The funny thing is, if theirs was the only standard being considered, you wouldn't hear them looking for competition. They only want competition when they are on the outs. Which is fine, but lets call this what it is. M$ lost in an area, and they are trying to win it back.
There is a huge difference between two things being related, and causally related. Colds cause cancer? Maybe, but this article wasn't enough to convince me. More likely kids with weak immune systems are more succeptible to colds. And cancer. (Cancer is after all, just over-replicating cells that get away from your immune system's defense, of killing dangerous cells, and replicates ad infinitum).
Someday firms will start realizing that one pirated version of photoshop does not mean a loss of $700. Not everyone who pirates photoshop could (or would) pay for it.
Where is piracy most rampant? Among the young and 3rd world countries (see China for an example). Can the Chinese afford 5600+ yuan ($700) for Photoshop when the AVERAGE (not median) working person makes 3400 yuan (about $450) a month? Same goes for any PFY making $7/hour at McDonalds.
The truth is that most software companies (except gaming ones) benefit from piracy in this manner. PFY pirates photoshop. PFY learns photoshop. PFY gets job that involves photoshop. Company must pay for photoshop. Without the initial pirating, Adobe would have sold one less license.
The exact same goes for any other program (short of games). Software companies benefit from piracy (even M$, you think they would have that monopoly without a few free copies?). They have to fight it so as not to lose their copyright (an undefended copyright is as good as no copyright), but I don't think they care as much as, say the *AA.
Great point. Mod parent insightful. The one concern I have is this: are pirates the ones who have the ability to contribute to GIMP? If I would have pirated photoshop but can't and use GIMP, does that mean I could really help develop it? Maybe maybe not.
there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?
No. Has there been a shakedown of IM clients? No the only thing that seems to be a long time coming is a voip gaim equivalent. A cross-platform cross-protocol client. When someone steps up with a voip client that can talk to yahoo and google talk and vonage and whatever else, then we'll have something newsworthy.
I think a lot of users out there WANT to know computers, but are afraid of them. They seem them as mysterious, confusing, magical boxes; when they are actually logical and predictive. Whenever I teach someone about startup (msconfig) or services (services.msc) or limited accounts (using the 'run as' command when necessary) they are always grateful and receptive.
Confidence around computers probably helps. My grandmother was afraid to take a floppy out of the floppy drive for fear of 'messing the computer up.' So her box wouldn't boot. I've known many users afraid to delete a temporary file because they don't know if they need it. Computers are smart and there are ways to fix them if you'll just play around I tell them.
So I don't think educating the public is an impossible task.
In other news: copyrights are out of control, Microsoft sucks, and all the other things that only slashdotters (and other tech-literate people) know. This might be news to my grandmother, but it isn't to me. If you read/. often, this shouldn't be news to you either.
The most important things for security are (in this order): Informed User, Automatic Updates (or frequent ones), Firefox (anything not IE or IE based), Anti-virus, Permissions (don't run with admin priviledges to surf the web!), and lastly anti-spyware.
I do low level computer support (hey I'm a college student, what do you expect?) and if everyone could turn on auto updates, use firefox and an AV program, and maybe even run as a limited account most of the time; my job would be so much easier.
But since no one does I have a slew of linux and windows liveCD's with all kinds of antivirus antispyware software to clean. Then a whole bunch of free antivirus, firewall, and firefox installers which I put on their computer (with their permission). While this scanning is going on I take the time to educate them somewhat, and peole have come back and thanked me.
AVG is good, but I vote clamwin. It seems every bit as effective as the others and it plays real nice with winpooch. Winpooch is a free antispyware detector that checks for hooking (the registry scanning isn't great, but if you have active spyware, winpooch will get it).
