They don't have to be. One approach is to create high churn through abusive behavior and unreasonable KPIs; this works if you don't really care that much about error rates and don't need your personnel to be able to do more complicated tasks besides "pick, pack, ship." On the other hand, at my company (we do aviation fulfillment), our warehouse personnel are paid well, given reasonable KPIs, and treated well, and so our churn is extremely low. I believe this year our warehouse churn has been 0%, and it's historically around 1% or so. The advantage of this approach is that you have better quality control and personnel who can competently handle things like dangerous goods. Perhaps most importantly to us is that you don't have to have the obsessive security most fulfillment warehouses have, which ultimately saves money. Funny enough, when you treat your personnel well, you don't have to worry about them stealing from you.

You do know that non-admin users have to provide an admin login to elevate using UAC, right? And that proper Windows practice since Windows 2000 has been to run users as non-admins?

Actually, you can just start typing on the start screen to find, well, anything; it defaults to apps, but the search hits all search providers. The WinKey+F shortcut isn't needed.

There's lots of ways to skin that cat, but I'd start with:

* Installing software: Use the invoke-expression and invoke-command cmdlets to run msiexec, after using new-pssession to connect to the machine
* Modify the registry: Powershell has a provider that treats the Registry as a drive. Use get-itemproperty and set-itemproperty to edit values. Or, follow the above process and use regedit /s to import a .reg file.
* Format a disk: Invoke-command + diskpart.
* Manage services: Invoke-command + sc or the *-service cmdlets (get-service, stop-service, suspend-service, etc.)

I'm no PS expert, but I was able to find this all in a few minutes of searching.

Insert disc, click Next a few times? Windows 7 and 8 are trivial to get going from zero, especially since they come with at least basic drivers for most things and can get the rest from Windows Update automatically once they have a network connection.

While the Linux installers have come a long way since the olden days, they're still a fair amount more complex than the modern Windows or OS X installers.

Nope.

Basically, when you complete a kit plane, you get it certified by the FAA as an experimental aircraft. Those can be flown anywhere that's permitted by their equipment and your licensing; for instance, the plane has to have its minimum equipment list to fly at all and navigational aids to fly in IFC. The major restriction on an experimental aircraft special airworthiness certificate is that it can't be used for commercial cargo or passenger operations.

To close a Metro app, grab the top of the screen and drag it to the bottom, either by swiping or dragging with the mouse.

I agree it's not intuitive, though. I found out about it via web search, and if you have to search just to perform basic functions in your OS, something's wrong -- either the OS needs to come with a tutorial, or the UI affordances need to be more obvious.

While DirectSound and DirectInput are now deprecated, you now have XAudio2 (or Core Audio, depending on your needs) and XInput. XInput isn't an exact replacement, however, since it only supports XBox360 controllers and those that can emulate one with their drivers.

I actually wrote a fair amount of UI code interfacing with Microsoft Agent as part of a research project, AutoTutor. While the L&H TTS engines were indeed the default for Agent, that's just because they were the default ones installed on Windows (2000 and XP) at the time. Agent allows you to load the TTS engine of your choice, so long as it supports the Speech API. Because the Speech API includes callbacks for phonemes spoken, Agent can synchronize lip movements of the character to what's being spoken by the speech engine regardless of its creator.

Ultimately, the poor quality of the L&H voices led us to SpeechWorks and AT&T's NaturalVoice products. Sadly, both the TTS and voice recognition fields went through major consolidations in the early 2000s, and now SpeechWorks is dead (acquired by Nuance). NaturalVoice is still available, more or less, from Wizzard Software.

The SkyDrive and other Live APIs are indeed opened -- for Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and Windows.

While I would agree that this is a sign of something curious in Firefox's code, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x4d2c09s(v=VS.100).aspx would seem to disagree with you on the MSVC compiler. In at least VS 2010, there's a x64 native versions of cl.exe.

Doesn't matter due to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Incorporation Doctrine.

Except for this:

...which is completely not true. If you serve up ActiveX controls, then yes, you need IE; however, there's nothing inherent in IIS or ASP.NET that requires IE on the client side.

Given the existence of the placebo effect, in what way do you suppose that the market -- consisting of individuals who operate on limited information -- will be able to tell the difference in efficacy between a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory and acupuncture? Especially given that so-called "alternative medicines" such as Zicam can effectively compete against science-based medicine even with FDA regulations in place? Do you propose we go back to the patent medicine era?

The reason we have the regulations we have by the FDA is because we tried working without them and, unsurprisingly, people died and a lot of unscrupulous hucksters made a lot of money. We have the same thing going on now with homeopathic medicine. What we need are good, functional, and smarter regulations, not merely fewer or more regulations.

Oh, and for what it's worth, FDA trial costs aren't even remotely the largest cost of a drug. Check out this study and its references. Marketing, in fact, is the largest cost of releasing a drug. Trials are considered R&D costs, which marketing dwarfs -- and bear in mind that according to this study and its sources, 13.2% of those R&D costs are in marketing-related trials. Please check your facts before posting; this took me all of a minute with a search engine to find in PLoS.

What's funny about this is that we *already* have this setup. SIPRnet, JWICS, and other networks running on the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) are already segregated from the public Internet by an air gap. This is actually required for any classified data. Information can sometimes enter a classified network from the outside world, but the mechanisms for doing so are extremely circumscribed and a massive amount of analysis has to go into making such systems "provably secure." In practice, NIPRnet and SIPRnet require different physical terminals. That's why we have things like the presidential Blackberry, which is essentially two Blackberries in the same case with a physical switch to swap between the unclassified and classified systems.

As for utilities and the like, sure, you have two options. One is to airgap the communications network, which is what I'd advise given the shoddy quality and poor security record of SCADA systems. The other is to use secure communications from the transport layer up and using defense in depth principles. Of course, that requires building security into the system from the ground up, and very few companies and people are willing to do that. In light of that, an airgapped network makes sense. If a truly independent network isn't needed, every backbone provider is more than happy to provide MPLS virtual networks for the right price.

In the end, though, I think the problem is that utilities don't want to spend the money on what they feel has no deterministic ROI (cf. trying to get a company to buy a disaster recovery system). This is rational self-interest, especially when you consider the explicit guarantee of insurance and the implicit guarantee of the government for critical infrastructure. The solutions are simple: enforce proper controls through regulation or nationalize the infrastructure so rational self-interest is removed.