It depends heavily one what you are doing with your computer at the time of writing. Windows does not allow you to write executable files that are currently running and I believe there is a similar restriction for .dlls that are loaded into memory. At least you are notified of the need to reboot. I may be incorrect but I believe the only thing that triggers a reboot on ubuntu are changes to a specific set of packages. As such, its always possible to install updates and still have vulnerable code loaded into memory.
I'm not sure about the failing to install. The only time I've ever seen an update fail to install is when I'm doing a re-install and do something like install a cumulative service pack for a program like Visual Studio that is getting brought down the windows update pipeline as well. I would be interested in knowing what types of updates usually fail.

I've always wondered why we have term limits for the president and no one else in the government. Granted, I can see the point of having Judicial appointments for life since you effectively have to make a career out of being a Judge. On the other hand, the founding fathers didn't believe in a career politician and it was several decades before they first appeared (John Quincey Adams being the first one I believe). Enacting term limits for all elected officials in the Federal government removes the incentive to continually win elections at the expense of good policy. Unfortunately, the cynic in me doesn't believe it will ever happen. Congressmen and Senators have to a swanky job that they will never vote to limit their own terms and the hopes of a state caucus amendment is unlikely to happen either since so many at the state level want to move up to the big house in DC.

I think there are people that way on both sides of the debate. In fact, regardless of the position you take you are going to be torn down by someone. If you don't believe in warming, you are an industry shill, if you do believe in warming, you are a communist out to destroy people's livelihoods.
I just wish all this carbon credit and sustainability nonsense would go away until we've dealt with things like heavy metal toxicity, industrial runoff, and other environmentally destructive things happening now . Once the fish kills and red tides that happen regularly now are taken care of we can start worrying about things that will, at worst, affect the planet several decades from now in the most outlandish doomsday scenarios. As an added bonus there will be decades more data to base trend prediction on to silence once and for all any debate from either side about not having reliable data to fit projections to.

The problem is that the 3rd party package has to be correctly constructed and play nice with other packages in the repository. I've had all sorts of problems with this using the OpenOffice.org from PPA. It does weirdness with the language packages and after installing from the PPA it would be impossible to get localization configuration to believe the languages were properly installed. The same thing can happen where a system breaks because a non-repository package writes a file and suddenly you can't install other packages that need to put a file there. Self-contained bundles alleviate these problems since its impossible for 3rd party packages to trample over things the system may need.

Evolutionary psychology? Living organisms are driven to perpetuate the species. It makes sense that there would be a powerful inbuilt need in humans to achieve goals rationalized as ensuring the survival of the species. I know that I for one sometimes stop and look around at the truly extraordinary things humanity has accomplished over our brief span on earth. We can bend the environment around us almost to our will, we can travel around the world in a day or so and many more impressive feats. Is there some reason that the civilization that has achieved that shouldn't be preserved?

Fortunately for those poor users, IE 8 runs as the equivalent of Nobody on Vista and 7 and can only read/write in a small sandbox.

Many users also don't see the need to have 2 applications running that do exactly the same thing at the same time and to have to arbitrarily switch between them. I would never consider trying to run two browsers on a regular basis.

Mini-addendum. "a working audio in port" My MacBook has a single audio port. There is a global preference that toggles out/in behavior.

Pirating is the wrong answer. If you feel so strongly you go without. By pirating the lack of any meaningful moral conviction shows through.

Uh? Your child's doctor isn't the only one to see the pictures. The radiology technicians have to see them too, and you've probably never and will never meet them. Also, why bash on TSA, I've met a pleasant courteous TSA person on about every other plane trip I've ever taken. I'm sure there are some cranky ones, but think about how much bull they have to put up on a daily basis from jackasses and I think I can understand it.

What I want to know is how body scanners are somehow more invasive than a pat down, you already have to put up with random people groping you, is this so different?

It is unclear to me why you would have to spend 3x as much to run Windows. I recently went Mac and I did price comparisons and found the difference to be $100 in favor of comparable Dells. Only then because they were having some kind of fire sale.

I think the message sending syntax was a little bit strange to get used to. The idea of intermixing names and parameters just seems odd. Still, when I had to do something in Obj-C I was up and running in less than an hour.

Or, they could just not support a company by purchasing devices that have a usage model they disagree with...

I'm pretty sure that's still a local exploit since X has reversed the conventional role of the client/server. For the X client to gain access to the local X server that is running someone has to be logged in locally and launch a remote client through some means.