People who haven't heard of a VPN or remote desktop/terminal services/Citrix? There's a phrase for that set of people: Almost everyone in the world.

I agree that there are off-the-shelf solutions that work better than this, but OP wasn't talking about /. readers, he was talking about normal people whose eyes glaze when you start using technical terms like "browser" and "client" and don't understand what all this fuss is about when they don't feel like they have anything to hide.

Almost everybody in the US has some access to the internet, but almost none have any appreciable understanding of how it works and what dangers they can face by trusting anything that comes by or all the people who can come into contact with their information. I don't know how you change that, but I'm pretty sure it's not from an appeal to geek-speak.

Oh, I get that. But laws of any science are never more than useful abstractions -- things don't follow the laws, the laws attempt to predict their behavior.

But fossil fuels remain consumable scarce goods. Very important scarce goods in the current energy economy, but not special enough that they are outside the bounds of supply and demand.

Birds? You mean air-kittens?

You have a scarce good that responds to economic forces, just like gold, food, computers, internet access, etc. And one of the first things you learn when you start studying economics (101 level) is that what people want isn't important, it's what they demand. I encourage people to study basic economics so they can understand basic market forces like demand and supply.

Fossil fuels are going to have to get a whole lot more expensive and a whole lot harder to get to before any other energy source is going to become a close second to them globally.

All resources are finite.

Just making it clear is all. I agree with the security problems inherent in Windows that make these things necessary -- I always found ClamAV for linux a little weird, frankly.

I'm not running Windows because I like it (although Vista hasn't really annoyed me as much as it seems to have annoyed everybody else -- I also found ME no more annoying than others, so I'm a definite outlier). I'm running it to run software that doesn't run right under wine, and because I haven't yet got Kubuntu running on the laptop.

To be fair, none of the security products I use is an MS product. The security features added to Vista (yeah, I know, they weren't all about security) I just found annoying as well, so I looked for other solutions.

When I bought the Windows laptop I'm using to post this a year ago, I decided it was time to be "responsible," and just add a basic set of security programs to protect me from baddies out there that were going to get my computer, the way everybody said I should. They said that it was irresponsible to run a computer without it.

So I did. After about 11 months, my firewall was fighting with FF badly enough that I had to replace it, and my new firewall fought with the cheap little Risk game I was trying to install, but, other than that, it's been at the annoyance level. After twenty years of using computers and telecommunicating to BBSs and the internet (where I've been for more than fifteen years), I still have yet to have a piece of actual malware run on any of my computers. I have had anti-malware programs produce false-positives, or freak out about email-viruses in my email archives that my email settings would never allow to run, but that's it. So, now that I'm running my security setup, it just sits there, scanning stuff, sucking up cycles, and being annoying, but that's all it does. My regular habits are exceptionally safe.

I'm reminded of a Smothers Brothers special back in the 90s where Dick accused Tom of being irresponsible, and Tom said "I'm not irresponsible, I'm wearing a condom right now!" My computer is standing around, wearing its condom, and then not engaging in at-risk behavior (beyond the obvious of running Windows).

So to those who want to tell me I was irresponsible for not running anti-virus software, my response is to point out that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that I ran sufficiently safe on my own without this software.