The average person isn't going to be setting up rsync and a cron job. I personally use duplicity to cloud storage for the most important stuff (measured in GB), and rsnapshot to normally-unmounted storage for the less-important stuff (measured in TB). It requires near-zero oversight, but it isn't the sort of thing that just anybody could/would set up. For family I'd probably recommend something like Carbonite - it isn't any better than what you and I are doing but it is at least targeted at the consumer.

Just letting viruses loose on your system is not wise. Besides the risk of data loss, you could have compromise of financial and other personal information. And, anybody can come along and write another cryptolocker/etc.

My point though was just running something like Linux out-of-the-box doesn't really solve your antivirus problems. I'd rather start from that than a retail Windows DVD, but we could do a lot better.

In my experience there are a bunch of skills needed to get the job, and individuals vary in how much of any of these skills they have. On average you find different skills in business analysts vs managers vs engineers. When you look at individuals I have no doubt you find people any any role who could do any other role, or people in a role who really aren't competent to do any of them.

The division of labor sometimes makes sense simply so that all the bases are covered and the job takes more than one person. Sometimes a lack of roles results in neglect, which hurts down the road.

I'm a business analyst by job title, but the last thing I'd want any software engineer to do is not talk to the customer. Likewise, I view engineers AS one of my customers, so I'm always interested in feedback about how my work is useful to them - I'm not big on producing deliverables for their own sake. I don't think I can do my job without being fairly knowledgeable about how the technology works, though I will confess that I don't have the standard class libraries of every language at a moment's grasp. I like to think that I add value.

But, I fully get what you're saying. The thing is, most people are average. I've had really good managers and I've had lousy ones. I have nothing but respect for the really good ones and I can appreciate the things that they do that make my life a lot easier, and I don't think I could fill their shoes. On the other hand, I have had poor ones that honestly I don't think I'd have trouble replacing. The same goes for "engineers" - I've had to deal with some where frankly I'd have been better off doing the work myself if I had the time to do it on top of the job I was supposed to be doing.

A really good team has a diversity of skills, they understand each other, and they work together so that they're producing far more than what you'd get if you took one member of the team and cloned them a half-dozen times. They know when to trust each other, and when to step in. And nobody really gets a pass on having at least a sense of how to do everybody else's job.

Who determines what positions are and aren't OK to take?

This is actually a good illustration of the fact that people making decisions for a corporation rarely put the shareholder's interests first.

If you're hiring and the interviewee looks like they are homeless, but for whatever reason they demonstrate that they are the most competent candidate for the job, then your choice is to either toss them for their appearance and hire a less competent candidate, or hire them. Now, if they absolutely reek of body odor perhaps you'll have to have them work from home or sequester them into an office with self-contained ventillation or else half the rest of the department will quit. All of those concerns are legitimate business concerns if your sole preoccupation is with making your shareholders as much money as possible.

However, a lot of other factors weigh into the decision like what people will think of you as a manager if you hire a "bum" and those tend to take priority over making your shareholders money.

This is just one example, and dress code isn't a particularly strong one. Managers don't make decisions to make companies money - they are motivated primarily by self-interest, and to some extent corporate policies help to align that self-interest with making the company money.

This is part of why start-ups tend to put little emphasis on things like dress code, tend to be much less rigid, etc. The owner knows everybody, and for a company where the decisions are made by the owner, self-interest and making money for the shareholders are almost perfectly aligned. Even if there is a layer of management or two involved, the shareholders aren't some disconnected and abstract force - they're people just down the hall who check in frequently and know everybody's name.

