Exactly how does this fall in to either category, the choosing of a new pope has nothing to do with "nerdery".
Unless one of his first edicts as pope is to bring the Vatican into the 21st century, create the first fully paperless state, and to ensure 100% "IT literacy" among all the inhabitants of the Papal state (and no this is not a misspelling of Paypal(tm) ).

So that would leave "stuff that matters"..... nope, it fails there too!! Because YES "1.2 billion Catholics", along with all other religious people, CAN be WRONG :)

Unfortunatly, we don't live in a free world.

In this world there are governments (both ones own and others), that will happily use every little bit of information that one puts on the internet against one.

Never mind that ones employment contract possibly says that they can fire you for saying anything negative about them on the internet, having the wrong political views, and so on.

In an ideal world this would not be a problem, so once we have a "free world"... I'll be all for a "real name" name requirement.

Let's just assume that the government teaches all it's employees good practices for taking and archiving their backups,

Solution:
1. Get IT dept. to reinstall the OS, and software
2. Download all your files that you backed up from an on-line cloud
3. Get back to work

And no, this is not an "attack on democracy", this is an attack against 1 person.
Democracy allows me to use a plethora of different back-up solutions, to lock my office door, to tell my BIOS not to boot from CD/DVD/USB, and to use a BIOS password.

Tablets have a place in education, but that should really be limited to providing information.
  - If one can reduce the amount of books the students have to carry around, great.
  - If one wants to able teachers to create/modify classwork "on the fly", great.
  - If one wants to save trees, CO2, etc., great
  - If there is an app for doing multiple choice tests, great

Just shouldn't have expect that "real computers" could be replaced by tablets.

One can improve a tablets input capability easily, one can get a cover which has a bluetooth keyboard, and a mouse.... and then one probably should have bought laptops/netbooks.

The problem with the DMCA is that, in every case where I have seen it used, ones content is blocked on the internet after lawyer are involved.
It is then completely up to the owner of the site to prove that they have no infringing content on their site.

The process of sending a DMCA complaint was free, the last time I checked. Go to DMCA.com... and fill out a form, quote from the site "The DMCA.com Takedown claim form takes about 3 minutes to fill out."

If one is a victim of a bogus DMCA complaint, there is no easy help to find on their site. Once one finds the correct page one can read that a counterclaim can only be sent "after the DMCA Takedown has been submitted and after the content has been removed."

Once on sends the the counterclaim to the ISP "they must wait 10-14 days" before they may unblock the content.

Accused = sentenced immediately :(
Exonerated = sorry, you got to wait 10-14 days :(

There are loads of place on the internet where one can buy a "Like", places there one can trade them, and possibly other barter systems.

There are "users" that have 10's of thousands of "friends", these are purely created to promote a company, product, etc.

Much of Facebook is just for ego boosting, both for the users, and for the company. Facebook pretends that there are "125 billion friend connections", and that is a load of crap. Most of those are the "124 billion 'some-one' connections"... because many people will friend any-one (even fictitious people), and like any-thing that exists.

I can't imagine that anyone ever sent a letter to Encyclopædia Britannica Ltd. to tell them "Your encyclopaedia has lots of cool information, but it needs a fancier design, the current one is dull."

The purpose of Wikipedia is to provide information... aesthetics will waste bandwidth, hard-disk space, CPU resources and most importantly time.

I know that design is important to some people... many of those are the people who got overly excited when a white iPhone(TM) was launched. So it's white, but it works exactly the same way.

As the Galaxy Tab can't double as a hand/lap warmer it's obviously completely unrelated product, aimed at a different demographic.

I posted a link to a homepage I wrote about a medical condition I have. Over the years many professionals (doctors, nurses, professors, etc.) have written to me to say that I have written a great site.

Despite this when I added a link to my site to the relevant Wikipedia page in the "External links" section it was removed.... and the editor referred to the addition as "an act of vandalism"..... this was a person who, on the same day, had done something similar on 100's of different subjects. The chance that is, that this person wouldn't be able to tell a useful site from a useless one.

The links that have been allowed are general medical sites that have at most a couple of paragraphs about this specific condition...
Just because the link is to an "authoritative site" doesn't make the link useful.

ps. my sites easy to find in google... so people who are looking for the subject will find my site. Wikipedia is just one extra link.

I can't say the same for AMD/ATI...... My latest computer has my first AMD/ATI graphics card, and much of the time I have had no problems.

The problem is that the AMD/ATI drivers are that they seem to be very software specific.... so each time either kernel/X.Org changes a little I can't compile the driver :( I never had that problem with the Nvidia cards/drivers.

I'm not idealogical enough to care whether the drivers are open-source.... I just want the drivers to work ALL the time.

Some people have the warped idea that once one has put something on the internet that it's automatically "with-out" cost and for "free use", unless clearly stated otherwise. The notion "well, they should have put a watermark on it" excuses the theft in some peoples(thieves) minds.

This view even exists in people who consider themselves as "law-abiding".

I run a site about a medical condition mainly affecting children, I do this with absolutely no financial incentive.... so I'm in the situation to say that just having a site "dedicated to promoting and supporting special needs children" IS NO F*CKING EXCUSE !!!! (pardon my blatant us of caps)

I borrowed an Acer Aspire AS7750-2354G which has a keypad, it took me 5 minutes to get used to the flat keyboard.

The keyboard and keypad were as wide and the 17inch screen.

It's build well... the owner has biked 20km back and forth from work with it for 6 months, and nothing has broken.

In case you're a Linux user, every thing works in Fedora 16.

One still has the choice to either use Googles products, or to not use Googles products.
There are other search engines, and other free email providers. Google became big because people chose to use their products, personally I have never "been forced" to pay Google anything... clicking on an ad or two has causes some-one to pay Google.

Microsoft became big by taking choices away from people, it may vary where you live, but if you want (or have ever wanted) a computer with-out MSWindows in Denmark your options are severely limited. Some companies even charge extra because you have to "customise" your computer to buy it with-out MSWindows.

More choices = good
Less choices = bad

- "Most people" won't use Linux until they are 100% sure that the programs/hardware(incl. drivers) they want are available for Linux.
- "Most people" won't use Linux until they are 100% sure that the files they exchange with others are compatible. Granted, people seen to "accept" that files from different versions of MSOffice aren't compatible.... I'm not sure why.
- Most companies won't support Linux until they are sure that their efforts will pay off.

Because of this "simple" problem, Linux will continue to have a limited appeal :(

I'm not sure.... I'd rather not have a phone from the company that gave our computers wonderful features like "Clippy - the Office Assistant", the "Blue Screen of Death", "Windows Genuine Advantage", Bing, etc.

I'd rather not risk in an emergency situation that my phone locks up and the starts asking about whether it should install updates, and then if you accidently press the wrong button, it will take 5 minutes to install the updates, then reboot, and finally take 5 more minutes to "configure" the updates.