The military has troops trained and equipped for exactly this. That's who they're sending.

The trial attorneys I know tell me that shows like NCIS and Criminal Minds really skew juries' expectations of testimony. There's an unrealistic expectation of high-tech magic that's simply not there.

I'm so smart that I am too smart to show anyone how smart I am.

And how does that differentiate you from an idiot?

The problem with "bright" and "bored" is that in the real world, you have to do a lot of "bored" to get stuff done. If all you want is "bright" then you're pretty much a primma donna who will sluff off the boring work to the detriment of the team. Better start that company and make millions being "bright" and avoiding the "bored".

Having worked my entire working life with both white and blue collar workers, I can tell you that after 20 years or so of manual labor, those men (and increasingly women) suffer from carpal tunnel, bad backs, and all sorts of chronic injuries. A not-insignificant percentage are on disability, unable to hold down any job.

This is not because they're lazy or faking it.

Manual labor is hard, and after many years their bodies break down. And chronic injuries don't go away when you retire.

So yes, you can make a lot of money initially, but there's a price to pay.

FBI crimes database and CDC database of child injuries and deaths.

I'm trying to find the reference where MS did this before. I'm drawing a blank but ISTR that one of the recent OS releases sent back gobs of encoded data. Vista? 7?

Any bets that MS will "forget" to turn this off in the RTM?

Nonpartisan investigations have debunked the vast majority of these claims. There simply is no evidence for significant voter fraud in the us, and thus all the voterid laws are unnecessary and politically motivated.

In spite of your rant, the actual amount of voter fraud is miniscule, on the order of a few dozen per national election. And no, illegal aliens only vote in the fevered imaginations of the gonzo right, and not in any reality that doesn't involve paranoid flights of fancy.

I should have added "close relatives and friends of the family"

Except that.... The "think of the children" thing is BS.

Well over 50% of all child abuse is perpetrated by mothers, another 30% by fathers. The rest is perpetrated by close relatives (brothers, aunts, and such). The actual "stranger danger" stuff is minimal; about 110 cases a year out of what, 30,000,000 minors.

So for 110 crimes a year we're supposed to "think of the children" and let Big Brother into all of our communication.

Right, like the uproar against the Patriot Act. Oh wait.....

Let's face it, Big Brother Government knows no political boundaries.

Yeah, but it's turning out to be true. Who wudda thunk it?

Translation:

It's such a screwed up mess that we don't know how to deal with it, so instead we're going to pull some marketing razzle dazzle and hope like hell people forget the mess we made.

But the real question is this:

If every other release sucks, and windows 8 sucked, and windows 9 is so good that it can't even be released, does that mean that Windows 10 will suck?