... doesn't mean they need to deal exclusively with binaries.

TFA alludes to this issue with the "gallery of misidentifications", but doesn't get as far as asking surely the most important question: what exactly does this software claim to determine? It's clearly not "biological sex", because you can't determine that from a photo (even a full-body naked photo) -- what about the 1% of people who are born intersex? And it's definitely, definitely not gender, which you could only ascertain by asking that individual.

Whilst one potential application mentioned (analysing crowds for marketing purposes) seems vaguely sensible, any system using photos to try and identify an individual's gender is reactionary, oppressive and doomed to failure.

If you're logging in locally, there's nothing to stop you using PolicyKit to grant physical, local users all root permissions whilst leaving everything else intact.

I'm slightly confused though, are you saying that you find Linux security prompts more annoying because there are more of them?

And as a data-point, I've run Linux for a few years and I still think UAC is annoying and mis-conceived. It locks up the whole desktop because it's woefully slow, and without asking for a password there's no real security added. If you implicitly trust local users (as Vista does; witness not needing a password for UAC), then why not let them do anything anyway?

It's not Linux's fault you're using a sub-standard IM client, or indeed can't configure your own computer.

Pidgin (and just about every other GNOME IM) encrypts using the default seesion keyring, and it is perfectly possible for sudo (or gksudo, or whatever) to have a magical thing called a 'time-out' so you don't have to enter your password all the time.

If you configure your system to have masochistic and paranoid security, don't be surprised when it... err... does!