[ale] Linux Distributions

[Jim Popovitch]

On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 15:27 -0400, George Carless wrote:

> "Power" is a rather vague term; running under a user account 
> restricts very little in terms of what you can do in a 
> 'constructive' sense, while restricting what you can do in a 
> 'destructive' sense;

Ture.  Unfortunately in order to actually use the PC you need to enable
access which does permit destructive or potentially vulnerable things.
For instance, in order to use a modem the user needs write access
to /dev/ttyS0 (or whatever they have).  In do this, that same user can
read and write data if another user is using the modem.  Big fat deal.
Yes it's a potentially 'destructive' capability... who cares on a
Desktop?  The same situations exist with /dev/dvd, lots of application
temp files, etc.

Again, my argument in this case is for using an everyday desktop Linux
PC productively and easily.  Servers are a complete different story and
should be treated differently.  

-Jim P.