... assuming CPU cycles are the key bottleneck and not, say, network communication and data access. I'd assume they look at performance pinch points and optimize those. So if the 10% most computationally-intensive code is written in C++ or Java, the savings in rewriting the rest in C++ might be 15%.

Are brain scans really so cheap that it's cheaper to set up an EEG than to pay someone in a third-world country to do it?

Does the patent also cover being ridiculously annoying and not actually secure since it doesn't prompt for a password? If so, I say we grant it to Microsoft so nobody copies that design.

It would be great if they added sudo.exe so you didn't have to run the whole command shell as an administrator.

(I'm basing this on my experience with Vista; things may have gotten markedly better in Win7.)

automatically equating weekend work with fun is just poor science

People do all sorts of unfun things on the weekends: cleaning the gutters, upgrading Windows, scrambling to meet a work deadline because you picked the wrong language or environment for your project...

In many states, property tax is the primary source of income for local (county, city, fire district...) governments. Conveniently, those governments provide services to people using that property (social services, road maintenance, putting out fires...).

The economist-minded folks might also point out that if someone has a lot of land and not much income, the land isn't being used very effectively, so having to sell because taxes are too high will increase the efficiency of used. (I have some philosophical issues with this line of reasoning, but it's got a point.)

On the plus side, it means that if you live in a rural area but work and shop in the city, your house in the country gets a paved road, a sheriff's department, and fire protection. It also means school districts in areas with high house prices are better funded that districts in poor areas where parents are less able to compensate for a school's shortcomings. It's not a perfect system, but it works fairly well.

They should tax porn downloads, so the state gets a piece of each ass.

So why wouldn't the virus authors set the security-related flag?

More importantly, I hope admins are allowed to run Command Prompt and web browsers. And if you can run those, I don't see how you're going to gain much security. And if you don't let admins download from the web and run DOS scripts, I don't know how you plan to accomplish much as a system admin.

Actually, they're reverting back to the numbering scheme from 95 and 98. The new Windows is just very late to market.

Oh, it's not a Superbra? I'm no longer interested in this article.

Just buy a coffee machine and some beans. You'll have an Internet Café without leaving the house!

One important factor in making security decisions is the tradeoff between preventing access by unauthorized people versus annoying authorized people. You can implement five-stage biometric security to open a lab door, but that increases the chances that lab workers will prop the door open when they go to the bathroom.

The main convenience issue that occurs to me in your situation is what happens when someone opens the document without a network connection? If somebody backhoes the Internet connection to your Omaha office and your access control system can't connect to a server in New York, is the Omaha employee allowed to to read the document? If not, how would you prevent someone annoyed by that fact from using Copy and Paste (when he's got a network connection) to create an OpenOffice version of the document?

Are employees allowed to print the document? If so, how do you plan to prevent them from handing it to an unauthorized party in a manila envelope? If not, how do you deal with annoyed users who like to print specifications so they can use a highlighter and write notes in the margins?