This is a bit off-topic but it is something that has bothered me for a long time. Slashdot readers are very smart, technically. Politically, they may or may not be, I"m no politician. But so far as economics go, I see few truly insightful comments. (Yes I know insulting slashdotters will get me modded into oblivion, but so it goes)
I have wondered, for a long time, about public views on economics. I wonder that they are so backwards, and I wonder why there are so backwards. It seems to me that, for the most part, people stay with what they know. I don't argue physics with the physicists, linguistics with the linguists, or philosophy with the philosophers. I expect that they know their respective subjects better than I, and if I want to disagree with them I had better educate myself first.
I hold an econ degree (big whoop right). Economics is predominantly a descriptive behavioral science. Finance is all about money, economics is all about human behavior. Since the study of how we spend money seems to be the most lucrative and demanded work of economists, it is what others see the most.
Back to my original point. Why does everyone seem to have an opinion on economics? One answer is: because it affects us all, we all ought to be involved. My counter argument is as follows. Everything that we study matters, if it didn't matter no one would study it. Anyone who thinks that literary theory doesn't matter shouldn't care if deconstruction is taught as the primary means of interpreting literature in elementary school. If all study affects everyone (or at least those purporting some economic knowledge), why don't they have as vociferous opinions on everything else?
I really don't know a good answer to this. Perhaps people perceive economics as a 'soft' science (which it may be), and as such my opinion is as good as the opinion of anyone else. That is baloney, take any econ class and suggest a poorly-thought-out theory. The professor will tell you exactly why your theory isn't the case. If you insist it is a matter of preference, he/she may take the time to construct a graph, a mathematical model, or do some econometrics to show that your theory is demonstrably untrue. However demonstrably false opinions are rampant in the public view of econ, and though they can be (and often are) refuted this doesn't seem to slow their propagation.
Go ahead and read about anything a US politician says about the economy, outsourcing and whatnot. It is almost always laughable.
I know it is cool to hate big corporations but they are largely responsible for the nice standard of living that both of us have. It is this high standard of living that lets us have computers (which are made by large corporations, small parts and whole) to spend our time debating such topics rather than working in a field for food to survive.
Economics suggests that "public goods" (ie telecoms) meaning they SHOULD be regulated because the costs of putting up duplicate power cables is enough to grant a "natural monopoly" to the imcumbent. This incumbent can pillage all of its customers for the maximum pillaging the customers will stand. This is bad for customers, thus regulation.
Barring a natural monopoly (where costs of infrastructure or development are so high, once someone gets there it deters all other entry) and an industry with significant externalities (positive or negative); the government is almost always a harmful force in the market. Consumers are better at picking for themselves what they want and how much they are willing to pay for it, than the government is. Soviet Russia showed us this with resounding clarity.
Markets are supposed regulated when it will help the consumer. That is the goal. This entire article is basically affirming economists long standing position on natural monopolies. Regulating them is good. Regulating any industry that we think is up to no good, is very bad and sounds a lot like a witch hunt (we don't like you/trust you so we are going to go after you).
You are right, no regulation is certainly bad in the case of natural monopolies (such as telecoms) or significant externalities (say pollution) and the government should step in.
However you make a leap of logic that doesn't follow. A strong government does not need to be inefficient. There is nothing that inextricably links the two. You want and example? United Arab Emirates, they have a strong government that isn't wasteful. They've had peace almost as long as they've existed and are quite modern.
I think you are a bit mixed up. All the examples you cite are called "public goods" meaning they SHOULD be regulated because the costs of putting up duplicate power cables is enough to grant a "natural monopoly" to the imcumbent. This incumbent can rape all of its customers for the maximum allowable. This is bad, thus regulation.
Barring a natural monopoly (where costs of infrastructure or development are so high, once someone gets there it deters all other entry) and an industry with significant externalities (positive or negative); the government is almost always a harmful force in the market. Consumers are better at picking for themselves what they want and how much they are willing to pay for it, than the government is. Soviet Russia showed us this with resounding clarity.
Markets are supposed regulated when it will help the consumer. That is the goal. This entire article is basically affirming economists long standing position on natural monopolies. Regulating them is good.