I once had to buy dry ice and bought it from a small business which clearly wasn't retail-oriented. I walked into the office door and asked if they would sell to private individuals. They responded that as long as the money was green that they would take it. I work for a company that employes 50k people. If somebody walked up to the security gate and offered $10M cash for 1 pound of dry ice (which could be obtained from a building 100 yards away easily) nobody would give them the time of day or have any idea how to make that work even if they were inclined to do so. Most likely they would be turned away, or if they had a desperate need they might just be given it free of charge. The idea of actually selling something for outrageous profit is so abstracted away there just isn't any process for doing it. The company certainly sells product, but completing a single sale probably involves 100 people doing 1/100th of the task each across two continents with ERP systems and financial systems and the works. If you walked into a software start-up and told them that you're desperately in need of a laptop so if they could just hand them one (wiped/new/etc) they'd pay $200k cash for it, they'd figure out how to make it work.

I'd considered this, but these days it isn't just juvenile prank software that ends up running. If you just accept viruses on your network you get issues like:
1. You're part of the spam problem. I prefer not to be a leach on society.
2. They're stealing your personal info, including stuff like banking credentials. I like having money, and would prefer to hang onto it.
3. Somebody could use your PC to attack something else, perhaps something important. I don't like guys kicking down my doors in the middle of the night.
4. Somebody could use your PC to host warez/music/etc. I don't like getting sued and having to prove my innocence, and heaven forbid any of my PCs actually contain warez/music/etc in the first place when this happens.

I could see regular wipes as an inconvenient ADDITIONAL layer of security on top of keeping garbage out. I just don't see it as a substitute.

That is his whole point though. The OS security isn't really adding any effective value. If you're going to not run malware in the first place, then it doesn't matter if you're running everything as root. If you're going to have good backups, then losing all your files won't matter much.

The unix security model makes sense from the standpoint that when damage gets in it is contained to a single user account, and doesn't affect the other 500 users on the system. The problem is that this isn't how desktop systems actually work. When there is only a single user account on the system, limiting the damage to only that account means that you've basically lost the war entirely.

Something like SELinux takes the security model a step further by not treating all programs with the same uid equally. The problem is that it is painful enough to use that most distros don't bother with it.

And good backups aren't as easy as you suggest. Maybe if all you do is word processing you can either store your stuff in the cloud or use an online backup service and you'll be OK. Once your data volumes go up, doing good backups is both expensive and inconvenient. If you want only one copy of your data, then you double your storage costs right off the bat. If you want multiple copies going back in time, then your costs go up more. The average user considers a backup a USB hard drive they leave plugged in 24x7, and thus it is subject to loss just like the main system - it really only provides protection against drive failure, not malware. Some people leave the backup drive powered off except when doing backups, which reduces the risk of malware, but probably means their backup is old unless they are religious about doing backups.

Sure, you or I could jot down a robust backup procedure in 5 minutes. The problem is that this works much better for a datacenter where you pay 5 guys to man the floor 24x7 to monitor 500 computers than for a situation where you have one person who is responsible for one computer and they'd prefer not to have to think about it.

Seems to me that any ISP that redirects browser HTTP requests becomes liable to suit from the customers - for substantially more than $20.

Microsoft now likes to act like they are an open source company that believes in open standards.

But they DO. It's step one - embrace:

1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish
4) Profit.

Well, they cannot become martyrs by just dropping dead. At least they have to kill some unbelievers as well...

Actualy, they CAN become martyrs by dropping dead - after deliberately NOT leaving the area of a plague and thus avoiding the spreading it, at the cost of their own lives.

Martyrdom doen't just come from being killed in a religious war.

Another way to become a martyr, for instance, is to die in childbirth.

Yet another is to die while defending your home and/or family from robbers or other attackers (as my wife pointed out to a crook who was trying to extort "taxes" for a local gang.)

According to a report I saw (following a link from the Drudge Report yesterday):

1)The early symptoms of Ebola are very similar to those of Malaria, to the point that people with malaria are being thrown into the ebola quarantine camps. (Also: Many of the people who HAVE ebola, or their support network, may THINK thay have malaria.)
2) The camp ran out of gloves and other protective gear - leaving the staff and patients unable to clean up after and avoid contagin from the body fluid spillages of the actual ebola patients. Come in with SUSPECTED ebola and you soon have ebola for sure.

