Would not need to be in the middle of the beam. Could even be quite a distance away with a nice antenna setup.

You've got this completely backwards. When using an encrypted protocol, such as SFTP, then a MITM attack may be necessary to see the unencrypted data. In that case, then it would be easiest if they were on the same physical network segment. (Although, careful not to get a false sense of security here. There are many ways to do this, even without physical access.) Fortunately, there are things we can do to detect and protect against those.

With unencrypted protocols like FTP, there's no reason for a MITM attack or any kind of attack at all. You've just potentially saved a future attacker or curious troublemaker a ton of work. You have literally sent your full login information on many separate networks, each of which have many devices connected to them. If anyone is monitoring traffic on any of those networks, your password could just sit in a dump file (along with your login name, your server's IP address and the port your FTP service is running on) until sometime down the road when someone stumbles upon it or scans for it. Unlike a MITM attack, nobody has to even be trying to attack you. There's no practical way to ensure that there isn't a single insufficiently-secured device on any of the autonomous networks that your info traveled across.

If you're using an encrypted protocol, someone usually has to take the time to attack you. If you're using an unecrypted protocol, you're just gambling on whether or not anyone who stumbles upon your login info will find any value in it.

I seriously think that the internet may have had a positive effect on Microsoft.

Many people have purchased computers primarily for accessing the internet, and the majority of those purchases benefited Microsoft through license fees (even if only those paid by an OEM) and by further increasing their market share.

Windows was built on top of DOS, and you had to have it installed to even run Windows 2.0 or 3.1.

Windows was around before Linux was ever written.

UNIX was not available to everyone, and the only computers that it was made to run on were far too expensive for someone to have one of their own at home for personal use.

You really should read up a little on the history of the personal computers. Judging from your comments, you'll be surprised by some of the things you learn.

Since we're using condom analogies for web browser security practices, which would you prefer?

A condom brand that has a long reputation of producing faulty condoms with holes in them, as well as a reputation for ignoring these problems and waiting a considerable amount of time before they work to correct them.

A condom brand that has a reputation for improving their manufacturing process to correct any potential problems as they're discovered.

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