Might have been more cost effective to just take one step closer instead of building a multi-billion dollar telescope.

Now apply this extreme warning to the user's (including my) regular web-experience and you have a conditioned behavior. The user isn't going to take an ultra-stern warning seriously this time because the 400 times before that he ignored it nothing bad happened. The warnings just get more stern and the user takes them less seriously.

A great advance in applying certificates would be a method of validation that doesn't produce so many false negatives. If the user thinks it's a useful mechanism the user will use it.

How do we do that? Beats me. Carmack's a procedural genius, ask him to do it.

Treating me like I matter is protecting my choices at the risk of allowing me the opportunity to make mistakes.

I don't want my browser (or government, or software producer) deciding for me what sites I'm allowed to view any more than I want my TV deciding for me what shows are safe to watch or my car deciding me what places are safe to visit.

You have an 18 mo old Vista installation that's snappy? My wife's lappy came with Vista non-snappy out of the box standard. It also came with all of my XP administration features renamed for no reason at no additional charge.

That being said my XP installation get's re-ghosted every 9mo or so; I suspect many slashdotters have had a similar experience.

Generally speaking, I agree your preference is the reason you would choose a Mac (whatever that bias is formed by, perceived system performance included), however your invariable Windows stability may be a unique phenomenon.