They will only get lots of passwords from people who are foolish enough to select a brute forcible password as their master. Picking a simple master password is stupid. Storing encrypted data on the internet isn't necessarily stupid.

Not to mention, if you generate random passwords for every service, it's not much labor to just go ahead and generate new ones when situations like this occur. All LastPass clients automatically update to use the new passwords, no big deal.

IMO the convenience of having a central password repository outweighs the dangers. It's a risk, certainly, but not a big one, as long as you have a sane master password.

Seriously, coupled with Zune Pass and the HD Dock, it's amazing.

I'm not a windows expert by any means (mostly use Linux) but I use Windows at work...

• Productivity. The new start menu is worth the upgrade cost alone. The task bar is also a huge improvement (although I tend to use full application names instead of the default icon only). I can't live without Aero Snap anymore.
• Security. Not running everything as admin actually works well. Lots of new security features, some of which IE takes advantage of (you'll notice that many 0-day exploits are defeated by IE8 running in protected mode, which I don't believe works on XP).
• Management. I think many AD features require windows vista or higher. You might find some of this useful.

Read the blog post. Needless to say, this is astounding.

This is exactly right. This simply reflects an increase in investment in OSD, an investment executives assume will pay off down the road. And even looking at Bing over the last year, they've made some pretty major improvements.

IE9 has hardware rendering as well, and it really makes a massive difference.

Not even close. Acid 3 tests various behaviors across nearly 20 different standards, most of which are hundreds of pages long.

Interestingly, this is still supported by Microsoft. Presumably there are a few customers out there with IE5 on Win2000 machines yet.

To answer your first question, no, I have yet to see any browser that is 100% compliant.

IE9: 32. Unfortunately that number is from 2 months ago after only short development. At any rate, significant progress is being made.

I use IE9 5 days a week, I promise you it's not the new IE6.

I think what info we've released publicly with IE9 is promising. New and vastly improved javascript engine, hardware accelerated rendering, lots of new standards support (and we're highly active in ECMAScript v5 and joined the SVG working group). Oh, and did I mention, we now do rounded borders?!

I've found that bing is useful in specific circumstances. For example, try searching for a restaurant in Bing. I find the interface much better, and the conglomeration of reviews to be far more helpful and interesting. This goes for most product searches as well. Bing maps also has a cool feature where you can get directions based on current traffic conditions. Handy for when you want to get someplace when the city is gridlocked in rush hour.

Searching for programming related questions, though, it's next to worthless for some reason.

If that's how you want to define emulator, then you might as well call glibc a C emulator.

Actually, Mono is completely different from Wine, and not even Wine is an emulator. It's a native implementation of the CLR and other .NET tools that run on Linux/BSD/etc. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to the JDK.