In places where photo enforcement is used, the laws are generally adjusted to implicate the person who registers the vehicle, and the license plate does tie directly to the vehicle registration. Your crime is not "running a red light", it is "allowing your vehicle to be used by some unknown person to run a red light". If your car was stolen, you can defend yourself using the police report to that effect. Otherwise you are SOL.

This is why rail works in the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NYC/Boston corridor. Regional rail is perfectly reasonable. I don't expect to see NY to LA anytime soon.

Aside from regional intercity rail, however, there still exists the problem of what to do once one gets there. I live in metro-NYC and frequently work in metro-DC, but I drive. I can get to Penn Station in NY very easily, and then get to Union Station in DC, but I can't get from Union Station to Northern Virginia beyond the beltway easily at all. Rail doesn't help me until I can get from Union Station to Herndon or Reston efficiently. In all these areas that developed after 1950 or so, the business destinations were spread out on the periphery - probably to avoid the taxes of the cities. It is really difficult to serve an area like Houston with subways/buses/light rail.

You are correct to a point. The Windows OS family has had a lot of attack vectors that don't require user intervention - worms and such - as well as many many vulnerabilities in tools like the default browser and email client. Mac and Linux systems have had far fewer of these vulnerabilities. A reasonably hardened XP system with the firewall turned on, various services turned off, and using Mozilla products instead of IE and Outlook Express is reasonably secure.