That, alone, would make it rational for someone not yet sick or mildly sick, incarcerated in the camp, to break out and hide out.

3) Stories are circulating in the area that ebola is a myth and the oppressive government factions/first worlders/take your pick of enemies are using this story, plus the odd malaria case here and there, to create death camps and commit genocide in a way that gives them plausible deniability.

That idea, of course, can lead to mass action by some of the local population to "rescue" their fellows and sabotage the camps.

The whole think is a real-world example of the cautionary tale "The Boy who Cried 'Wolf'". When the officials lie to the people for their own benefit, repeatedly, until the people come to expect it, the people won't believe them when they are telling the truth about a real threat - and all suffer.

Ebola is one mutation away from being airborne transmissable. It already happened with Ebola Reston -- fortunately for us all, that turned out to be transmissable to monkeys but not humans.

I've heard reports that it may have happened with this one, too.

It doesn't have to be as GOOD at doing airborne transmission as, say, the common cold, to be a BIG problem.

Yeah, I can't complain about the EOD bots. Actually, I'd think those would also be ideal for some kinds of wacko-with-a-gun situations. If the wacko is alone you can send in the robot to talk to him, and the guy could surrender the gun to the robot. That lets you disarm the wacko while reducing the risk of a situation where a cop would have to shoot the wacko in self-defense. Sure, it won't be able to subdue him on its own, but that isn't the point - you want to talk to them, calm them down, and get them to put the gun on the floor and walk away from it. This lets you do it without putting a person in harms way, which means you can be more patient and not fire as soon as the guy twitches.

Yup. We really need to crack down. If we keep up this laxity before we know it people will feel like it is OK to change religions, marry somebody of a different religion, or teach a girl how to read.

Like file downloads vs. interactive sessions, some power loads just need a long-term average and can be adjusted in time, without noticable impact, to shave peaks and get a closer match to generation - even if some of the generation, itself, is uncontrollably varying.

In fact, this is already being done. A prime example is in California, where a large part of the load is pumping of irrigation and drinking water. California utilities get away with far less "peaking generation" than they'd otherwise need by pumping the water mostly at off-peak hours. Cost: Bigger pumps, waterways (and in some cases "forebay" buffer reservoirs, below the main reservoir) than would be needed if the water were pumped continuously. This is practical because it was cheaper to upsize the water system than build and run the extra peaking plants. (Also: The forebay-to-reservoir pump generates when water is drawn down. It can also be run as a peaking generator, moving reserevoir water down to the forebay during peak load hours.) Similar things can be (and are being) done with industrial processes - such as aluminum smelters.

But there's a limit to load flexibility. Sure you can delay starting your refrigerator, freezer, and air conditioning for a few minutes (or start a little early, opportunistically), to twiddle the load. But you can't use such tweaks to adjust for an hours-long mismatch, such as the evening peak, or an incoming warm front leading to calm air and overcast skies on a chunk-of-the-continent basis. Try it, and your food spoils and your air conditioner (or heat-pump heating system) might as well be broken, or too small for your living area. Sure you can tweak factory load some. But do it too much and you reduce the production of billion-dollar factory complexes and workers who are still getting paid full rate.

Renewable energy actually helps - because its large-scale variations are driven by some of the same phenomena that affect heating and air conditioning loads. More wind means more heating and air conditioning load due to more heat transfer through building insulation. More sun means more air conditioning. Solar peaks in the day and wind in the evening (due to winds driven by the "lake effect" on a subcontinental scale), so a mix of them is a good match for the daily peak. But it's nowhere near "tweak to match generation and load without waste".

Special driving license, maybe...

If we were talking about busses I'd definitely buy in. They're larger than normal cars, and there are issues with evacuation, and situations that just don't come up with cars.

However, driving a taxi safely is no harder than driving a car safely. Maybe just a special endorsement after taking a quiz would make sense. If somebody can't drive a few passengers safely, they can't drive a family safely, or even themselves safely without putting others at risk.