What are some good rules of the thumb:
If you following the advice the Internet is a good place to experiment with political and sexual discussion, pregnancies and STDs come from meeting IRL.
It is good to have relevant restrictions as conditions for porbation (no alcohol for people convicted of intoxication related crimes), but I don't see any good in a total restriction of computer use for a petty thief (unless he brokers on ebay).
N.B. OOo suffices for most of my business correspondence; I prefer (La)TeX/LyX for the more scientific documents.
Off course this can be fixed by "block redundancy" (like RAID does), "block recovery checksums" or old-fashioned backups.
Happiness is twin floppies.