My former flatmate's grandfather had something like this to scare away stray cats and dogs. We could hear it just fine though, and it was mighty irritating. He'd forgot that he even had it until he saw us grimacing.
Though this one is clearly different (more powerful) than the one I ran into, I bet it'll still keep away any animals around. The strange thing was, after a few hours, you forgot it was there. You could hear it if you listened for it, but if you didn't think about it you didn't hear it at all.
What I'd like to do with it, is put it outside someone's house. The kids will go nuts, the parents will think they're making it up!
What I want to know is what happens if two different people are both in the room with RFID?
Could you hide an RFID tag in someones living room that always goes to porn? (or MTV, which judging by the current quality of music may be more embarassing to be caught watching)
How about hijacking preferences, so the Tivo thinks Susy's preference is always the nature channel?
And if we are all walking around with RFID tags embedded in us, who else could track/find us?
If you google around you'll find this thing really is freaking fast . This isn't just an ad, it is the fastest flash drive around. And you can get them for $25 + S/H . I've got one and I must say, they are solid (metal casing) and noticably faster than any other flash drive I've used.
This was one of my biggest gripes for a long time. It isn't completely fixed, but it is pretty darn good.
Though others may have mentioned NDISWrapper, which is a neat little hack which recreates the windows environment for the wireless card. So you can use Windows drivers with it. This is a little tricky to implement, unless you use a distro that does it automatically. I know Mepis and Ubuntu do it, and I've heard SuSE does too. Give one of those a shot. If you want to do it with a different distro check
this site
Otherwise wikipedia has a pretty good list of hardware that plays nice with linux.
I'm sorry but this is the type of idiocy that runs rampant (conservatives as well as librerals use it). If you don't get the result you want you claim the science is wrong. Economics is not a fundamentally flawed science. What you are calling economics is actually finance. This guy ran a financial analysis NOT an economic one.
With a proper and more full economic analysis you would include costs to the environment (say the cost of cleaning up extra pollution, or the opportunity costs of using the oil for gas, or economies of scale when more people purchase hybrids). Poor analysis isn't the fault of economics, it is the fault of the economist.
You are exactly right, as is parent. Insightful, both of you.
Alas for police, in America there is this thing called 'innocent until proven guilty' and habeus corpus. I think the same goes for Great Britain.
Everyone is always screaming about 'fair use' rights. They are being taken away, and we are right to kick, scream and shreik the whole way. However another branch of eroded rights are 'unregulated rights.' Fair use is a small area of rights that would otherwise be given to the copyright holder (like copying) but is given to the user under certain circumstances (like personal use).
In the same way our unregulated rights are being lost. Reselling is an unregulated right. The fact that software companies don't like it, or put in their EULA that resales are illegal, doesn't matter (if companies put in a eula a clause restricting your right to free speech it wouldn't be enforcable either). I have been looking for someone to fight this for a long time, I'm glad someone is finally making this an issue.
My favorite trick is this: When protecting continents with lots of borders (europe was best for this) I'd stack huge amounts of troops on the interior of the continent, on a country next to two or more border countries. That way I couldn't attack unless my opponent did first. And they knew opponent knew, if they attacked any border country, he'd unleash the caged beast. So he'd leave my borders alone.
This was efficient because I don't have to be stronger than him on every border country. I just have to be stronger in one country than he is any one place. Considering people love to beef up armies on borders, this was wonderfully successful. Now if only Risk used something that would enable a force of 20 to be 20 times as effective as a force of 1 (rather than only 3 times as effective).
This strategy gets less efficient later in the game when you have stranded troops, but owning europe or NA that early was priceless.
I know I'm going to get killed for this comment, but it has to be said. As a disclaimer I do love macs, I use them all the time at work.
