COPPA of course. COPPA made it almost impossible for a non-specialized provider like Google to provide services to children under 13 in a legal fashion in a way that is cost effective and profitable. In a situation like that, of course Google's way to comply is to ban accounts for users under 13.

Now, the question is, is it a good thing for COPPA to essentially force non-specialized interactive services to not deal with children?

I am strongly of the opinion that it should be the parents responsibility to guide, gaurd, and teach their children and that COPPA should not exist. But I also understand the counterargument that it is hard for parents to do that without some restrainints on corporations as well.

I'm not certain that is always true. I often throw things on dropbox for convenient synching without really caring about them, yet I am reasonably confident that it will get backed up effectively. And even if you care, your average user doesn't know how to do proper backups, certainly not as well as many cloud providers do.

With that said, it is generally possible to use limited trust with any cloud provider. I love dropbox for its convenience and it has always been reliable. But I also backup my dropbox folder to my NAS at 2AM every morning. I think dropbox is reasonably secure, yet anytime I post anything more sensitive than my next homework assignment it goes into the Truecrypt file I store on dropbox rather than into my main folder.

As others have said, the best option is to find a local gaming or comic shop and ask around or join their Encounters session if you like D&D.

But if, like me, you have a hard time finding large blocks of time to play with friends, you could consider Play-By-Email (PBEM). It goes much slower than a face to face game, but you can play in small chunks of time at your convenience. I average around 10-15 minutes per day at the time most convenient for me instead of trying to coordinate schedules. If you are upfront with the gm/moderator that you are new many will go far out of their way to help you. Many PBEM games emphasize the role playing and downplay or streamline combat just to help keep things moving, whether or not that is a good thing depends ont he style you like.

I think it depends on how you define "good support". Many free (both libre and gratis) applications are very well supported by the community, this includes both Python and R. If you do not like community support, most major free applications have companies that will happily sell support contracts. Red Hat is the obvious example with Linux. Logilab and ActiveState will sell support contracts for Python.

As for the open source part, you are technically right that there is a difference beween "open source" and "libre" or "gratis". But unless they specifically say otherwise at some point, most people that say open source are looking for something that is both libre and gratis, not just that there is some way to acquire the source code.

I cannot agree more. I have an IPAD and a Netbook. They supplement my PC, not replace it. While a truly post-PC era *might* be coming, proclaiming it is here now is certainly an exaggeration.