In the US most political subdivisions are allowed to raise taxes, the problem is that they choose not to.

FTFY

I remember first hearing it on Friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJTvzenS_uc

One word: CyaongenMod

I only upgraded my Samsung Vibrant to a Samsung Note 2 because I wanted 4G and a bigger screen. CyanogenMod gave the Vibrant whole new lease on life plus no crappy Samsung or t-Mobile apps. I'd like a new Samsung Note 4 but I will probably put CyanogenMod on my current phone and use it for another year.

Too bad I can't do that the iPhone 4 work made me buy when they paid for my phone line. I hated both AT&T and the iPhone so I told work to stop paying for my phone. About the best I can do is sell it cheap to some iTard...

Notice I said a separate webuser for porn surfing. I don't usually have issues with websites containing tech info infecting my PCs, but that will could change in the future.

Personally I find application manuals on the box itself are usually pretty useless. When I need that sort of info I will 'su -' to the regular user and use elinks to search the internet. If I really need to see the pretty pictures I will run a VNC session as the regular user and connect to that.

SSHing to a Linux box and tunneling a VNC session to my local desktop also works great on Windoze. For those times I am stuck on a Windoze PC that has net access I always carry a copy of putty and vncviewer on a USB flash drive.

Very true, I glossed over the whole exploit gaining root access thing because the hypothetical webuser should not have root or sudo access. If the webuser could possibly click on an exploit to activate it then they really should not have any sort of root access. Why would a user who only exists to surf porn on the web need that sort of access anyway?

As far as taking advantage of a buffer overrun to gain root access, that is a crappy programming problem that can affect any OS, not just Linux. if you are that worried about that problem then run Linux in a VM and have no important data either on the VM or on the VM's host. If you do get compromised then you can revert to a prior snapshot. You can copy the compromised VM for further forensic study before you revert if that kind of thing interests you.

Contrary to the OP's assertion I think that the OS you run absolutely matters. I would use a reverted Linux VM for further porn surfing without a second thought. With Windows if you have a special VM and host for porn surfing then it would probably be OK too if it was on an isolated porn surfing VLAN. Otherwise you run the risk of Windows reaching out to other Windows boxes and doing a drive-by and infecting those too. If you are that paranoid about security then it probably would not hurt to use an isolated porn surfing VLAN for your Linux VMs too.

Of course I am only referring to criminals trying to exploit your boxes. Once you start talking about state actors working under the auspices of a nation's government then everything goes out your Windows (pun intended).

You could air-gap any boxes you want to protect but then then that information can become pretty useless to you because it is hard to access when you need it. And air-gaps (as well as fine-grained access controls) will not prevent INSIDERS from compromising your systems, which makes me wonder why more criminals don't try bribing insiders to accomplish their nefarious ends like governments have been known to do in the past.

This is how flamewars begin. If you are really talking about the problem being users (which I agree with) then you need to keep it general and you do not need to reference ANY operating systems.

I did not call you a racist, I only implied you were not being truthful. You need to learn how to parse what you read better.

As far as the truth, you keep referring to individual operating systems when it sounds like you are trying to say they don't really matter. If they don't really matter then why do you keep mentioning them?

In order to get your ideas across better you need to improve your English writing skills (i.e., don't say stupid shit like you are not trying to start a flamewar). If you are not trying to start a flamewar then it should go without saying (i.e., it should be "obvious").

And yes, the operating system does matter. You are only looking at Linux usage on the desktop, how many servers run Linux? If you add them into the total Linux usage then then the "market" is pretty big. Linux servers can get compromised too, in fact the only Linux boxes running AV these days tend to be servers.

Anecdotally none of the friends who I set up with Linux (and NO antivirus) for surfing porn have gotten owned, so I would say contrary to your assertion the OS you run DOES matter.

Hmmm... You have a regular user called user who has their docs in /home/user. You surf the web with a different user, say webuser, who has their docs in /home/webuser. If webuser is dumb enough to run a script that encrypts /home/webuser what has the hacker accomplished?

They haven't touched anything in /home/user. You can log in as root and run: 'rm -rf /home/webuser' then 'mkdir /home/webuser'. Copy a few files from /etc/skel then run 'chown -r webuser:webuser /home/webuser' and you are back in business. Or you can run 'userdel -r webuser' and 'useradd-d webuser' and you are good to go.

Either way whoever encrypted webuser's files just wasted their time with very little to show for it as the problem can be easily fixed by you at the cost of just a couple of minutes of your time.

Also just about every Linux user I know has good backups of their documents. If you happen to be stupid enough to get your home directory encrypted and you don't have good backups then you probably shouldn't be using a computer much less using Linux.

Yeah right. Every single racist I have met has told me "I am not a racist". Just because someone claims something is true that does not necessarily mean that that something is actually true.

Only on Slashdot can someone be brazen enough to equate egalitarianism with 'DISCRIMINATION' (there I fixed the spelling for you).

Must be OPPOSITE DAY and I missed the memo or something.

I first started using Slackware Linux when you had to download multiple floppies to install it. I really liked Slack because it was a great way to learn Linux. I stopped using it because it was pretty difficult to upgrade versions.

I switched to Red Hat because you could get books containing an installation CD-ROM. Afterward I switched to Mandrake because it was RPM-based and had a bigger set of userland tools than Red Hat. I stuck with Mandrake until about version 10.

