This doesn't change the fact that WAY more people complain about ubuntu f$cking their machine than everyone else combined.

The question is, is it "WAY more people" proportional to how many people actually use the different distros? Proportions are everything. Bonds, McGwire (and a few others) may have a higher single-season home run record than Babe Ruth, but Ruth hit more home runs that season than the average team did that same season. Proportionally, Bonds and McGwire are pushovers.

The GNOME encryption utility has this integrated. I established a key for connecting to my server at work in seconds with a few clicks and my remote password.

So Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.. Linux distributions have this solved.

Thank you for providing this analysis for people to read.

It's the same reason that water droplets form spheres... it minimizes the surface-area/volume ratio.

And for combat and presenting a low target profile, that's the ratio to minimize.

On the other hand, if radiation emissions energy is dependent only on volume, minimizing the SA/V ratio also makes you quite a hot (if small) radiator.

It can't be done without generating a lot of unnecessary bandwidth, though, and harshing major on dialup users (who are already getting their asses kicked hard enough.)

On the other hand, it also makes the malicious site owner have to pay more for bandwidth, and that bandwidth is wasted cash since it isn't giving them any effective data.

A guy that I knew had an interesting variation on this:

If he ever got a telemarketing call (this was pre-do-not-call-list) he would inform them that he'd be happy to discuss whatever products and services that they wanted to tell him about, but he would assess them a $1,000 consulting fee for his time. In addition, for each instance that they contacted him in the future, the $1,000 fee would apply immediately since, having been informed about the contract, their call obviously indicated that they wished to pay him the money for the consult.

He then let them know that he was recording the conversation (which was true), and asked if they agreed to the terms.

He told me that their responses were varied, and hilarious.

The LTS versions are every two years. (every 4th of the 6 month releases)