Yeah sure, replace something with known security holes with something new where they still have to be discovered :)

Through a policy (gpedit.msc).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953252

The article is about 10 times as long as it needs to be, look for the subtitle "How to use Group Policy settings to disable all Autorun features".

Which add up to what - 10% of domestic energy in the US? 15%?

It was between 6 and 7% in 2004, I don't know how much it is today. I don't want to even attempt to predict anything in this field, but my expectation is that the goal of 100% in 10 years from 2008 will NOT be reached. Not even by half.

Why does everyone always point out that they "don't produce CO2" nowadays, when all they do is shove the CO2 production over the horizon, into someone else's yard?

Gasification technology, by contrast, converts nearly all of the waste into gases like hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be used to run generators and furnaces

So instead of burning it (producing CO2) and generating energy locally, they produce carbon monoxyde that can be burned (producing just as much CO2) somewhere else, and suddenly they're "clean".

There is a benefit to using waste: if you just let it rot you get CO2 as well, so it's not a bad idea to gain some energy in the process. But gasification isn't any cleaner than other methods for getting energy out of waste.

There is a benefit to gasification, just in that you can use the gas somewhere else, closer to where the energy is needed. But mentioning CO2 as if it magically disappears is hypocritic.

A different topic maybe, but electric cars are just the same: no, they don't produce CO2. The CO2 is produced in the electricity plant that generates the current to charge your batteries instead. Or in a nuclear plant, creating its own kind of problems. And a small but growing part in clean alternative plants.
The net effect of a "clean" electric car is that the energy has to come from somewhere else, shifting the responsibility for doing it in a clean way to someone else. Electric cars aren't clean, they're hypocritic.

It's not just car manufacturers and waste gasifiers, many are making themselves "clean" today by saddling someone else up with the problems.

Sorry, but what alternative OS disallows users to execute programs from their home directory?
(Actually, NT4 did if you wanted it to, so I suppose it must still be possible in its descendants today.)

... US senators attempting to turn US copyright into a more compatible version of Europe's copyright because we signed a treaty with them (the Berne Convention)

The old US copyright laws were based on the Berne convention. That convention was held in 1886, and AFAIK that was a bit before Walt Disney and Sonny Bono were born.

Protection already lasted longer under the 1976 copyright act than in most other countries that signed the Berne convention.

The Mickey Mouse Protection Act of '98 and the DMCA have been the immediate reasons for the rest of the world beginning to changing its laws to remain compatible with the US, not the other way around.

The article site appears to be slashdotted.
OTOH, I'm using a Belkin router. Do you think they'd dare...?

maybe it is a government conspiracy to ... wait wait only kidding.

Not hearing any sirens yet? Exactly what I thought - the NSA don't use sirens :)

No DNS entry for that domain here, and neither for help-israel-win.com
Both domains pop up at google though, as #1 and #2 for "help israel win", so they must have existed.
Google's cached version of the page reports 7040 registered botnet members.

Net-criminals have been known to try and make money out of natural disasters etc. before. War can be seen as a disaster too.

What guarantee did the 7786 in this case get that the botnet they've wilfully joined will be used for what they're being told, and not for more common purposes such as sending spam, hosting dirty pictures of big and/or little children, and selling fake medicine with the same advertized effect of making a certain male body part grow?

Vista isn't any less stable than XP, if you ask me. By that I mean that for as long as it has existed, the number of crashes or other instabilities (not counting third-party application bugs) I've seen in Vista is exactly the same as in XP: zero equals zero.

The only negative thing that can be said about it, is that it requires a ton of resources - but that was to be expected. Win2000 needed more than NT4, XP more than 2000, Vista more than XP. Each of those times, what was decent hardware for one OS became the bare minimum for the next.

I think the reason why people hate it the most is UAC with its extra dialogs, and I can easily imagine someone confusing that with instability - because I've seen it happen.

Someone at work (who calls himself a software engineer nonetheless, writes small device firmware in assembler, but at PC level knows nothing but VB, and even that only half-assed) saw an UAC pop-up on my machine shortly after I installed the first Vista in the company. He immediately went out to tell everyone (behind my back, as usual for him) that he had seen "Vista crash" and that I was a moron for wanting to use it. That while he himself refuses to even look at Linux because it's too difficult, and still runs Windows 95 on one of his own boxes because he's afraid some DOS-based programs he wrote in Clipper 15 years ago will stop working if he upgrades.

I mean, if even a professional - be it one I wouldn't hire - thinks an UAC popup is an error message, calls it a crash, what must non-IT professionals think?

No. It depends, but $100 is always far too cheap to be art.

Art is what you can barely afford and your neighbours can't. To some, a SUV is art. For me, it would have to be crashed into a tree or a 40-ton truck first. THEN it becomes art (the kind I can't afford).