Macs are easy, and currently not affected by much of what plagues windows. But I fear that Apple is growing a group of computer idiots for users. I don't mean you guys on slashdot. There are plenty of brilliant people who use macs because of the nice BSD underpinnings. I mean the users who can't handle Windows maintenance so I advise them to use a mac. So the people capable of maintaining up-to-date security patches and whatnot with Windows stay with Windows, those who can't do this switch to a mac. I know there are better/more common/other reasons to switch to a mac, but I suspect a lot of users are going for this reason alone. Because of this growing trend I think there is going to be some major problems in a few years for them (once their market share hits critical mass).
What happens when someone releases a worm like the sasser on a mac? Even some exploit for the mac version of IE like there is for windows. All these macs aren't running firewalls (I know they have almost no ports open by default, but M$ didn't think they'd have security problems prior to actually having them either), no one uses a virus scanner (truthfully they don't really do anything yet) and users don't understand permissions. Basically Apple (or people like myself encouraging others to switch to a mac) is encouraging bad behaviour.
See what I mean? Safety comes from good computing practices regardless of what OS you run. I run a firewall and virus scanner, and I am on an up-to-date Debian system.
I think the concern isn't with spyware that gets on because of a user. You are right, that isn't Microsofts's fault. They have a lot of idiot users who click "I Agree" and "OK" far too easily. In fact I think a lot of the fabled security reputation Linux enjoys is because of those who run Linux. We know good security proceedures. We don't run as root all the time, we use a firewall (hardware or software), we can change permissions and on and on. I think Linux will start seeming less secure if more idiot users switch to it.
But I have to disagree somewhat with your post. A lot of spyware gets on through security holes, not by users permission. My grandmother uses IE on XP, she never installs anything and we have the security settings on IE pretty high. Yet she still got infected with spyware in a major way. After clean up, she uses firefox and hasn't had a problem. She didn't get spyware because she allowed some shady activeX control to run (or installed something that was piggybacking spyware), but because IE is a security nightmare and lets through a lot of things that shouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing is, if theirs was the only standard being considered, you wouldn't hear them looking for competition. They only want competition when they are on the outs. Which is fine, but lets call this what it is. M$ lost in an area, and they are trying to win it back.
There is a huge difference between two things being related, and causally related. Colds cause cancer? Maybe, but this article wasn't enough to convince me. More likely kids with weak immune systems are more succeptible to colds. And cancer. (Cancer is after all, just over-replicating cells that get away from your immune system's defense, of killing dangerous cells, and replicates ad infinitum).
Someday firms will start realizing that one pirated version of photoshop does not mean a loss of $700. Not everyone who pirates photoshop could (or would) pay for it.
Where is piracy most rampant? Among the young and 3rd world countries (see China for an example). Can the Chinese afford 5600+ yuan ($700) for Photoshop when the AVERAGE (not median) working person makes 3400 yuan (about $450) a month? Same goes for any PFY making $7/hour at McDonalds.
The truth is that most software companies (except gaming ones) benefit from piracy in this manner. PFY pirates photoshop. PFY learns photoshop. PFY gets job that involves photoshop. Company must pay for photoshop. Without the initial pirating, Adobe would have sold one less license.
The exact same goes for any other program (short of games). Software companies benefit from piracy (even M$, you think they would have that monopoly without a few free copies?). They have to fight it so as not to lose their copyright (an undefended copyright is as good as no copyright), but I don't think they care as much as, say the *AA.
Great point. Mod parent insightful. The one concern I have is this: are pirates the ones who have the ability to contribute to GIMP? If I would have pirated photoshop but can't and use GIMP, does that mean I could really help develop it? Maybe maybe not.
there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?
No. Has there been a shakedown of IM clients? No the only thing that seems to be a long time coming is a voip gaim equivalent. A cross-platform cross-protocol client. When someone steps up with a voip client that can talk to yahoo and google talk and vonage and whatever else, then we'll have something newsworthy.
I think a lot of users out there WANT to know computers, but are afraid of them. They seem them as mysterious, confusing, magical boxes; when they are actually logical and predictive. Whenever I teach someone about startup (msconfig) or services (services.msc) or limited accounts (using the 'run as' command when necessary) they are always grateful and receptive.
