I don't believe that's true. Most of the bullies I knew in school would never have been able to become cops and most certainly never judges. The people I knew from school who did become cops were not bullies.

Teachers are essentially forbidden from controlling the classroom anymore. Parents disapprove of this. Their children are special angels who can do no wrong. A teacher who uses disclipline, even non-physical discipline such as detention, can get into a lot of trouble with the school and the school can get into a lot of trouble with the parents.

School admins have basically hamstrung themselves. They have zero policy rules which remove the need for any thinking, and indeed even forbid any independent decision making. These changes have been brought about through fear of lawsuits, fear of what would happen if there was a school shooting and there was some rule they failed to implement that may have prevented it, and fear of angry parents (and I put a lot of blame on parents too for being too protective of their precious snowflakes and intimidating schools into making the changes).

I had the update waiting in the list of optional updates (listed as "important") but it was not automatically installed for me.

Y2K was indeed going to be a problem. But there weren't too many serious problems precisely because people did something about it. There was enough warning that there was some time to solve things. In 1996 even we had some Y2K problems. The myth was that things would suddenly die at midnight on 1/1/2000 which was not what Y2K was all about.

And sometimes it took months or years for any patches to come out, sometimes never.

I remember the first internet worm that attacked via sendmail. The thing was that a core group of insiders knew about the bug and had patched their systems, but the larger community of sysadmins had no idea that the vulnerability existed. It was especially a problem for those systems were the people operating it relied only on official documentation from vendors and who didn't hang out on usenet or at conferences. It wasn't open source, as only people who spent the extra money could get the source and recompile to fix things, assuming they knew something needed fixing. I think one of the big changes from how I saw it was that after the worm the communication became more open about security issues.

Encryption is meant to make the original text be obscure, however the means of encryption should not remain obscure. What "security through obscurity" refers to is the common and naive practice of assuming that no one will guess your security methods, and the problem is that people do find this stuff out. Ie, assuming that no one will guess your backdoor debugger password. Now it is fine to start with a strong set of security practices and then only after that is in place it can be made more obscure. But usually when something is made obscure it is because the security is really weak in the first place.

As for ActiveX, the problem was not that the end user would go and hunt down a trusted plug in and install it, but that it relied upon the web to tell you if something was trusted and then automatically install it (and for the average user this happened even without their knowledge). This was done at the same time that Java was promoted as an alternative, a system that was intended to be designed for security by sandboxing the code (though of course it had flaws) as well as being cross platform, whereas ActiveX was all about taking plain x86 code and executing it as long as it was signed.

The real problem with ActiveX was the idiotic idea from Microsoft that it should be installed automatically without bothering the users with annoying questions such as asking for permission first; they did the same boneheaded move by allowing executables in emails to be executed without a confirmation. It wasn't until they started added UAC that it seemed they understood what the problem was.

The issue is more with the home users, without an in-house IT support group. They most likely don't even know what Windows 8.1 Update 1 is, much less that they should be on the net researching how to get it installed.

Can't do that, because the IRS makes you pay a penalty if you end up owing too much taxes. If you force everyone to do quarterly estimated taxes then they'd soon vote in a law to allow paycheck withholding. So you'd also have to do away with penalty for underpayment during the year.

Until someone on the ball notices and says "Your representative voted to keep your taxes complicated!" That won't go over very well in most red states (and quite a few blue states either).

Ya, but you're a customer. In Comcast's eyes you're like a snake. They're already squeezing out all sorts of cash from you, they just want a second entity to squeeze cash out of. (had to get the that snake squeezins' ref in)

Quite a lot of standard business is essentially legalized bribery.

What about JavaScript? I'd trust it even less.

It is nicer now that I can download stuff from the banks. However I still like to double check all those numbers with the actual papers I got from the banks (this is sort of personal penance for failing to balance my checkbook). However every year or two there's always something that's just a bit too strange and TurboTax asks me a question I'm baffled by. Ie, banks didn't used to have to report basis so I'd have to dig through old records trying to find this stuff out, agh. Then there was the SPDR gold trust with its strange calculations. Or the year I rolled over traditional-IRA to Roth-IRA and the bank clerk checked the wrong box on the forms and the IRS thought it was a premature withdrawal (oh how they sound so dirty at times).

Ya, there's not too much on my forms that the feds don't already know about. It's mostly the deductions. Charity, since the government isn't tracking that for taxpayers. I am not sure but I think they don't track things like vehicle license fees and other stuff that are common deductions.

However for people who are still in the 1040-EZ or 1040-A range, the government could do it all for them. But it is still up to the taxpayer to know when it is better for them to do the long form or not.

And even if the feds do all this, we're still stuck with the states. Each state basically takes the IRS form as its starting point, then applies a grab bag of slightly different rules to various things (ie, some bonds with the state are not taxable by the state). The states all have their own legislators who want to promote this or that special thing or recover funds for other projects (ie, do you get tax rebates if you installed solar panels or low water usage toilets). I think it would be a lot of effort for each state to get on the ball and start doing this, and until then they're going to demand to see your full IRS forms.