Afterward I started using CentOS due to the availability of third-party repos like RPMForge and EPEL. I recently switched to Scientific Linux due to them bringing out the latest version months before CentOS did. Half of my boxes now run Scientific Linux 6.

My other Linux boxes are now running Arch Linux, which reminds me a lot of Slack. Arch uses a rolling release model and it has pacman, an excellent package manager that handles dependencies really well. If you like Slack but are frustrated by a lack of a package manager that handles dependencies you should really give Arch a try...

You need to use HTML character entities:
 
< is &lt;
> is &gt;
 
More info: HTML character entities

You did not have to tell us that, it is quite obvious from your post.

I AM a professional Linux systems administrator and I have never had to do any of what you described over the last 15 years I have used Linux (Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch and various other distributions).
 
Maybe if you chose supported hardware you would not have this issue? You don't seem to mind having to buy supported hardware to run your precious OS-X.

Checks current systems -- ALSA works fine for me out of the box. Extra sound system? I am a control freak so I got in the habit of building my systems up from a minimal install which means that I don't install that POS called Pulse Audio. I will admit that there are little pieces of OSS lying around but they never seem to get in the way.

That is your problem there. GNOME sucks, not Linux. KDE has gotten as bloated as Windows so it is starting to suck too. Fluxbox rules!

Hmmm... I am currently running CentOS on most of my multimedia boxes, mainly because I support Red Hat servers at work. Let's see, minimal CentOS install, install the RPM Forge repo RPM, yum install [fluxbox, vlc, etc.]. Not exactly rocket science there buddy!
 
As far as resources, if you are speaking hardware I have a P-II 300 running Fluxbox on Ubuntu in my workshop. The result is sweet, sweet music while I work on my carpentry projects. Can you even get OS-X to run on older hardware? I'll bet you need a CPU made within the last two to three years to get OS-X to install much less run.

How many interfaces does the Mac have? One? There are plenty for Linux, it is the user's choice as to what to run. Choice is good.
 
As far as office software, Open Office works great for me. I even put it on my Vista laptop because the stupid new MS Office ribbon menu UI sucks big time.

All my boxes have a feel that is exactly right for me, because I know how to set them up that way. They are all internally coherent, which is all that matters to me.
 
I don't like having to run my computers the same way everyone else does because Jobs or Gates/Ballmer dictates that is how it has to be. And I sure as hell don't like having to pay for additional software to do simple stuff like changing the stupid Office ribbon menu UI into the old-school UI I prefer to use.

If you want to give Apple all that $$$ that is your business, I prefer to keep my $$$. Just because you are a major FAIL when it comes to setting up Linux does not mean that Linux is worthless to others.
 
By the way, I checked out your hacks to get MacOSX to boot on non-Apple hardware link. I don't have to perform ANY hacks to get Linux to work on my PCs.
 
The procedures listed on that page ARE system administration tasks and relatively advanced ones at that. Besides, I thought the reason you Mac fanbois run OS-X is because of Apple hardware. Why on earth are you trying to get people to perform the difficult task of installing and running OS-X on non-Apple hardware in the first place?

Informative my ass...

Maybe its just me but I would prefer to read a poorly-formatted article with actual content in it rather than a nicely-formatted one containing no content at all. As far as your brain goes, the first is a good meal and the second is only empty calories.

My preferred way of making documents? I use SSH to tunnel to a VNC session running on a server and then use OpenOffice on the server. Any Windows machine I use only needs a copy of puTTY and VNCviewer available before I can get to work.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that all my documents remain on the server. To me the big PIA is having to move documents between computers at work, school and home in order to work on those documents in those different places. Using OpenOffice on the server means no more unnecessary moving of the documents from computer to computer.

Another thing I like is how VNC saves the state of your session. You can be in the middle of a working on a document and then find out you need to go to another location. You close the vncviewer and the next time you open up the vncviewer again you will be where you last left off.

One disadvantage is that in order to access your documents you have to be on a computer connected to a network. I find that these days whenever I am at work or at school it is rare to find a non-network-connected PC. If I need to get on the network while away from home I can always go to a Starbucks and grab a cup of coffee while connecting to the network from there.

Another downside is that printing is a pain. I haven't bothered to set up remote printing yet, that is on my to-do list. If I need to distribute a document I will usually export it to a PDF file and send that out as an email attachment. PDF is a good format to send to others because everyone has a PDF viewer.

I also use Open Office on my only Windows machine, a Vista laptop. I do not want to run any bootleg software nor do I want to pay for a copy of MS Office. On the most part Open Office under both Linux and Windows works well for me on a day-to-day basis.

I have had only minor formatting problems with documents when transferring files between computers if they have been saved in the older Word 97/2000 format. Unless you are doing some funky document formatting the older Word format should also work reasonably well for you.

I have been receiving more .docx files these days, the odf-converter-integrator plug-in really helps as far as allowing me to import those files into Open Office. If I need to work on those documents I will convert them into the older Word 97/2000 format before working on them.

If your formatting is constantly having problems then I suggest you look into using styles to format your document. If you use a style sheet to define the look of your document it will convert more cleanly which means fewer problems with the formatting breaking on you.