Start8 is better than nothing, but it brings up a minimized Metro-ish screen taking up a quarter of your desktop. IMO, Classic Shell is a much better solution and actually restores a real start menu: http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

UAC has an ancillery purpose that attempts to allow applications that "needed" administrator privs to run anyway as a limit user: File and registry access to system locations were redirected to special folders/registry hives owned by the user specifically; if a game wanted to write its save files out to C:\Program Files, the OS would pretend that it's succeeding, but it's really being written out to some location like C:\Users\JoeSixPack\AppData\LocalLow\VirtualStore\Program Files

Of course, it's possible for developers to bypass it with specific knowlege of this mechanism. Steam, for example, never has files written out to the VirtualStore.

You mean like btrfs? (which has many additional advantages that Microsoft can't simply "add" to NTFS without replacing it entirely; it's like how ext4 is a good improvement on the old filesystem design, but overall it's limited in very fundamental ways. NTFS is similar; it needs to be thrown out entirely)

Only Counter-Strike really gets patches, which is still insanely popular. As far as that goes, that really makes sense; they are making significant profit off of it, they better keep the game running as smoothly and secure as possible. I'm sure Half-Life 1 gets a trickle of sales, but nobody plays multiplayer HL1 anymore and the game hasn't had an update since 2006; the single-player experience isn't affected by multiplayer cheats.

Generally more secure, but Linux servers are still vulnerable, especially when they are neglected from being looked after. I have signed onto a company that kept a mail server running for years with no updates -- turns out that exim had a security vulnerability and there was a rootkit living on the system for at least a couple years. If the machine was being properly monitored, the chances of infection would be very low (keep on top of updates!), and it would have been detected rather quickly even if it did happen despite that first point.

I still don't know what the attacker gained but apparently it pays off enough to pry on mismanaged Linux servers.

Spider even on two suits is fairly difficult, on four suits it's way harder than Freecell usually is :)

I used to have a tape deck in my PC 20 years ago for backup, but I always thought the tech pretty much died, but now I'm curious, I have 3TB of storage in my current PC and I haven't quite been able to afford the hard disks to fully backup everything, but if tape is so cheap and fast (for sequential writes anyway, which is all that's important here), is it readily available for home backup use?

heheh, I could start using tar (Tape ARchive) for what it was originally intended for.

BrowserQuest 2: The Search for More Money

As far as what it sounds like, the restriction is only enforced client-side, so maybe using Pidgin or other clients will bypass this block. Anyone that uses MSN that can verify this?

Of course, I wouldn't put much trust in a Microsoft-run IM service in the first place...

I suppose this would be the modern equivalent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists