I know very few people, even in IT, who have full-featured back-ups of their home systems. Even fewer have easy, convenient remote access to their data.

Using online apps with online data services give you both of these things 99% of the time. They are a better option (assuming they have the features you need) than running things locally for the vast majority of people. Yes SaaS/cloud services might screw up, but the chances of them doing so are far lower than the chances of YOU screwing up.

You are basing your decision based on anecdotes, not on statistics or evidence. Gmail's backup system is better than yours. Their remote access is better than yours. Use the brain your ancestors evolved for you. It can reason based on probabilities rather than bullshit if you let it.

Given its political influence, I'm surprised Wikileaks hasn't been relegated to Tor yet.

You'd be surprised.

I used to figure nobody would give a crap about the contents of our family website, so why secure it? We're just normal people among hundreds of millions.
Then when I was checking Google to see who linked to our site I found out that a picture of my one year old daughter was posted on a porn forum b/c someone thought she was cute.

Since then I've removed the image, blocked Google from crawling it, and secured the site behind a login.
Plus I have to go through all the photos from my iPhone and remove the geotagging info from them.

Pain in the butt, but it's better to take privacy precautions now than assume no one is looking and deal with the consequences later.

I think of the issue as: reductionism is right, but useless. Unless we can combine the countless calculations that describe the basic physical properties of some system with enough accuracy and detail to model its emergent behavior, then we cannot develop an improved understanding of that system through reductionist means. (Which incidentally is why strong AI is never going to happen.)

Or, a Monet is just a bunch of dried oily goo on some canvas, but it's much more productive to understand it by looking at it than by precisely describing the goo with equations. And one would need to appeal to an entirely different field (cognitive neuroscience) to explain the psychology of the historical context motivating the artist; and thus the art historian's approach manages to synthesize two enormous scientific fields without even needing any math...

Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).

Public domain software is ideal, but the most permissive (least restrictive) FLOSS software stack you can get today would be based on minimalist "cover our legal butts" licenses like BSD. Other great permissive software includes Apache, PostgreSQL, Python, LLVM, X, vim, libtorrent, the Xiph codecs, and so on. Major kudos to Google for releasing Chromium under the BSD license, which for the first time in history finally makes a decent 100% free software desktop possible!

The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back. There has been some effort to get Gentoo's portage or NetBSD's pkgsrc working on it, but it never got off the ground. It seems like the open source community is ostracising Interix for purely irrational anti-capitalist reasons, and that's really a shame - it could have brought the power of UNIX to the >90% of users who run Windows! (Yes, there's also Cygwin, but it's embarrassingly slow, buggy, and incomplete.)

As Stallman's economic fallacies become ever more evident, I expect ever-more developer time to shift to 100% free (non-copyleft) software, which means there's a very bright long-term future ahead for platforms like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, NewForkBSD, and even MINIX 4!

Next: Castrate all men. To remove their “facility” to rape women.

(Oh boy, I know that there are “battle tank butch” lesbians out there, who think I’m completely serious. ^^)

...Reading and watching video in the dark.

If you want, for a small fee, I will come to your house and rip out the cables out of all of your earphones, speakers, phones and other devices that blare the sound into your ears.
I'll break your TVs and monitors for free, but ripping out LEDs and light-bulbs will cost you extra.
You know... for that complete passive experience you are obviously aiming for.

Can't do much about the smells, touch and taste without removing your tongue, nose and skin though.
But for a price, I know a guy who does that too.

There ARE rewards without risks (trying hugging your mom/kid), and risks without rewards (try playing russian roulette). So the whole "there a no rewards without risks" is just a bland, stupid statement.

Nuclear power did a lot of damage in Tchnernobyl because greens did not instill enough fear in it, there.

It's a balance thingy. I wouldn't trust my balance to you.