And what that means is that nobody who doesn't want Linux anyway will use that Live CD, because they won't want to look through the instructions to find their machine and go through what sounds like an arcane process.

Easily disproven? You're speculating here, not providing actual evidence. You can't disprove something with speculation.

More precisely, there are three groups of people here, listed in what I perceive as increasing size. People who understand what Secure Boot is and want to lock out other OSes, people who understand what Secure Boot is and want to be able to run other OSes, and the mass market. A mass market customer wouldn't argue for doing less with his or her PC, because a mass market customer wouldn't have a clue about the subject.

You seem to be missing my point.

I'm not saying anything about protecting the credentials from others. I'm saying something about preserving the knowledge, and assuming ordinary competence with computers.

You mention my birth certificate. I can get a copy of it, no problem, if I lose the copy I've got (and I don't know offhand where that went to). If it is destroyed, that's annoying, not serious.

Where do you put that CD-ROM? If you keep it at home, you can lose it in a house fire. If it's in a safe deposit box, it's safer, but not completely safe. It also will require periodic trips to verify that the disk is still readable. (Taking serious precautions to back something up is not characteristic of the average computer user.) Spread the CD-ROMs around, and you're increasing the chance that somebody will get hold of a copy. Keep them limited and you're increasing the chance that you'll lose your wallet.

For perhaps 95% of the people in the world, any password they put on it will be half-assed, and they can't even spell steganography, let alone know what it means. If the CD-ROM falls into the wrong hands, anybody competent with computers can probably break it,

You are considering certainly no more than 5% of the population when you suggest avoiding third parties.

A few questions to try to get closer to the heart of this thing:

1. Is there evidence that Einstein published a paper on Special Relativity in 1905?
2. Is there evidence that the world was created since then?
3. What would you do or think differently if you knew that the Universe had actually been created in 1964? If the answers are "yes", "no", and "nothing", is the question even meaningful?

"Is there a God?" is an unscientific question. It is meaningful, as people will think and do things differently depending on their answer, and the details of their answer. It is not scientific in that it isn't falsifiable, among other things. The same is true, as your link points out, about things like morality and aesthetics. (Questions on people's religion, morality, and aesthetics can be scientific, and it's conceivable that we'll someday have a sciences of aesthetics.) Morality and aesthetics are subject to argument, but the arguments go on both sides (except for some things we're mostly agreed on), and our opinions or conclusions or whatever affect our thoughts and actions.

In general, in morality and aesthetics we are not asked to believe against the evidence and reasoning, and I consider religions that want people to believe against the evidence to be anti-scientific and bad.

In your example, either you intend to think or do something on a belief that's against the evidence, or you are asking a meaningless question. The first is anti-scientific, in that such conclusions do not agree with the principles of science, and such habits of thought are destructive to the practice of science. The second is anti-scientific in that it's a waste of time. It's anti-everything to entertain such a view as anything other than an intellectual curiosity.

If somebody does that and removes money from your bank, the bank is going to have to show it was really you, or that there was sufficient authentication by a route you agreed to. A conversation with a bank employee and a photoshopped ID are not going to be considered sufficient authentication. If it turns out the bank was liable, it is going to have to restore the money, and it will be able to do so. Recovering the money fraudulently taken from the bank is, after that, the bank's problem.

There have been cases where stolen domains (where the evidence is clear) are never returned. It seems to depend on the registrar, and that's a good reason not to use GoDaddy.

No, I'm just wondering why you have this bizarre viewpoint. The evidence that the Sun came up yesterday is stronger than that it will come up tomorrow. If there is no evidence that the Sun came up yesterday, science simply doesn't work. A scientist looks at experiments in his or her field - and suddenly realizes he or she has no evidence that they ever happened.

There is no evidence for the creation of the Universe. There is evidence that the Universe evolved over time. Therefore, believing in any creation significantly after the big bang is believing against the evidence, and is anti-scientific.

I dislike people trying to deny other people basic human rights, like the right to marry who they love. Should I be working to try to get rid of people like Eich? And in what way driving people out of jobs less tolerant than trying to deprive them of basic rights? Eich can get another job. Even when my cousin got married in Massachusetts, Arizona did not recognize their marriage, which is unconstitutional as far as I can tell, and certainly worse than losing a job.

Again, nobody's going to tell the church they have to perform same-sex marriages. That would be held as violating freedom of religion, which the courts are not going to do. Note that, in many cases, a business dealing with the public cannot discriminate based on certain criteria, such as race. I bet I can find people around who think that mixing races is immoral; would you support their right to not cater to mixed-race couples?

I've lost lots of credentials before, but there has always been a way to retrieve them. If I'm the only guy with the wallet key, and I lose the key, then I've lost those Bitcoin forever. If I have multiple copies of the key around, I have to worry about somebody finding one of them.

If I could use a version of the software that was easily available but which I would wind up violating the license, and a version I wrote, I would write my own. That applies no matter which license applies. There's nothing special about the GPL in this case. (I'd be uncomfortable with the lack of license on the Fortran code, myself, but nobody's likely to do anything about that.)

Freedom without restrictions must be better? So a country that maintains the freedom to own slaves is freer than one where that's illegal? After all, preventing me from owning slaves is a restriction. There are also restrictions on me shooting you if you say something I don't like. Freedom needs restrictions to survive. You may certainly have your own opinions about specific restrictions, but nothing's axiomatic about it.

Ah, we are in agreement here, and my sarcasm detector needs calibration.

Your opinion that authoritarian corporatists who push nationalism and traditional values are liberals has been noted. As much as it deserves, anyway.

Legally, there are no federal elections. All elections are run by the states, for statewide candidates.

There are positions that are voted for by the entire state, including governorships, Senate seats, and usually the electoral college members that actually elect the President and Vice-President. The candidates for President and Vice-President are listed on all appropriate ballots I've seen, but the vote is actually for a slate of electors that have pledged to vote for particular candidates.

Any voting system needs some sort of enforcement system. Assuming it exists, voter fraud is a solvable problem. If it doesn't, there will be fraud on a large scale.

Voter fraud is a very inefficient way of rigging elections, and those participating are usually guilty of felonies, so it can only work well in places that will tolerate a lot of other fraud. It's far more effective to tamper with the counts.

And you claim that everybody can drive to the DMV during working hours, including those who work during their office hours and whose who don't have a car?