It's a good thing our forebears didn't know it was impossible, or they'd have all starved to death.

Or is this some new use of the word impossible that I'm not familiar with?

You're perfectly free to select what you ingest. You can grow your own Bt-free corn, feed it to your own rBGH-free cow, eat it on the 4th of July, and I'll applaud you for it. You can even be a vegan and just live off the veggies you grow yourself.

But maybe you live in the city, and can't raise your own food. No problem. Farmers are growing it today and labeling it Organic. There's a documentation regimen they go through to ensure you're not getting "non-natural" food. As a part of this they have to mechanically remove weeds, and apply manure instead of spraying fertilizers. Since it costs a lot more money to operate a certified organic farm, it's going to cost you more in the grocery store.

So why isn't that good enough? You can buy exactly what you're asking for today. You may pay a premium, but that's the price for being selective. That's capitalism in action right there.

We seem to have no problem finding an endless supply of Windows "admins" with zero experience. I don't know why you think that's such a big deal.

Plus with all the mobile devices I would imagine that internet bandwidth has grown to accompany this. But how many people download a torrent on their mobile phone?

1) Trying to run away from good security practice by going to something you perceive to be less targeted or better able to save you from yourself isn't a good idea. Hate to break it to you but really Windows itself is pretty good security wise these days. If you are having trouble the question to be asking yourself is what is wrong with the way things are set up. To me it is like having your house robbed and moving to a new neighbourhood, rather than locking your door at night. We run a mixed environment at work, and we don't have many Windows security issues, despite it being our big OS. Reason is we have a good security setup that provides defense in depth. We have real proactive security, not ostrich security.

2) Because often the products businesses need aren't available for Linux. People will point to half-assed alternatives because said half-assed alternatives are the best they can find. "Just write your own," is completely unfeasible to many companies, and uneconomical to others. If you'd save $X in terms of security issues and licensing but spend $X*10 to develop and support your software that does what you need, it isn't a good move.

3) Because Linux doesn't always, maybe even not usually, have a lower TCO. In our environment it requires a hell of a lot more fiddling than Windows to make it work. Our Linux lead spends a lot of time hacking around with things to make them work right, and dealing with customized setups (which we do a lot of being a research university) is a pain. I spend way less time fiddling to make Windows work, and not because I'm smarter to better than him. He's damn good. It just seems to be more trouble to get Linux to do what we need, the enterprise support tools aren't as robust.

Remember that security is only one facet of cost, and also remember Linux doesn't provide perfect security. You can argue if it is better or not, though many of the better arguments are just arguments of less targeting. Things like malware that the user has to download and run, an OS can provide no defense against that short of trusted computing or the like.

So you have to look at what it would cost and save in total.

Also as I said, really security talk needs to be about defense in depth and how to prevent problems, not about trying to run away from them. Security failures WILL happen, anyone who's done physical security know there's no such thing as a perfect defense, everything is fallible, and you have to have layers and you have to monitor and adapt to maintain good security.

I would rank a place high security that runs Windows but does things like: Have regular users run deprivileged and not hand out admin accounts. Have a good, but sensible password policy and use two factor authentication. Have all systems patched regularly and quickly and monitored. Run a host based firewall on all systems. Run an on access and on download virus scanner on all systems, centrally monitored. Run a network based firewall and IDS, maybe even more than one. Segments servers from workstations and only allows the access needed. Proactively monitors for problems. And so on.

I would rank a place low security if they just run Linux, give local users sudo, and say "Have fun, Linux is safe!"

Linux could potentially help with security, that would need to be evaluated by someone competent case-by-case. Linux does not give good security, it is layers and a process, not a magic bullet.

I've seen that talk, I'm a big Rosling fan. I share much of his vision of the future and a big part of that is a level population. Well to have that we need one of three things:

1) A situation where everyone pairs off, has precisely two children, and more are only had in exceptional cases to replenish people who are dying out too fast for various reasons.

2) A draconian government system where total number of births are monitored and each family is told how many children they must have and aren't allowed to have any more.

3) A society where it is acceptable to have as many or as few children as you like, and those that choose not to have them offset those that wish to have more. Where having or not having children doesn't make you good or bad or productive or not, it i just a simple choice you make.

We are heading towards #3 in most countries and I think that's great. People just seem to be able to self-moderate. The majority of people will get married and have a few kids, 1-3 probably. A minority will have more, a minority will have none. It all ends up being roughly in balance (this is not a situation that requires precision balance).

However then we have people who want to try and roll that back, who want to make men out to be useless, selfish, perpetual children, etc if they don't choose to be fathers. They want them to be looked on as societal outcasts, deviants, so that nobody will choose that life.

Well if we do that, it will probably lead to population growth unless we are willing to get draconian. If having kids is what is socially required of everyone, and we don't control the people who want to have more, then we'll have growth.

I want to see a future with a stable population, where everyone has at least the necessities of a good life and preferably a good deal more than that, and I want to see it happen in a way that preserves individual freedom of choice.

Yeah I think even the ancient Greeks made that argument at one point. It's called growing up, when you get to the point when you shake your head at all "those darned kids and the stuff they get up to nowadays". Mr. Psychologist should just look in the mirror and accept the fact that he has reached middle age instead of acting all paranoid and thinking there is something sinister happening.

The children's needs should be second. That way they learn patience, discipline, and that the whole universe does not exist to please them. Parents who are run by their children and do otherwise usually end up with spoiled brats.

For whatever reason, a lot of society still sees men as needing to be as they were back in the old days. They want equality in terms of men and women in the workplace, law, and all that but not relationships. Men are still seen as needing to be providers to fulfill their societal contract, though women no longer need to be mothers.

You can see it in courtship too. It is still exceedingly rare to find women who will pursue men. It is expected that men should go after women. They should court them, ask them out, initiate the relationship. This comes from back when women were property, as it was very literally a case of a man courting a woman, or more properly her family, and then purchasing her as a wife (with a dowry).

While that's all thankfully long gone (in our culture at least) the remnants remain. Men are expected to do the asking, to take the emotional risk and women, being their own person now, have the option of accepting or rejecting. The situation is not often reversed. If it is, then the woman is seen as self confident, empowered and it is a good thing. However if she doesn't want to do that, just wants to be passive and wait for a man to make the move, that's ok.

However a man who wants a women to initiate? Well there's something wrong with him! HE clearly isn't properly socialized, he's a loner, etc for not wanting to put his emotions on the line and risk rejection.

It is changing, in my purely unscientific observation, but it is slow as many societal changes are, and we have retards like this fighting against the change, telling everyone "You should act like you did in the past! That is the only way you are acting right!"

It's a common reaction to people hurt by addicts. They hate and banish the thing related to the addiction. There's two reasons, one somewhat logical, one not:

1) They've seen the harm that addiction can cause to the addict and to those they care about and don't want to see it happen again. Even if they know said thing isn't very addictive or not addictive to most people, they don't want to risk it. Makes some sense.

2) They need something to blame for the problems, and the thing is it. They figure if that thing had just not been around, none of this would have happened, and so on. They have an emotional response and it leads them to banishing that thing from their lives.

These are things groups like al-anon can help with (that is the group for people hurt by addiction, not the same as AA).