Confidence around computers probably helps. My grandmother was afraid to take a floppy out of the floppy drive for fear of 'messing the computer up.' So her box wouldn't boot. I've known many users afraid to delete a temporary file because they don't know if they need it. Computers are smart and there are ways to fix them if you'll just play around I tell them.
So I don't think educating the public is an impossible task.
In other news: copyrights are out of control, Microsoft sucks, and all the other things that only slashdotters (and other tech-literate people) know. This might be news to my grandmother, but it isn't to me. If you read
The most important things for security are (in this order): Informed User, Automatic Updates (or frequent ones), Firefox (anything not IE or IE based), Anti-virus, Permissions (don't run with admin priviledges to surf the web!), and lastly anti-spyware.
I do low level computer support (hey I'm a college student, what do you expect?) and if everyone could turn on auto updates, use firefox and an AV program, and maybe even run as a limited account most of the time; my job would be so much easier.
But since no one does I have a slew of linux and windows liveCD's with all kinds of antivirus antispyware software to clean. Then a whole bunch of free antivirus, firewall, and firefox installers which I put on their computer (with their permission). While this scanning is going on I take the time to educate them somewhat, and peole have come back and thanked me.
AVG is good, but I vote clamwin. It seems every bit as effective as the others and it plays real nice with winpooch. Winpooch is a free antispyware detector that checks for hooking (the registry scanning isn't great, but if you have active spyware, winpooch will get it).
As a bonus both of them are open source.
This is a bit off-topic but it is something that has bothered me for a long time. Slashdot readers are very smart, technically. Politically, they may or may not be, I"m no politician. But so far as economics go, I see few truly insightful comments. (Yes I know insulting slashdotters will get me modded into oblivion, but so it goes)
I have wondered, for a long time, about public views on economics. I wonder that they are so backwards, and I wonder why there are so backwards. It seems to me that, for the most part, people stay with what they know. I don't argue physics with the physicists, linguistics with the linguists, or philosophy with the philosophers. I expect that they know their respective subjects better than I, and if I want to disagree with them I had better educate myself first.
I hold an econ degree (big whoop right). Economics is predominantly a descriptive behavioral science. Finance is all about money, economics is all about human behavior. Since the study of how we spend money seems to be the most lucrative and demanded work of economists, it is what others see the most.
Back to my original point. Why does everyone seem to have an opinion on economics? One answer is: because it affects us all, we all ought to be involved. My counter argument is as follows. Everything that we study matters, if it didn't matter no one would study it. Anyone who thinks that literary theory doesn't matter shouldn't care if deconstruction is taught as the primary means of interpreting literature in elementary school. If all study affects everyone (or at least those purporting some economic knowledge), why don't they have as vociferous opinions on everything else?
I really don't know a good answer to this. Perhaps people perceive economics as a 'soft' science (which it may be), and as such my opinion is as good as the opinion of anyone else. That is baloney, take any econ class and suggest a poorly-thought-out theory. The professor will tell you exactly why your theory isn't the case. If you insist it is a matter of preference, he/she may take the time to construct a graph, a mathematical model, or do some econometrics to show that your theory is demonstrably untrue. However demonstrably false opinions are rampant in the public view of econ, and though they can be (and often are) refuted this doesn't seem to slow their propagation.
Go ahead and read about anything a US politician says about the economy, outsourcing and whatnot. It is almost always laughable.
I know it is cool to hate big corporations but they are largely responsible for the nice standard of living that both of us have. It is this high standard of living that lets us have computers (which are made by large corporations, small parts and whole) to spend our time debating such topics rather than working in a field for food to survive.
Economics suggests that "public goods" (ie telecoms) meaning they SHOULD be regulated because the costs of putting up duplicate power cables is enough to grant a "natural monopoly" to the imcumbent. This incumbent can pillage all of its customers for the maximum pillaging the customers will stand. This is bad for customers, thus regulation.
