Err no! you are thinking of early PC's and their single tasking equivalents. Passwords to access multitasking computing systems have been around from at least the 1960's. The Unix OS was designed and enhanced with user names and appropriate passwords going back to at least the early 1970's.

Actually even today a good password is quite hard to break even with so called "man in the middle" attacks providing you are using something like ssh and possible one time passwords (I used this type of access back in the mid 1990's) to access machines.

In many ways as long as you have a good remembered password to access your PC you should only have to worry about your PC being compromised by Viruses, Trojans and social engineering attacks. As long as you are aware and know how to recover from an attack (most people don't) then you are pretty safe from mall-wear. Even if you are compromised then you should have some idea on who to contact such as Banks , Web site etc to report and hopefully resolve the issue.

There are plenty of apps that allow you to store your passwords in a database. Do a lookup on "password manager" and you should get over 250,000,000 hits. The problem is that you need to make sure that the passwords you use are not trivial and should be preferably over 8 alpha-numeric characters in length as well as having at least one special character (ie. !,@$# ... etc). A password generator is actually very good for this however the more complex a password the more you need to rely on a password database or at least the sites you are connecting to being able to save your password such as in your browser.

That is not really a problem if you generate appropriate passwords and have a password manager.

Of course at some stage you really must remember at least one or two passwords. One to log you into your PC, Workstation, Mainframe etc and the other to access your password database if you have one. Oh yes you also have to have a contingency plan in case you are compromised such as knowing who to contact and it does not hurt knowing how to restore your data as well, assuming you do backups.

internet is a public utility like water, sewer,

If you're still lucky enough to have them as 'public utilities' good on you. Because around here they were sold off and privatized a long time ago. And there's jack shit we can do about any of it.

The problem with software documentation is exactly the same as it was over 30 years ago. This is not to say that software documentation is bad, in fact most are surprisingly well documented with the main problem being the user (oh dear!). Now let me explain why I said this.

When an application is designed (hopefully), written and documented there is a percentage of time that is allocated to all three attributes and usually the smallest percentage is (you guessed it) the documentation although the initial design should be the groundwork for the documentation in the first place. However no matter how well documented a software product is, you are always going to have detractors saying thing like "The documentation is obscure" or "There is not enough documentation" or "The documentation is too long". Usually the detractors fall into attitude of "The application should be so good I don't have to think or do any reading anyway".

The author of the article gives an example of LightDM which has fairly meagre documentation if you go to the web site. Oh the horror (sigh!). Well the application is a "Desktop" which can be likened to Gnome, KDE, Xfce and even Microsoft Windows. In this particular case you normally have a system setting GUI or you can go to the web for more information. If you do a Google search on LightDM you get something like 472,000 hits so there really is no excuse for saying that there is not enough documentation and information.

Personally I don't blame the so called technical elitists from saying RTFM (coined well over 30 years ago) and then come to me if you can't find what you want. The last bit is what I normally say as well and many users seem to have selective deafness. With the Web and decent search engines getting information could never be easier, the problem is that many users who complain don't seem to want to use their brain.

Didn't they have these episodes of "Cops" where the patrol officer would pull a car over for a "minor traffic infraction", run the plates, find out the vehicle was stolen, and a high speed chase would ensue?

No offense to your 2004 Focus, but it has been years since I watched the program, but the stolen car was always a Saturn?

I know that auto theft is a felony and the police are there to protect and serve, and this car was some poor dude's ride before it got boosted. But the cops engage in a high-speed chase to recover . . . a Saturn? Which ends up wrapped around a light pole in most of the "episodes"? "Sir, we recovered your car . . ."

So is it really worth the danger to the public to give chase to a criminal who has boosted a 10-year old Saturn?

You could run a GUI on VMS as far back as 1992 if you had a Graphics Workstation. It pre-dates Win NT by about a year.

For budding Necromancers and magic users in general, did you know that by incrementing the letters of VMS by one you get the following:

V --> W
M --> N
S --> T

The original letters summoned and bound the Old Ones in clusters to do your bidding. Unfortunately the incremented symbols have not bound the Old Ones properly so take care not to summon up something that could bind you into the darkest depths were there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ;)

So, you will go to your local national-chain hardware store, some zit-faced teen will take the hinge, put it into a scanner, disappear "into the back", come back with the new part still warm from the process, and tell you, "Take this up front and tell them to charge to twelve dollars."

You will then take it home and then figure that it is a tenth mm too big in all dimensions to fit?

Is this going to be like the class trip to the State Capitol? There are these "souvenir" machines into which you place some coins. It is not injection molding as that would produce something semi-durable. Rather, it is vacuum forming where in a process somewhat but not completely unlike glass blowing, this really cheesy soft plastic is pushed against a mold, only the machine puts on a show that it is doing something important. And out pops this floppy statue of the head and shoulders (I think the sculpture term is a "bust") of the Great Emanacipator engravened with "Land of Lincoln."

Actually you can get OCR applications for Android and iPhone. Of course the better ones you do have to pay for but there are quite a few which are free.

Actually KDE "can" be configured to look like MS Windows, but why would you when it can do so much more.

You mentioned the word "commercial" by that I assume it is going to cost. Since most window managers for Linux are free I can't see this being a big selling point.

The link is to a book published in 1994. Actually Unix was developed in 1970 and it's name was a pun on the Multex OS which was available in the mid 1960's. So basically Unix has been around for almost 43 years. As for Linux which began in 1991 it has been around for 23 years and definitely does not look at going away any-time soon.

With regard to the article different UI's such as KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc are consistent for a given UI across all Linux distributions and even support touch screens. Of course having the same UI across multiple screen sizes is IMHO stupid and even more so if the user cannot configure the display to their liking.

Los gehts! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I voted for atomic batteries to power, but I guess that shows my age.

How about the "real life" launch sequence that the "shooters" on the carrier deck crews use?

(5 fingers out stretched) Release brakes.

(circle one finger in the air) Miltary power (i.e. full non-afterburner setting).

(wag two fingers in the air) Combat power (advance throttle to afterburner).

(put a knee to ground Tebow style, duck, and point with an outstretched arm, pilot acknowledges with a Navy salute) Go!