It's amusing that an influential person like (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee can make a statements such as this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17753971 in the national press and the population don't even blink...

You can when half of the population read the Daily Mail.

It's been quite private though because no one's ever taken the time to look at it. Now it can all be logged, stored, processed, lost, stolen or used for blackmail. How about a Tory MP buying a DVD from a known source of Fetish porn? Even in this case you'd expect an obscured return to sender address.

Royal Mail have actually been using OCR for at least 20 years.

Those sneaky bastards... :)

Fedex and DHL will also be bound by the law and will always know sender and recipient. Stamps can still be bought with cash though. It's also illegal to withhold encryption keys from the government (senility or internet induced ADHD isn't a defense either).

Silk Road? Bath Salts? Snail mail would also become an attractive method of communication amongst bad guys if the internet surveillance bill goes through (and it probably will).

Someone should really tell the guys in power that 1984 was more of warning and less of a plan. Guess the old e-petition becomes invalid now: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400

Difficult to say. If you've got AppleCare, it should be easy (and fast) to get a replacement or recover your data. I think my point was that a Raspberry Pi will break (I've got one and it and it's associated peripherals don't exactly fill me with confidence: mine gets upset if I try to use both a mouse and an ethernet connection and likes to reboot randomly). A MacBook air, on the other hand, is a very well engineered machine: all solid state storage, aluminum unibody case and LED backlight (more reliable than CCFL) should mean that it'll run for many, many years without fault. My plastic cased MacBook is six years old has put up with all kinds of abuse but still runs like new. From what I hear, this isn't the exception to the rule.

Apple tech support is genuinely excellent. Raspberry Pi tech support doesn't exist and I doubt that getting a (surprisingly) expensive projector fixed at short notice is much easier. My day-to-day machine is a beat up six year old MacBook. Bits are breaking off the case, it's been dropped, had a bottle of ink spilled on the keyboard, gotten wet and been through all kinds of abuse but it still works as well as the day I got it. A MacBook air with a unibodied aluminum case, LED backlight and all solid state storage should last a lifetime.

But an Apple genius might.

It'll break, you won't be able to fix it, the ergonomics will be terrible, you'll get hassled in airport security. This is a recipe for you getting pissed. Just get a MacBook air: built to last, lightweight and usable.