Barring a natural monopoly (where costs of infrastructure or development are so high, once someone gets there it deters all other entry) and an industry with significant externalities (positive or negative); the government is almost always a harmful force in the market. Consumers are better at picking for themselves what they want and how much they are willing to pay for it, than the government is. Soviet Russia showed us this with resounding clarity.
Markets are supposed regulated when it will help the consumer. That is the goal. This entire article is basically affirming economists long standing position on natural monopolies. Regulating them is good. Regulating any industry that we think is up to no good, is very bad and sounds a lot like a witch hunt (we don't like you/trust you so we are going to go after you).
You are right, no regulation is certainly bad in the case of natural monopolies (such as telecoms) or significant externalities (say pollution) and the government should step in.
However you make a leap of logic that doesn't follow. A strong government does not need to be inefficient. There is nothing that inextricably links the two. You want and example? United Arab Emirates, they have a strong government that isn't wasteful. They've had peace almost as long as they've existed and are quite modern.
I think you are a bit mixed up. All the examples you cite are called "public goods" meaning they SHOULD be regulated because the costs of putting up duplicate power cables is enough to grant a "natural monopoly" to the imcumbent. This incumbent can rape all of its customers for the maximum allowable. This is bad, thus regulation.
Barring a natural monopoly (where costs of infrastructure or development are so high, once someone gets there it deters all other entry) and an industry with significant externalities (positive or negative); the government is almost always a harmful force in the market. Consumers are better at picking for themselves what they want and how much they are willing to pay for it, than the government is. Soviet Russia showed us this with resounding clarity.
Markets are supposed regulated when it will help the consumer. That is the goal. This entire article is basically affirming economists long standing position on natural monopolies. Regulating them is good.
Peter Wright, the Editor - Mail on Sunday took first place.
Marina Hyde the former "Gaurdian" diarist to second honors.
The results are here.
The results are here .
All the device will do is make sure teens spend a shorter amount of time by the store. How long does it take to vandalize a store again?
My former flatmate's grandfather had something like this to scare away stray cats and dogs. We could hear it just fine though, and it was mighty irritating. He'd forgot that he even had it until he saw us grimacing.
Though this one is clearly different (more powerful) than the one I ran into, I bet it'll still keep away any animals around. The strange thing was, after a few hours, you forgot it was there. You could hear it if you listened for it, but if you didn't think about it you didn't hear it at all.
What I'd like to do with it, is put it outside someone's house. The kids will go nuts, the parents will think they're making it up!
What I want to know is what happens if two different people are both in the room with RFID?
Could you hide an RFID tag in someones living room that always goes to porn? (or MTV, which judging by the current quality of music may be more embarassing to be caught watching)
How about hijacking preferences, so the Tivo thinks Susy's preference is always the nature channel?
And if we are all walking around with RFID tags embedded in us, who else could track/find us?
If you google around you'll find this thing really is freaking fast . This isn't just an ad, it is the fastest flash drive around. And you can get them for $25 + S/H . I've got one and I must say, they are solid (metal casing) and noticably faster than any other flash drive I've used.
This was one of my biggest gripes for a long time. It isn't completely fixed, but it is pretty darn good.
Though others may have mentioned NDISWrapper, which is a neat little hack which recreates the windows environment for the wireless card. So you can use Windows drivers with it. This is a little tricky to implement, unless you use a distro that does it automatically. I know Mepis and Ubuntu do it, and I've heard SuSE does too. Give one of those a shot. If you want to do it with a different distro check this site
Otherwise wikipedia has a pretty good list of hardware that plays nice with linux.
I'm sorry but this is the type of idiocy that runs rampant (conservatives as well as librerals use it). If you don't get the result you want you claim the science is wrong. Economics is not a fundamentally flawed science. What you are calling economics is actually finance. This guy ran a financial analysis NOT an economic one.
