But if enough people download the file or donate money, the government's surveillance resources can't stretch to it.

Wikipedia shouldn't be cited as a source at any level. But it can help you to understand a topic, and hopefully point you to some better sources if you need to cite something. There's no arbitrary limit at which you can't use it like that. Even when you're an expert in some field, you're still going to want information on related fields quite often.

And in fact, we (the British) have now given up on the jump jet variant. We'll get the carrier variant, and fit our new carrier (or carriers, as and when there's the money) with catapults and arrestor wires.

I reckon a few Harriers will live on for airshows. I've seen them, and they are impressive to watch. Plus, there's a certain patriotic satisfaction in knowing that we made a successful VTOL jet decades ago (the Russians also had one in service, but it was a bizarre design with two extra vertically-mounted engines).

Well, it would be no great leap for Google to add that feature themselves. They've been able to act as a POP client for some time now, sucking in e-mails from the accounts people have with their ISPs, mainly.

And I like GMail's interface. Facebook would be doing pretty well to beat Google there.

I disagree. Computers and the internet (and Google) are tools. People shouldn't have to understand how it all works in order to use it, because it's fantastically useful even if you think it's powered by magic pixies. We force people to get drivers licences before they're put in charge of half a ton of steel capable of travelling at 100 mph because it's easy to kill people if you get it wrong. If you 'get it wrong' with a computer, you end up with some data in a proprietary format. Which is usually nothing more than an annoyance.

By all means try to educate people, but banning them from the internet until they pass some test is a terrible idea.

Plus patching any known security holes? Interesting idea. I think the trouble is funding/motivation: both virus and antivirus writers usually do it for profit, and it would take time and effort to keep it up to date. Since it would be, at best, dubiously legal, it probably couldn't be sponsored by any company, so it would have to be a guerilla effort. And the people who could write it mostly wouldn't benefit (except perhaps that they'd spend less time cleaning their families computers...).

It won't do you much good, though. This is why an alarm is now standard in most, if not all, new cars. Microsoft seems to be moving in the same direction for Windows, with Security Essentials. I guess antitrust issues stop them from installing it by default, though.

Like the CPU issue, I don't really see the bugs that I always hear about. At least on the sites I visit, it's reliable enough for regular use. I don't know what I do differently to everyone complaining: I'm using the stock versions of Firefox and Flash installed from Ubuntu repos.

For comparison, an HTML5 test video at the same resolution in WebM (Firefox 4) took over half of a core.

People always say this. But I can easily watch Flash video in full screen on Linux, and I often do. Just testing a (non-fullscreen) video now, it took up some 35% of one core (Pentium 5300: not exactly top of the range). I don't have a problem with it.

Chernobyl is in the Ukraine, not Poland.

To put this in perspective, the newspaper article you link to describes some scientists who've done a computer simulation of burning mixtures including biodiesel (a particular type of biofuel), and predict that it will produce a greater amount of PAHs, which are known to cause cancer, than simulated pure fossil fuels. As far as I can see, they've not even burnt anything.

Assuming real experiments match their simulation, the mixture will most likely be tweaked a bit--some chemical change, some additive, or something--to bring down the resulting amount of PAHs. We already drive around with catalytic converters bolted to our cars to clean up various pollutants. What you've described is a minor pothole in biofuel development, not the roadblock you seem to be implying. By far the greater challenge is how to devote the necessary land to grow biofuels while we simultaneously increase food production to feed a growing world population, and try to conserve land for nature.

I've recently got a SanDisk, and I'm quite pleased with it. Decent audio quality (although I'm not an audiophile), shows up as a USB disk, so it's not dependent on some proprietary software, and even plays ogg files. This was the cheap and cheerful "clip" model, though, and I don't know what their more expensive models are like.

Well, we do refer to the Dutch. We just got a bit confused about where they come from. The people we call the Dutch call themselves Nederlanders.