No, it is why we have a representative system which is balanced two ways (House - weighted by population / Senate - balanced by state). The Electoral College system can go.

That of course assumes that viewing all the detail is important. In many cases "viewing all the detail" is not what you want. It can be distracting from the message that the writer and director is trying to convey. At times the blur in the background can help support the in focus stuff in the foreground and the elements that are actually important to the story.

Winston University is always a cash positive option.

But if you do red line the contract and then click "ok" and subsequently the software operates, the vendor has agreed to your changes. The vendor is using the licensing screen as a legal proxy - they delegate authority to the software to sign and validate the contract. If you sign (click ok) the software works, if you don't sign the software doesn't. If the delegated legal proxy doesn't take into account that you red lined the contract it isn't a very good proxy, but it why would it make it any less legal? I would argue that if the proxy isn't strong enough to withstand changes, it isn't strong enough to enforce the agreement.

No, it is done on December 24 before dinner. Costco closes at 5pm on the 24th.

Easy fix for a small deployment, but if you are talking about enterprise level deployments (tens of thousands of desktops) you would have to have several "IT guys" whose job is maintaining this database - both keeping it up to date and retrieving lost keys on a 24/7 basis. It is very hard to "make" tens of thousands of employees do anything, so unless your key escrow system is automated, it won't be reliable at that scale. Sure you could develop programs or scripts to manage all of this, but doing so has a cost and at enterprise scale you are going to want something that is tested and supported by a vendor.

Note that most enterprises running at this scale would be on a Microsoft Windows based infrastructure with Active Directory. These enterprises have already paid for BitLocker - it is included in your enterprise agreement with Microsoft. It amazes me how many companies who have already paid for disk level encryption (with managed key escrow) aren't using it.

There is a reason to spend budget if you are an enterprise or have a need for centralized key recovery. While you don't want to leak data if your laptop falls in the wrong hands, you also don't want to lose data if your employee forgets their decryption key (either by accident or as a malicious action.)

i7-3960X is 6 cores at 3.3 - 3.9 GHz each. That isn't all that far from 24 GHz.

In college I worked at a mufti-purpose coliseum. The building could be a basketball arena or by dropping in curtains at one end a large theater. Behind the curtains were big speakers. An analog audio processing system was used to make the walls sound "solid" - this was before digital processing was popular. Part of the analog audio processing was this oddly shaped room with a speaker at one end, a microphone at the other, and zig-zag baffles in between. The room acted as a delay and echo chamber. It worked great with one exception. The architects put the bathrooms right over the echo chamber...

Perhaps he is paying $24 / year to his domain registrar, DNS hoster, etc. (It would be a bit expensive, but it makes a good point)

When you talk about alternatives to Active Directory you need to be specific as to what features of Active Directory you refer to. Active Directory is a lot of things: Distributed multi-master database, Authentication provider, Authorization provider, Configuration management system, and more. The Active Directory infrastructure provides: File services, Print services, Group policy, LDAP, DNS, DHCP, and other services.

I haven't read in detail about Samba 4, and it appears that the Samba Wiki is down at the moment, but there is a decent description on the Fedora Project site. According to the Fedora site, Samba 4 includes the ability to be a domain controller and implements the Kerberos stack, but it is not clear that it provides the centralized configuration management that Active Directory does. This centralized management (Group Policy) and the ability to delegate administration (Organizational Unit based delegation) are very powerful features of Active Directory and what keep large organizations on the platform.

If what all you are looking for is a shared account database and the ability for multiple workstations to authenticate against it, Samba 4 may be just the ticket. If however you are looking for a replacement for Active Directory at an enterprise level, I doubt it is there yet.