I do not think it is as bad as you say. There are lots of jobs, around maintenance, and over watch of the systems that do not require great intelligence. Think Homer Simpson watching over the power plant, 99.99% of the time nothing happens, but when it does you need someone to report it. Look around and there are lots of these automated systems that needs someone who is not ambitious, does not need to understand the internals of their system, but just how to operate and maintain the system. In other words these are jobs that do not require courses in calculus, chemistry, or physics. Think of the Army, they use some of the most sophisticated equipment, yet the soldiers who operate them, often have no more than high school experience and a 3-9 month operator course. I do not see these types of jobs going away anytime soon.

Maybe it will use the Cortex-A5, more efficient and faster than Arm11, but supposedly lower cost than Cortex-A8. There were rumors that it would finally show the light of day in 2011/2012. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380443,00.asp

Many libertarians believe government exists to protect liberty, and are not interested in anarchy.

That is funny because I have the opposite problem. I also have an IBM R52 laptop and I run Ubuntu 5.04 and once in a great while everything just freezes and I have to do a hard reboot. Hopefully this problem will be fixed in newer version of Ubuntu. On the other hand I have never had a problem running WindowsXP, but in fairness I do not run it very often.