>> They can't win.

Sure they can but it might mean they have to end backwards compatability to do it, which would be fine if they were serious about security afterwards.

End doing shit like having a registry and allowing apps to create files everywhere in the OS, and having things such as USB keys ever being able to auto-execute. Get rid of useless crap like UAC that just gives the illusion of security by being annoying to users, and instead use a better (I'd suggest linux-like) security model and package management system that prevents user apps ever being able to install themselves as a part of the OS or mess with the OS's configuration at all. Get rid of any apps such as office that by accident or design execute data files on loading. Get rid of hidden directories like ApplicationData. Stop using UUIDs everywhere, and stop running things using proxy parent tasks such as svchost as both obscure what is really going on.
For end-users the best and quickest answer is to do as anyone with a clue has been doing for years: Drop windows and upgrade to Linux.

>> It's a oversimplification to say the creators of software and hardware that make up networks and services must be held accountable for security.

No it isn't. I blame Microsoft. The widows architecture and development culture around windows both encourage/require allowing apps to extend/modify parts of the operating system itself (example: the registry and the windows/system32 directories). Microsoft have been notirious in encapsulating executable stuff in things that should be data-only, such as documents, and designing programs in such a way that then both can and should execute parts of loaded data files.

>> As to how people speed up and slow down with an automatic versus a manual transmission, you do realize I have personal experience with this right? ..and given you don't know me your supposition that I somehow don't is absurd

>> Furthermore, physics calls you wrong.
About what? I was correcting your point about cars with manual transmissions, not addressing how drivers of semis choose to leave big gaps. which is in their case (I.e possibly pulling upto 40 tons) is obviously the right thing to do.

>> Perhaps you don't know what stop and go traffic is in the first place?

Believe it or not, I don't live in a cave.

>> The big semis or buses generally don't go any faster than the fastest sports cars under those conditions.

Of course not, the trucks end up going at a constant speed that is on average slower than the rest of the traffic, because there are always cars filling in the large open gaps ahead of them. Cars unnecessarily acting the same way (because they don't ahve anything like the same amount of mass to worry about) are simply being selfish dicks by consuming a large amount of space for themselves so causing lower total throughput on the freeway and adding to the delays for the people behind them, just so they themselves don't have to touch the brakes, like that takes such a big effort or something.

>> I don't think a highway full of manuals would do that.
Of course they would. Perfect example is the M25 around London, notoriuos for having suffered exactly that problem for decades, yet most cars in the UK are manual. The actual solution was to put in variable speed limits, controlled by computers that watch for and damp the effect.

>> As to your stupid little insults at the end... We'll write that off as immaturity and move forward. :)
What insults? I simply wrote what is happening here in Phoenix. This is just you being a passive-agressive dick, which is pretty much the attitude I'd expect from someone who also thinks its OK to take up multiple car lengths for themselves on an already overloaded freeway.

> People with manual transmissions do not accelerate and then jam on the breaks over and over and over again.

No they use engine braking, so they slow up quick without the brake lights coming on, so the person behind has to brake hard.

>> It is why in such traffic I get behind the biggest semi I can find.... and an otherwise stressful drive becomes quite peaceful.

Yeah diesel fumes will do that to you, but you left out "carcinogenic" and "arriving late" somehwere.

The problem at least here in Phoenix is all the idiots that think they're being a good/safe driver by driving slower than everyone else and also leaving like 15 car spaces between them and the car in front. It only takes 2 or 3 of them in the same 1/4 mile to effectively create a road block and reduce the effectiveness of the entire freeway quite noticeably, especially when they apparently on purpose parallel some other really slow person for miles.

yeah I heard Comic Book Guy was working on a global Androids Dungeon franchise.

>> Any really good company/department is going to find it more important to find the right person than skills in a particular language.

Not at all. Companies used to be more like that but now its all about whether you can hit the ground running.

Your best bet is to find out if the place you intend to work for does regular peer reviews of code as a part of their process, and if not either stay clear or get an agreement that they will code review your stuff at least for a few months until you know the ropes.
Code reviews of your efforts, if done properly, are the best way I know of becoming effective quickly.

Do you honestly think the Replublicans would be actually any better about giving control back to the people? Once the government gets power over something they NEVER give it back.

Any system of government where all voting options have been pre-screened/provided by the system itself, and there are only 2 viable voting options that both feel free to trample on the constitutiion whenever it suits them, is clearly not a representative democracy but a dictatorship that performs the charade of elections only to give the citizenry the illusion of freedom.

Sweet. Now you come to mention it I do remember reading in the US computer magazines that we used to get in the UK that there was an amazing culture of user groups springing up all over the US and Radio Shack and some other stores used to run free after-hours sessions on their computers. I was very jealous of such stuff, since most UK stores were far more about keeping the kids off the computers than welcoming them in, and there wasn't even one computer user group at least in my town.

I grew up very close to an amusement arcade and my mind was blown when a Space Invaders showed up one day in 1979. I couldn't afford to play it as often as I wanted (i.e. 24x7) and there was always a queue to play it, so a version of Space Invaders was also my first attempt at an even slightly complex program from scratch too.
I didn't have anything as stylish/expensive as a TRS-80, mine was a Compukit UK101:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C....
I even had the same performance issues as you, so had to directly poke everything into video ram. Later on I got an Atari 400, and then wrote my own Pacman for it for much the same reasons.

Yeah He and Wyden were basically tag-teaming during the whole fillibuster.
I guess he also included another as a way to be covered so he can take a bathroom break or whatever.

>> BTW, your windows directory is small compared to mine.

Yeah the 15gb is right after a clean install and before patches (i.e. minimal to the point of the smallest its ever going to be).

I think my windows partition is using about 120GB now, but in all fairness that includes some small apps I also installed and a few documents on the desktop.

You're right everything is all about whcih compromises you're prepared to make.

It seems that ease of development and time to market are now the carte-blanche excuses to mercilessly bodge an architecture, consider memory/disk/cpu resources to be infinite, and throw in dependencies on every bloated toolkit and library instead of writing a few lines of well-crafted code.

In fact I'd say that ability to write well-crafted code is now a dying art. Most so-called developers these days are basically just package integrators and any coding they're obliged to do is sloppy and just glue logic between packages, and they're lost if its in a langauge that doesnt have a garbage collector.

you are right. there is no more dicking about with hardware jumpers and maybe 2 parameters in config.sys and autoexec.bat

I remain convinced that all the extra bloat that modern windows has (registry, hidden system backups, useless control panels, uninformative error messages, retarded menu and filesystem hierarchies etc etc) is NOT the right direction to make a step forward though.

This story seems to confirm my ongoing claim that a minimal Windows install taking 15Gb+ of disk space and using over 1GB of ram just to run is BEYOND crazy. ...but then I'm also old enough to remember when a bootable MsDOS environment used up about 1/3 of a 1.2mb floppy.
Now get off my lawn.