to lock me out at the BIOS level.

It's already annoying enough that they ship hard drives completely unsuitable for use and requiring formatting (we aren't large enough for custom disk images or custom SLIC BIOS entries yet) - but at least this is only an annoyance and not out right sending defective equipment, which is the only possible definition for locking you out of the system at the firmware level and not allowing any OS to boot.
(By "any" I don't mean less than one, I mean literally any OS)

So what you're saying is you haven't installed Firefox or Chrome but instead are using solely the built in Internet Explorer browser? With no antivirus?

Hate to break it to you, but you very likely already have a ton of third party viruses, trojans, keyloggers, and network scanners installed too :P

Ambiguous?

If it was released tomorrow (Mar 19th 2015) then the deadline would be a year after (Mar 19th 2016)

If you install/upgrade-to 10 before the deadline, it is free.
Upon and after the deadline, you will have to buy it in order to install/upgrade-to.

The only thing ambiguous about it is our lack of knowing when Win10 will be released, which we need first before we can "add one to it" and give you a more direct answer.

But let us reword your position for a moment to point out the folly (currently at least) in its usefulness.

Here in my home country, if I desired a hamburger I happen to know from experience that most restaurants will have such a thing to sell to me. Ignoring jokes about McDonalds not having real food for just a moment, I know they are the most common place around to find a hamburger at.

Then you come along and (correctly, but uselessly) point out that the laws of physics do not rule out the possibility of finding a hamburger sitting around in some random persons back yard, and so such places should all be equally searched as well.

Yet if you or I were to travel to a country we have never been to before and happened to desire a hamburger, we would search out a restaurant knowing the chance of finding a hamburger there, even without ever having visited a restaurant in that country before.

No one is actually arguing that it wouldn't be possible to find a hamburger in a random persons backyard (although many would argue if it would be a good idea to eat it :P ) but from experience we know the odds of finding one in such a place are much much lower than compared to a restaurant.

Likewise, we know life on earth is more likely to be found in water than not.
That doesn't mean there is NO life outside of the water at all, just that the odds of finding it in water are higher than finding it elsewhere.

Again, no one is actually arguing that water is required for life in general, only that our sample of one shows a much higher chance of finding it, and our sample size of one is all we have to formulate characteristics to actually look for and detect.

So looking for life in water, that is similar to life on earth, is what we have the best description of (as crappy as it may be) and so the best chance of actually detecting, and our one sample shows it as the highest likelihood of occurring in water.

This is why we look for water and use the characteristics of life we have to match on - because it gives the best chance of success.

As our samples of majorly differing life forms increases and our characteristics to match on increase, we will have better odds of success looking elsewhere.

But with our current knowledge and technical level, it makes no sense to search for hamburgers in random back yards when we can search in restaurants first.

You always aim for the low hanging fruit first, then move on to the harder to reach fruit after.
You have to learn to walk before you can run.
Insert additional cheesy proverbs here (especially if they make good hamburger toppings! sorry, I think I'm hungry)

Just because searching for life as we know it in water is the first step does not exclude all the other harder to detect steps, it only delays them until later, hopefully to a time we are better equipped to do so both with technology and our knowledge.

It's also worth pointing out that no one is actually forcing you to look in the most common places for the things we know how to detect - you are free to look anywhere you like for things you can't describe, if you so wish.
It's just that your odds of success are so drastically lower, even compared to the already seemingly low chances in finding life in water on another world, that few people would be willing to throw money at you for the task.

And that, put simply, is why we look for water on other worlds in our search for life.

The problem with only using "how I feel" as a measurement while ignoring scientific measurements of the effects is that human senses are pretty horrible and are often wrong.

Back in my day this was taught and demonstrated in public education (seems not to be the case anymore) and can be proven with a very simple experiment: the old warm and cold bowl of water trick.

Line up three bowls on the counter. Fill one half way with cold water and another half way with hot (to the touch, not burning) water. Put one hand in each for a few minutes.
Then mix the two bowls of water together in the last bowl to get warm water, and put both your hands together in that bowl.

The hand previously in the cold water will feel hot, and the hand previously in the hot water will feel cold, both at the same time and in the same bowl of water.
Your senses are completely lying to you. One bowl of water can't be two different temperatures at the same time.

Only our intellect is capable of recognizing the contradiction in the data from your senses to indicate neither can't be correct.

Only impartial scientific measurement can give you accurate data that is correct, combined again with our intellect to let us override data from our senses with measured data.

This isn't to say our senses aren't important or don't matter at all, only that our senses are just the first step in obtaining knowledge. All three (senses, intellect, and measurements) are required.

Please don't rely on one without the others, as that only serves to make your knowledge dubious, and draw into question any and all future knowledge based on that one incorrect fact.

First one, then the other.

Rats, I knew I should have checked with a lawyer before opening my Joe's Barber Shop and Scabies Quartet franchise!

Apparently so. People tell me all the time I have a unique smell that cannot be appreciated!

I've seen it twice (outside of documentation, as you say)
Once while learning how to code finder extensions in pascal - poorly.
Another when the MB wasn't in a case and I accidentally dropped a couple HD screws out of my hand directly onto the MB.

Obviously both cases were my own doing and 'my fault', but I remember being pretty proud at the time seeing something so rare most people didn't know what that icon even meant.

I don't remember OS 9 too well, but wasn't the spinning beach ball a new introduction of OS X 10.0? Along with most of the candy style widgets?
In OS 8 I clearly remember the only 'wait' cursor was the wrist watch that always said 3 PM, and had no color in it.

But I admit it was some time ago now

Cable Co Exec: *Hands over envelope of cash* You my nigga?

Representative: It certainly appears so.

Cable Co Exec: The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts. You fight through that shit.
Because a year from now, when you're kicking it in the Caribbean, you'll say to yourself: I was right

Representative: I have no problem with that.

Cable Co Exec: In the vote, your ass goes down. Say it.

Representative: In the vote, my ass goes down.

Well since you offered, could you make your paypal payment to me about $6000 USD for a mid-range server?
Or since you're being so generous offering to pay for servers for us, how about a nice even $10000 and I'll get one of those newfangled blade systems!

Three days ago the Systemd-UpdateAgainstYourWillD automatically installed SystemD-AiD, which is a requirement to even boot the kernel because it was deemed no human being ever has or ever could be capable of the overwhelming task of "run some programs", which of course includes programs written by humans.

Two days ago there were promises SystemD-AiD would also gain enough intelligence to read corrupted syslogs, while insulting your petty human intelligence via way of SystemD-FortuneD, and injecting them into all outbound emails sent from your username via SystemD-SpammerD.
It was also rumored to soon be capable of washing your dishes, since no init system wants to start dirty programs or use plastic fork()'s.

Yesterday they canceled the dish washing patch based mainly on a usenet poll where "fuck systemd!!!" was interpreted by a similar AI as voting against the feature, thus canceling the patch due to overwhelming demand.