So you don't like UAC, but you want there to be some things that a user can't change? But that's exactly what UAC is *for*. Preventing users from changing system settings. What, you want more than one kind of admin user?

Yes, a regulated monopoly, that is forced to do business with everyone equally.

Or you could copy something like Australia's NBN model. A single wholesaler builds and maintains the cables. They *must* run a cable if required for anyone in their service area. But they are only allowed to offer and charge for a link layer transport between end points. Any ISP can then include the rent of the link in the price for internet access and other services for their customers.

Though of course the NBN has screwed up. They bowed to pressure from the incumbents in a number of ways that made running a small ISP unprofitable. They based the pricing of link capacity on the current cost of bandwidth over existing services. And the new government has been trying to compromise the quality of the network by building curb side nodes instead of running fiber end-to-end.

Easy access to credit plays a big part of the equation. Newly borrowed money creates demand, income, jobs and economic growth. Of course exponential growth cannot be sustained. Eventually paying back or defaulting on that credit will destroy demand, income, jobs and economic growth.

Most of the companies that built rail, went bankrupt. After they were built, nobody was willing to pay the rent they needed to break even. Sometimes construction should be paid for from general tax revenue, because nobody can make money from it.

Using https everywhere does have some downsides, things like Javascript that contains executable code is either cachable or secure from MITM tampering. Why don't we have a way to sign content without encrypting it?

Unintended consequences. We want people to be able to afford houses, so we give them a grant so they can pay a deposit. What happens? Everyone goes to the bank with their $7K, the bank manager gives them 95% LVR and allows them to borrow $140k more. Then they go and find the house they want, and offer what the bank manager said they could. End result? House prices go up and housing ends up *less* affordable.

A couple of little easter eggs in bespoke software;

Hold a couple of modifier keys and click on the icon in the about dialog, "The developers [names] would like to present you with a complimentary cup holder" followed by opening the CD ROM tray. Every new developer checked in a change with their own name once they'd passed their probationary period.

Leave the about dialog open for 5 minutes, the dialog goes black and the developers names start floating around like the game asteroids. Click on a letter and it will disappear, splitting the name in half. With both parts moving slightly faster. Probably should have made it slightly hard to start though. The customer had a ball, but the manager was not happy.

I was looking for a comment along these lines .. exactly. Over the years I've found that good code is that which can be opened up months or years after it was written and changed or repurposed easily. Good programmers seem to write this instinctively.

I believe they mean that they have identified people who are living without those genes.

CSIRO patented a few things related to Wi-Fi in the 90's. They like to claim that Wi-Fi wouldn't have existed without them.

Yeah, yeah. The sky is falling.... Except that it isn't. With signed bootloaders like shim, you can install or run any operating system yourself without changing the BIOS to disable Secure Boot at all.

Not being able to run a 3rd party OS was a concern with Windows 8. But the open source community have solved that problem. So being able to disable Secure Boot is no longer required.

That's exactly my point. You could have voted 1,2,3,4,4 previously. Since you didn't indicate a preference between the last 2 candidates, it would stop counting at that point and leave everyone else's vote to decide which of the remaining two gets in. While leaving the opportunity for your vote to count against one of the first three candidates. But now you can't do that.

He's being quite literal there. Valve doesn't force people to work on particular projects. If nobody wants to do it, it wont get done.

I don't want my forth choice getting in. At some point I might want to waste my vote instead of having it count towards the lesser of two evils. But the system in Australia doesn't allow for that (anymore).