And boy do I (as a computer professional) love being asked every three seconds if I am sure I want to do what I am trying to do. Even when you disable the "are you sure you want to use your computer" warnings you get a daily reminder that you have disabled the "are you sure you want to use your computer" warnings. I know Big Bill said he wants the home computer to be easy enough for the average grand parent to use but we are not all old and useless.
Unfortunately, it is computer professionals like yourself exhibiting attitudes like this that have the potential to compound the security issues that Windows is notorious for.
If you were worth your salt, you'd be fully aware as to why UAC is an important feature in Vista and why it's a good idea to know which applications are requesting elevated permissions at all times; hence why you'd not disable it. To imply that it is only fit for the "old and useless" demonstrates mainly ignorance on your part and perpetuating these views actively encourages others to disable it, thus continuing on the cycle of making Windows systems less secure and application developers more laissez-faire and liberal with the manner in which they develop their applications with the assumption that all users are blindly running with administrative permissions as has been the case for numerous years now.
If you need to run a number of applications in an elevated state, there are methods of doing so without being prompted while still keeping UAC active. If you know there are several applications that you'll be needing to run with administrator permissions, for example, you could simply launch a command prompt with elevated permissions then run the programs directly from there. I'd suggest this was a much more secure method than disabling UAC entirely and an approach that many developers and professionals use. You get one prompt to launch the command prompt and that's it.
It is worth bearing in mind that the large outcry about UAC has, in the main, been caused because the vast majority of users were previously used to running as an Administrator at all times, which is a dire practice from a security standpoint. Unfortunately application developers were also running as Administrators too, meaning their applications came to rely on the fact that users were too running in this state. Many applications simply don't function properly without admin access when they shouldn't need it based purely on the operations they're intended to perform. This is starting to change, thankfully, due to Microsoft's efforts, through UAC and other methods, to get people to recognize when they're running things as an administrator and when they're not.
UNIX and UNIX-like systems have, since their inception, ran on the principles of LUA, or Least User Access, meaning user accounts run with the least number of permissions possible and launch applications commonly in this state. If you want to perform administrative tasks, as I'm sure you're aware, you have to elevate your permissions by authenticating as a root user. This is seen as par for the course in order to protect your system and one of the reasons why UNIX systems are inherently so secure. You wouldn't run constantly as a root user on a *NIX system, at least I hope, therefore I don't see why you'd disable UAC on a Windows-based system. You may get more prompts on a Windows-based system due to poorly developed applications, and the onus is squarely on developers for this, however this is starting to change and knowing what is requesting permission elevation is a fundamental aspect of securing a box; something I'd not be giving up too lightly regardless of my level of technical expertise. In fact the more you know, the more clear it will be come as to why this is important.
That's the other side of the debate put forward by myself anyway. A slight deviation from the main topic, however I felt it important to discuss. Have a good day.
