Your friend is lying in order to cover up his shameful addiction. It's all about levelling. After that it's all about hanging around the bank on a unicorn, or was that UO?

Yes, the company offering free service if you pay a one-time fee for the hookup (a fairly reasonable one, at that) is totally making the digital divide worse. Clearly.

The pricing of their gigabit offering is fantastic. And while that price is undoubtedly out of the reach of poor people, so is almost everything. If it's really that important to have gigabit internet for the nation's poor, then that's something the government (as well as charitable organizations) needs to subsidize, just like with anything else that is deemed necessary (but too expensive for the poverty-stricken to afford). In no way can Google be reasonably found to be at fault here.

Oh, I don't blame the users, despite how it might sound. But that doesn't mean I enjoy the support nightmare that BYOD entails (unless management is going to say "you bring it, you support it", which isn't likely at most companies).

Yeah, sometimes I forget my password too.

The utopian future, where users won't be crying "fix my random device you have never seen one of before, I need it to work" to IT?

You either didn't read or didn't read closely enough. TFS clearly states that the author is a fan of Schneier, and that this is a hypothetical exercise.

That's definitely not true. While I can't definitively state that the function hasn't changed, I can get different results by typing a phrase, and then typing the phrase with quotes. Ergo, quotes are not ignored.

In the sense that there is a non-zero risk? Sure. But that goes for any system which you patch. In the sense that there is a significant risk? Absolutely not. I have installed more patches on more machines than I can count, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have ever had a problem. The only times I have had problems was on occasion with my test group of PCs at work and well... that's what test groups are for. On my personal machine, I have never had problems ever, even though I have nothing to test the updates on first. It is not at all difficult to avoid problems patching. You have a test group or (if that is not an option) wait a week or two for others to have issues and for Microsoft to resolve them. Either way, you avoid any significant risk to your own machine(s).

Or... test your patches before installing them. If you're installing just on one machine, do like the OP said and wait a few weeks or so before installing (to let others find the bugs). It really isn't that difficult to avoid having headaches with Windows patches.

Let's address those point-by-point.

• Free: fair enough.
• Fast: Windows is plenty fast enough, and has been for quite some time.
• Open: who cares? Being open source doesn't matter for the vast majority of people, even power users.
• Reliable: Windows is also plenty reliable enough. We aren't on Win95 any more.
• Not back-doored by the NSA: for all 99% of people know, Linux is back-doored by the NSA to high heaven. The ability to inspect the source code means nothing when you aren't qualified, nor in possession of a trusted contact who is qualified, to find vulnerabilities in the source code. Linux's lack of back doors is taken by most people on faith... the same as Windows.

So out of your list, the only valid point is "free". And perhaps applications, depending on if you need to use an app which is Linux-specific. But otherwise it's not a compelling argument you just made. And hey, if you have no need of applications which run on Windows and want to take advantage of the Linux price point (or just prefer the OS), God bless you. But Linux advocates also need to cut it out with this superiority complex nonsense. Linux and Windows are both perfectly serviceable operating systems which may or may not be superior depending on your needs. Saying one is inherently better than the other is asinine.

It'll probably still be cheaper to hire a driver than buy one of these.

Also your driver won't blindly follow a GPS the wrong way down a one way street.

This is probably the best way to tackle it. Although frankly, the real answer is that your personal data almost certainly isn't important enough to bother encrypting it. But if you must be paranoid, then let them choose the best method, because I guarantee you that if you start asking them for a public key their eyes are going to glaze over.

Out of curiosity, where did you go? Lord knows I hate the crap that the government here is doing, but it seems like other countries are also keen to trample freedom, just like we are. I'd love to be wrong though.

There is no realistic chance of this working. That is not the same as no chance whatsoever. It may be about the same as the odds of winning the lottery, but it's still non-zero.

In the cases you mentioned, the alternatives are not "do something that probably won't help" and "do nothing at all", they are "do something that probably won't help" and "do something which helps in a small way". Not the same thing at all. If someone was going to donate $5 to an advocacy group, then I can respect saying that this hurts the cause for the case of that person. But if someone was going to do nothing at all, this is still an improvement, however small.

Even doing something which doesn't have much of a chance to help is better than doing nothing at all. A .0000001% chance is better than a 0% chance any day of the week.