It's like saying the Earth is almost spherical, instead of saying it's a lump of matter with an undetermined shape.

I've read of tokamak's plasma described as a pretty good vacuum.

But installing the updates is critical for computer security. I would feel at risk of getting some random malware if a Windows computer fell even days or weeks out of date on the updates.

I think Vista is even a bit like Windows 2000 vs XP : same OS than 7 but a bit older, more traditional user interface, will be deprecated sooner but mostly does the exact same things. If I needed Windows I'd look into running it on purpose. License stickers are even sold for cheap (though I think warez versions of Windows get all updates anyway?)

A smartcard? They're used on satellite decoder boxes at least (and I remember seeing a "fraudulent", "diy" one used)

Even better : go to the town hall and vote there. They should provide some (hopefully secured) PCs that can be used for voting?

Intel still is innovating and perhaps aggressively at that, with an architecture update every year or two. The physical limits, down to speed of light putting a barrier on latency are strong. Funnily in the older times they could sell the same architecture for five years with minor tweaks and frequency increases (486, Pentium/Pentium MMX, Pentium Pro/II/III)

To a degree it can be done with bicycles :).

There were motherboards with two kinds of slots before (since the 90s), so I'm pretty sure we'll see them again. Intel Skylake officially supports either DDR3 or DDR4 for one thing. If there's market demand, one or two mobo vendors at least will make it.

And at first it was the "PC bus" or the "AT bus", the name ISA came because of the clone industry using it. Superficially at least, using DOS, ISA and Intel (or clones) is similar to using CP/M, S-100 and Intel. It's good we had another relatively open platform early on. S-100 died before I was born though.

But you can set the thing to 45 watt. You just need some airflow and very good heatsink.

Well, if you want CPU performance get a 35 watt Intel i3 ; the AMD CPU is worse and slightly hotter but will better run games (and some rare GPGPU or HSA software). That's all. And if I was building a SFF PC, I'd probably look for quad core Atom (or the same named Celeron), Kabini and successors or even Tegra K1 (but that one isn't strictly a PC)

It's good for niches of users, like those who insist on building a small PC (to compensate for a too big penis?) or why not the family Windows PC where users only care about being able to run a game at all (either now or four years down the road).

Else, the CPU performance is sure fairly disappointing (and Windows itself is disappointing, ugly and manages to be both simplistic and complex, I miss the days you could use 2000/XP and be done)

I always choose a motherboard with both ports. Can be very useful even if you start out with both peripherals as USB. e.g. when my USB mouse broke, I got the older PS/2 one from a drawer and it still works very fine. Likewise I broke a keyb from 2010 or 2011 and ultimately replaced it with one from 1996 (which has grease and a space bar that needs serviced but registers all keys)

The best security in this case is if there were no PS/2 keyboard connected before, then it won't be recognised until the computer is shut down or rebooted.
If you use a Model M, you will probably even fry the PS/2 port - but an "evil" Model M would have a replacement micro-controller that wouldn't fry the port by drawing too much current, like keyboard from the 90s and 00s don't.

But a GBA with a little "magic" cartdrige (I mean flash / linker) will allow more uses out of it, like carrying 20 games (with the option of them being legit, though Nintendo never liked that and always pretended ripping your cartridges is wrong), running your ROM hacks on real hardware and then miscellaneous homebrew programs and media readers.

That said on the GBA SP, I think the form factor is pretty great but that the lighting is just bad, modding one to improve the lighting would be interesting if that can be done.