With a proper and more full economic analysis you would include costs to the environment (say the cost of cleaning up extra pollution, or the opportunity costs of using the oil for gas, or economies of scale when more people purchase hybrids). Poor analysis isn't the fault of economics, it is the fault of the economist.
You are exactly right, as is parent. Insightful, both of you. Alas for police, in America there is this thing called 'innocent until proven guilty' and habeus corpus. I think the same goes for Great Britain.
Everyone is always screaming about 'fair use' rights. They are being taken away, and we are right to kick, scream and shreik the whole way. However another branch of eroded rights are 'unregulated rights.' Fair use is a small area of rights that would otherwise be given to the copyright holder (like copying) but is given to the user under certain circumstances (like personal use).
In the same way our unregulated rights are being lost. Reselling is an unregulated right. The fact that software companies don't like it, or put in their EULA that resales are illegal, doesn't matter (if companies put in a eula a clause restricting your right to free speech it wouldn't be enforcable either). I have been looking for someone to fight this for a long time, I'm glad someone is finally making this an issue.
My favorite trick is this: When protecting continents with lots of borders (europe was best for this) I'd stack huge amounts of troops on the interior of the continent, on a country next to two or more border countries. That way I couldn't attack unless my opponent did first. And they knew opponent knew, if they attacked any border country, he'd unleash the caged beast. So he'd leave my borders alone.
This was efficient because I don't have to be stronger than him on every border country. I just have to be stronger in one country than he is any one place. Considering people love to beef up armies on borders, this was wonderfully successful. Now if only Risk used something that would enable a force of 20 to be 20 times as effective as a force of 1 (rather than only 3 times as effective).
This strategy gets less efficient later in the game when you have stranded troops, but owning europe or NA that early was priceless.
I know I'm going to get killed for this comment, but it has to be said. As a disclaimer I do love macs, I use them all the time at work.
Macs are easy, and currently not affected by much of what plagues windows. But I fear that Apple is growing a group of computer idiots for users. I don't mean you guys on slashdot. There are plenty of brilliant people who use macs because of the nice BSD underpinnings. I mean the users who can't handle Windows maintenance so I advise them to use a mac. So the people capable of maintaining up-to-date security patches and whatnot with Windows stay with Windows, those who can't do this switch to a mac. I know there are better/more common/other reasons to switch to a mac, but I suspect a lot of users are going for this reason alone. Because of this growing trend I think there is going to be some major problems in a few years for them (once their market share hits critical mass).
What happens when someone releases a worm like the sasser on a mac? Even some exploit for the mac version of IE like there is for windows. All these macs aren't running firewalls (I know they have almost no ports open by default, but M$ didn't think they'd have security problems prior to actually having them either), no one uses a virus scanner (truthfully they don't really do anything yet) and users don't understand permissions. Basically Apple (or people like myself encouraging others to switch to a mac) is encouraging bad behaviour.
See what I mean? Safety comes from good computing practices regardless of what OS you run. I run a firewall and virus scanner, and I am on an up-to-date Debian system.
I think the concern isn't with spyware that gets on because of a user. You are right, that isn't Microsofts's fault. They have a lot of idiot users who click "I Agree" and "OK" far too easily. In fact I think a lot of the fabled security reputation Linux enjoys is because of those who run Linux. We know good security proceedures. We don't run as root all the time, we use a firewall (hardware or software), we can change permissions and on and on. I think Linux will start seeming less secure if more idiot users switch to it.
But I have to disagree somewhat with your post. A lot of spyware gets on through security holes, not by users permission. My grandmother uses IE on XP, she never installs anything and we have the security settings on IE pretty high. Yet she still got infected with spyware in a major way. After clean up, she uses firefox and hasn't had a problem. She didn't get spyware because she allowed some shady activeX control to run (or installed something that was piggybacking spyware), but because IE is a security nightmare and lets through a lot of things that shouldn't.