And, in other news, a Dutch judge approved blocking of the piratebay, as requested by a private party Brein (dutch RIAA).

The net neutrality law actually allows blocking of sites through court orders.

Well, I do not have a Facebook account, and I do not feel any difficulty in engaging anywhere whatsoever. Okay, I might not be able to comment on every website or "I like!" something, but who really cares. It is about getting the information you need, or having the fun you want.

Your argument is false. Because another type of government is just as bad or worse, doesn't dismiss the argument that capitalism is ill-equipped at dealing with external costs.

And as far as "taking energy companies to court" goes, you sound a little too idealist about how the real world works. Trying to take on a multi-billion dollar (or euro for that matter) in court takes a lot of time and more importantly, money.

I fully agree. I never took notes (or only very little) and it got my through all my education. If I did take notes, I couldn't read it a week afterwards anyhow, as it was stenographic and my handwriting is generally illegable anyway.

If I couldn't understand it from lectures and books, notes were certainly not going to help me.

Wo do have the power to steer Apple: don't buy Apple.

I might be a little off-topic, but why is rich-text editing not supported natively by the browser? With all these Web 2.0 and app-stuff, wouldn't it make sense to have a decent text editor available by default?

Let it spit out simple HTML fragments and you'll be fine for most apps.

You might forget that Apple has 100 billion dollars in the bank. They could also use that many to invest in a better work environment for Chinese workers instead of making their execs richer than they need to be.

So, basically, Go doesn't compile to native code, it just wraps the runtime engine (VM?) with it ....

You forget that most people's knowledge on physics comes from Hollywoord. Hence it is completely understandable that they buy into this.

Linux is simple. You just have to set it up (just like with Windows actually...). On my last laptop (about 3-4 years old now) I had Vista and Ubuntu installed. My wife could choose whichever she wanted. After a while, she was only using Ubuntu. She is an intelligent woman, understands computers from a user's viewpoint, but is by no means a computer nerd. And I certainly didn't push her to go either way. After some time, she actually managed to install a Wine application, by just clicking around. Linux works.

In my company, after using SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (which is a load of crap; mainly because of missing a gazillion packages), we switched back to Ubuntu and Windows 7. The Ubuntu users are happy, just as are the Windows users.