Skateboarders are having fun at their own expense.

Yes, but the motive is largely the same.

If you ever got arrested for serious harm to a hacker, you would definitely want me on your jury!

I would hope you'd decide based on the law, not on your dislike of the victim.

If you ever got arrested for serious harm to a hacker, you would definitely want me on your jury!

What is the motivation to write viruses that simply destroy other peoples property without any gain for the malicious perpetrators who still have to reside in mom's basement, drooling in the dark?

The same reason they ride down stair rails on skate boards.

I haven't waded through the density of the original article yet, but I suspect it's because nobody freaking uses Vista if they have any option whatsoever.

It seemed to be more an off-the-cuff statement by a Microsoft employee that didn't have any actual backing. It's kind of like saying that something is "the best widget on the planet", only "secure" actually means something.

People thought switching to Firefox from IE made them safe but that changed once Firefox gained enough users to make targetting them worthwhile.

In the number of severe unpatched vulnerabilities, you're still much safer with Firefox than IE, though IE has gotten significantly better.

One of my home PCs got hit with some sort of worm or trojan yesterday afternoon, although it doesn’t appear to have been this particular one.

From what I've gathered, this isn't really a virus in the traditional sense, and it doesn't infect the users of Twitter. Rather, sends tweets containing a link to a webpage containing javascript that, when executed by your browser, posts tweets from your browser back to twitter that contain the same page link.