If you use a company workstation, DBAN your machine.

That's probably in breach of your employment agreement, and more than likely criminal too.

I wouldn't.

Very likely it's forbidden at some companies, but last time I left a job (IBM UK), DBANning all one's computers was a step on the official checklist. It seems to be a good idea for any company that allows its employees to use work computers for personal web browsing etc., as the employee then takes responsibility for his own private data, rather than trusting the company's IT admins to deal with it.

I didn't. I nuked my personal stuff, and then worked hard to put the machine in a state that my replacements would find useful to reproduce my processes.

For those of you who got sucked into this conversation. Use whatever OS you want and then use vagrant for your development OS. http://vagrantup.com/ I promised myself to never use Windows again. I'm happy with my 27 inch iMac and my two laptops running Linux. Life is good :)

That is so funny. I saw BTJunkie shut down yesterday and I said to myself, "Time to fire up the old BBS"

I can imagine a world in which we go back to direct dial-up connections to avoid being spied on.

Then again, I imagine that it's trivial to monitor those connections as well; although just like with SSL, they may not be able to snoop on the actual contents.

Windows 8 wants to tie you to an email address for your login. They have multiple screens that try to force you to setup a hotmail or live account. With all the social networks I wonder how many people use multiple email addresses.

I agree, the lack of customization is very irritating. If everything would get out of my way when I'm trying to do something productive I would be happy.

Thank you for your comment. I agree with what you said but I thought maybe something new came out.

Does the same apply to a webcam on a laptop without an indicator light?

Remember back in the 70's and 80's before cable TV? We only had channels 3,6, and 7. We loved TV but couldn't stand the commercials every 5 minutes. The internet has turned into one big TV commercial. Websites are now 10% content and 90% ads. It is so sad that we let this get out of control. Don't get me started on social networking and how they exist to be the big TV commercial just to make boatloads of cash.

A username and password is great. To get that you have to fill out a bunch of personal information that most people do not have time for or want to fill out. Soon a person will have 20 email accounts tied to 20 different Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts. I guess my goal was to find out how a single piece of information could be used to login to many different sites similar to OpenID or single sign on and be successful. Thank you so much for your comment.