Anyone who tells you to follow all those rules simultaneously is not a security expert.

Expertise means not being ignorant of hugely important aspects of a field, such as cost-benefit analysis, or how users behave.

I'd start straight away with those criminals the justice system never touches; those who do things like ordering invasions of other countries.

I mean leading a clean life is always best and that counts the legal ones. You are better off not to smoke tobacco, or marijuana or anything. However there's a big difference between those and things like meth and heroin.

Actually, tobacco is far more dangerous than heroin would be if it were legal. Before prohibition, addiction to heroin wasn't much more than a nuisance, while tobacco was merrily killing people just like it does today. The big dangers of heroin are all caused by prohibition - unreliable dosages causing accidental overdoses, insane black-market prices causing crime and needle-use (so as to get the desired effect with as small an amount as possible), and cutting with toxic substances doing all sorts of things. The worst side-effect of addiction, if it were accepted the way the drugs everyone uses are accepted, would be constipation.

Crystal meth is the only significant drug which clearly beats alcohol and tobacco for dangers inherent to the drug itself, rather than the dangers you'll incur due to the bigots who'll hate and fear you for making choices which aren't sufficiently normal.

In a given year, I might read thousands of news articles, hundreds of Wikipedia articles about various things and hundreds more from diverse websites, spend hundreds of hours reading forum and blog posts, hundreds of hours watching subtitled anime, hundreds more hours reading documentation and technical specifications, perhaps over a thousand hours reading code, (not to mention writing a load of this stuff too), and let's not forget reading Slashdot. And possibly read no books.

I don't think it makes me that illiterate.

Free speech is supposed to give all citizens equal rights to speak, not to help those with money to shout down those without.

They're not a single cohesive group. Some do stand up for their customers, and oppose things like the Digital Economy Act, some just want to sell them out. It's not surprising to find one owned by Rupert Murdoch being of the latter persuasion.

If we let Blu-Ray die... we let mediocre, sub par quality win.

Sounds good to me. I've never quite worked out what all those extra pixels are for, I can make everything out perfectly well without them. They just mean larger, more unwieldy files and Recorded Media that's far more Defective.

Of course, the real issue there is the criminal world's monopoly on the supply of non-mainstream drugs.

Of all the drugs to describe the consumption of as punished harshly, you've chosen one of the few legal ones?

I can't imagine what you'd think about the punishment of people who take safer, but harshly discriminated against drugs like psychedelics, cannabis or MDMA.

I'm glad I don't have a car. Driving must be the worst normal way of getting somewhere; you can't think about anything else due to the concentration requirements, and you don't get any free exercise.

The potential evil is one of deceit, it's in colluding with someone who claims to be 'selling' an application, which in reality is programmed to disobey the person deceived into thinking they own it if it can't find this DRM server.

Using DRM, by itself, is not an issue. It's this refusal to be clear that, by doing so, you've changed 'selling' into a strange form of rental (with incompletely specified conditions) which is the evil bit. If you participate in an activity which looks like selling, but doesn't actually give the 'buyer' the freedoms they get when they buy a useful object normally, that looks like complicity in fraud to me.

Lots of others may be doing it, but in morality this is no excuse.

Mobile phone account -- Don't have an account that you 'pay' for as such. Haven't spent any money on my mobile phone for a couple of years now.

Health insurance -- Don't need this, I live in the civilised world.

Home phone account -- includes broadband -- Included in my rent. So can't separate this out into an 'item'.

Gym membership -- Don't need this, I'm good at walking.

Car insurance or transit pass -- Don't need this, I'm good at walking.

Current account with non-pharma drug provider -- Well, I have a current account with a bank. It doesn't cost me anything.

Birth control pill prescription -- Even if I was the right gender, I think you could get that on the NHS.

NPR membership -- wat?

What about the people producing child pornography? I absolutely agree that simple possession of an image should carry no legal penalty, but I also think there should be a punishment for causing a person to engage in something potentially psychologically damaging before that person has reached the age to make an informed decision about whether to do so.

Well, most frequently nowadays, the person producing it is the 'victim' themselves...

Just have a generalised law against sexual activity with children who are very significantly younger than the offender, which covers both 'sex' and 'making porn'. That'll cover any age-related abuse without even involving collections of pixels.

Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then? If you're using some 10 years old version of your Linux OS and it doesn't support some feature that the newer OS/kernel versions have, you're not going to be able to install programs that require said feature.

1) Upgrading free software tends to cost less.

2) If we don't like some aspect of the latest version of free software, such as having DRM built into its foundations, we can fork it.

Use /dev/urandom. There is virtually no reason to use /dev/random as a source of randomness instead of /dev/urandom. The only difference is that /dev/random blocks if it doesn't like the amount of entropy it's got. While this is highly annoying, there are almost no scenarios in which it is a genuinely useful security precaution. Only use /dev/random if you have a thorough security analysis telling you exactly why /dev/urandom is dangerous but /dev/random is safe for what you're doing. Don't use /dev/random out of some vague idea that it's 'more secure', this is very rarely the case.