When we all drive electric or homebrew biodiesel cars, there will be no gas tax to pay for roads.

And as fuel economy increases from better engine design and lighter/smaller cars, existing gasoline tax revenue drops. The gasoline tax model is simply not sustainable. Most states already require cars to come in for emissions checkups every other year. Why not require electric cars to come in for a mileage check and tax accordingly? Isn't this the model for public utilities? Some municipalities have automated utility meters that send real-time usage data back to HQ. If folks are OK with that, why not mileage tracking on cars? (BTW your cellphone company, and probably the goverment already knows where you go if you leave your cellphone on all the time. Who needs GPS lol!)

Another option is to make a default use tax for each vehicle and offer rebates the less you drive. You purchase the right to drive up to 15,000 miles via monthly fees, but get a big rebate at the end of the year when you only drive 10,000 miles. Insurance companies are already doing this, so why not the government? You can even have special provisions for low-income households who have to drive a long way to work and are underserviced by public transit.

But these are just ideas. Ideas are bullshit. Execution is what matters, and thats fucking hard to do.

Can you please post the hardware PNPID of your audio devices? With this information Microsoft can investigate and post an appropriate fix via Windows Update. You better beleive MS employees are scouring all the interweb forums including slashdot to address real customer issues!

Best bet is to post a dxdiag log file as that will contain all the driver information and perhaps help to address your other issues as well:

• start - dxdiag.exe - save all info

In the mean time, try force-installing the Vista driver via your vendor's website.

In Vista there are actually multiple copies of the "window data" in BOTH system and Video ram. That's one reason why dwm.exe commit size is so large in Vista.

If you have a WDDM 1.1 compatible video card in Windows 7, however, the memory savings is huge. Especially if you frequently have a lot of windows open simultaneously. All this was presented at WinHEC/PDC. All of this means that you can actually run Win7 with 1GB quite well without any disk thrashing. You can certainly run WinXP with 1GB or less, but you don't get all the cool stuff that all kids love.

So how do you know if your current Video card is WDDM 1.1 compatible? From looking at the INF files distributed with the BETA, you can deduce that any DirectX 10 capable card is also WDDM 1.1. Presumably the graphics guidelines for Windows 7 system builders will be published soon to verify this. Until then, get your latest WDDM 1.1 drivers from Windows Update Catalog