Keeping your sexual orientation secret in the workplace is easy enough if you just take simple measures like requiring all your employees to refer to their lovers only in gender-neutral terms and to use gender-ambiguous pronouns when talking about eir partners, and firing anyone who drops gender-revealing names (People dating 'Sam' are fine, people dating 'Deekoo' are not). At most non-porn jobs, your sexual orientation is not going to be relevant to your job performance.

When it comes to games, this sort of thing is *not reasonable*. Most mmog players are doing it *for fun* and don't want to have to use the genderless pronouns they use at work. And they're doing it *for fun*. Why should people have to keep their orientation secret *while playing a game*?

IMO, per-app exceptions make things insanely complicated. What I personally think is right in your scenario is to examine the API and its users (that is, the applications) to see what they're actually doing; if the API does one thing and the docs say it does something else, you patch the docs. If for some reason the API changes to fix one thing *have to* break something else, then you determine which thing is more important. Most of the time, the thing that's currently working is more important, because users will be a lot more angry if the device that worked in the last kernel does not work in the current kernel than they will if the device that didn't work in the last kernel also doesn't work in the current kernel.

In instances where an app actually relies on a bug, you need to figure out how important fixing that bug actually is. 'Bug #16384: Computer works as I expect it to.' is not actually a bug.

As long as the machine doesn't have an actual rootkit, that is.

If you are booting into the infected system, you CANNOT count on any program that you run within it being able to remove infections. Safe mode itself can be disabled or overridden by malware; your approach only works if you're up against a relatively low-end piece of malware. Luckily for users and technicians, most malware isn't that well written - but acting like safe mode is an easy out is a bad idea.

I used to do computer repair; it wasn't particularly unusual to find customer machines infected with malware that their AV or anti-spyware program did not yet detect. Once a computer is infected, it's possible for malware to hide itself or render itself unremovable even if the antimalware program is later updated to detect it.

Impact: One to three hours of billable technician time per call, typically, with new malware being more likely to take longer. Reduced email deliverability for the people sharing a network connection with the warezd00dette who managed to get herself infected with Spamforo. Hours to days of reduced productivity due to both direct effects of malware and necessary countermeasures. Exposure of confidential data (I once got to review draft government regulations before the general public did because some idiot's Sircam infection sent me a file in order to have my advice.). Increased bandwidth costs. (Thankfully, the one customer whose infection autodialed 900 numbers did not have a modem on their computer.)

The opinions of the Framers (not necessarily Founders - IIRC, Jefferson was shipped off to France to keep him from getting in the way of the Constitutional Convention) are *completely irrelevant*. The authority of their Constitution derives from the elections that ratified it, not from the wisdom of the authors. Our distant ancestors (well, the male, white, wealthy ones, at least) voted for or against the TEXT. If the wisdom of the Framers was what mattered or what they thought should guide them, they would not have needed to bother with a written Constitution - they could have simply put all the Framers in the Senate and made do with an unwritten one.

Would they have authorized private ownership of nukes? I don't know. Some of the Founders were mad scientists by profession; some were narcoterrorists. Maybe they would have thought nukes for everyone were a great idea. (Doubtful, though: if nukes were available at the time, either the war would have been fought with a policy of bilateral restraint, or most of the framers would have been radioactive corpses and Amendment 1 would have been BRAAAAAAAAAIIIIIINS.)

If they release a Javascript RPC implementation, their competitors will be able to use it to make their apps as slow, clunky, and unreliable as Wave seemed to be?