http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pub/gd/

If this is to be believed (I haven't tried verifying it myself), then they've committed the most ancient web browser vulnerability I know of (accepting a URL into a fixed size buffer).

well, more accurately they would need to compromise the node immediately adjacent to you and a node near the sender for the attack you're describing (even if they're using multiple encryptions for the transfer like onion routing (which i don't know) you could still have a reasonable guess based on amounts of traffic, despite not having compromised some of the intervening nodes)

Personally, I didn't switch over to Linux until I had a computer that was purely Linux. I had a dual boot machine for a while, but simply never ended up using the Linux partition, except the first time it was installed. Rather than the dual boot helping me learn, it just sat there. The better learning experience was probably doing things for school on the command line over ssh (via putty).

I eventually simply had to make the plunge, and have been very happy with Linux since.

I don't know; when I was in high school, the major reasons I would do what my parents said were, rather than respect, a combination of irrational fear and rational desire to continue to be fed. (but my case was quite atypical)