Switzerland has very low murder rates, yet any adult citizen (with no prior convictions) can buy a gun - all you need to is fill out a form, wait a few days and you get your gun.

No full auto unless you get special permits and carrying them also requires a special permit (without permit, you need to carry them in a locked container).

Besides, one could easily secure this by using IPsec and machine certificates.

I'm not a Linux admin, but that's how i would do it on Windows.

OEM Windows WILL activate online, it doesn't always though. Sometimes you do have to ring up, usually if the number has been activated too many times but sometimes just straight off the bat.

No, they don't. They DID, several years ago, until Microsoft changed that.

SBE licenses, on the other hand, WILL activate online. Many people confuse these two, and call SBE licenses "OEM" licenses, since they're meant for small PC vendors.

You can't activate OEM licenses online - you have to do it by phone.

An explosive collar can easily be designed to just kill the wearer.

A VCPU will always max out at the speed of one real core.

SMP will only bring you so far - i'll bet 8 VCPU VMs on Atoms will be beat by a 2 VCPU VM on a Core 2 Duo.

There have been many cases of trojaned iWork/iLife packages on Piratebay.

Not a problem if you only install legitimate software, but the issue exists and it will only get worse as Apple gains more marketshare.

So Apple's internal communication policies suck. Not his fault.

There's a drawback to everything being hush-hush.

Didn't the guy who found it made a reasonable effort by calling up Apple, asking them if they want it back?

Apple's poor information policy, of course, prevented the guy or gal on the switchboard knowing what a prototype looked like, that one was lost and that someone tried to return a legit device - but that's purely Apple's fault.

Didn't the guy who originally found the prototype call up Apple, and they didn't want it back?

At least that's the story i've heard. Assuming this is true, i don't see an issue with him selling the device.

Ever heard of a little thing called AppArmor? [wikipedia.org] One simple tweak of a configuration and the web browser has no access to the local file system at all barring its own config files. You could also very easily run the browser as another user that has extremely limited privileges.

Curiously, that's exactly what IE 7/8's protected mode does on Vista/7. And that's enabled by default.

Is AppArmor, with those restrictions, enabled by default in a popular distribution of Linux? As far as i know, most ship with an AppArmor capable kernel and some profiles - but they're usually not enabled.

Google's problem right now is that they're not running a "corporate IT" - all their developers have a lot of freedom on how to run their desktop. While this is great for the individual developers, from a security standpoint, this will always be a nightmare.

While there might be some very security-conscious people like you working there, others may not be overly concerned with security.

So in your opinion, neither Chrome, Firefox nor Opera have any security issues that could give you at least local user privileges?

And with local user privileges, there's not much missing for to get local administrative access - there are several local root exploits on Linux every year. And even if not: All the important data is accessible without administrative privileges - in the users home directory.

Google was compromised by an IE6 security hole.

This hole only affected IE6 running on Windows XP. If they had been running IE7 or IE8, they would've been safe for the most part.

If they were running IE7/IE8 von Windows Vista, there wouldn't have been any issue, as this issue was never exploitable on Vista with protected mode enabled for IE.

(Windows 7, to be fair, wasn't out long enough to be broadly deployed).

In the end, it's Googles own fault. Poorly administrated OSX or Linux systems will get hijacked just the same.

Be aware that Small Businesses can purchase SBS, which is very, very cheap (1000 bucks for the server software including 5 CALs for everything, 800 bucks per additional 5 users).

Schools have special purchase programs - they usually pay 5-10% of the list price, sometimes even less.

In both cases, the licensing cost pales to the hardware infrastructure, internal IT people and/or external consultants.

No, Microsoft's software is not expensive. Even Office is cheap at 300$ for the Home and Business version, per PC.

Let me guess, you're still running Exchange 2003 - a 7 year old software package.

Exchange 2007/2010 have a decent SMTP engine.