Why should I be productive? I'm retired, you clod!

And what do the drivers communicate with? The firmware.

Well yes, of course. However, drivers tend to be OS specific, and can be reloaded fairly easily if infected. TFA is talking about getting malware into the firmware, which has to be OS agnostic and is somewhat harder to disinfect.

No, what you're thinking of is drivers. Firmware is held in non-volatile memory and executed there so that it's ready to be used the moment the device is turned on, and so that it can't easily be modified.

I can remember when there was a jumper on the motherboard that had to be shifted before it was possible to flash the firmware. If all motherboards had that, the only way an attacker could get malware into the BIOS (or whatever other firmware they wanted to target) would be by tricking the user into changing the jumper. Not only that, many of the users who'd be foolish enough to fall for that kind of trick wouldn't have the confidence to open up their box and play with the hardware. Not all, of course, but then, no security measure is 100% effective.

I presume that the Alibaba Group has forty directors running it, and that every single one of them has "sticky fingers."

You might want to follow that link and see what I was suggesting. It's probably not what you think.

Depending on who's in control of the system, you might get your location sent to the OADS for "service."

Some Linux distros do that, others don't. I'm not sure, but Ubuntu might. I know that Fedora (using XFCE) doesn't, at least if you don't use their software updater.

I'm not saying that they're not justified in complaining about the rent. However, my point still stands that if they're starving because of high rents, they should either move someplace with lower rents, get a room mate to share the rent, or stop complaining that they can't afford to buy food.

If the place is too expensive for the starving artist, then they should move some place where it isn't.

One thing for sure, if they're starving and won't move to someplace with lower rents, they have no reason to complain about starving.

As a Democrat and a Californian, I say Fuck Feinstein.

As a Californian who happens to be a moderate Republican, I say, no thank you; she's not my type. I've been voting against her for decades, but the liberals can't get enough of her.

1) You can't (safely) use the same password in more than one context.

It all depends on how much security you need for a particular application. As an example, do you really need a separate password for each and every blog you follow, and do they all need to be as strong as the one protecting your financial records? Probably not. Yes, knowing how to create, remember and use strong passwords is a Very Good Idea, but not every account you use needs one. My suggestion is to have simple, in-obvious but easy to remember passwords for accounts like that, and save the strong ones for places where you really care about security.

One warning: Unity, with the need to get the mouse into a very small strip down the left side of the screen to get to menus, is not at all "Parkinson's friendly." After several months of struggling with it, my older sister let me install Xfce on her Ubuntu desktop, and she's found it much easier. And, when she got a laptop, we started off with Xubuntu because we knew that was what she wanted. You may not find Xfce as comfortable as we do, (I use it on Fedora.) but if you're setting up a computer for somebody who has difficulties with small, precise hand motions, pick a DE that doesn't require them, and you'll all be better off.

In Soviet Russia, asteroids pulverize you!

Presumably that author wasn't just defining things cyclically and had defined cardinality elsewhere.

One would think so, but no. When I came across that book I was trying to learn about such things and I'd think that would have remembered it if he had.