Direct democracy does have its downsides too in Switzerland. For example it's much easier to pass restrictive immigration laws simply by fear mongering.
Other subjects are difficult to comprehend such as financial treaties or international cooperation. That's the reason why Switzerland joined the UN only in 2002.

Finally, there are some discussions that are always getting very emotional and don't allow for an objective evaluation. I'm thinking of preventive custody for sexual crimes for example. It's very easy to convince people to vote for stronger laws in this area because nobody wants to support rapists.

That being said, all in all direct democracy is a good thing and gives citizens a feeling of participation that many non-direct democracies are often lacking.

Who cares if Carbonite goes bankrupt. Just move your files to a different provider if this happens. Remember, it's called backup, so you still have the original files locally.

Another thing that helps is cutting down on the size of the photo collection:

- Keep only the best shot of a specific scene instead of multiple shots
- Delete pictures that are blurry or not interesting. Nobody will want to look at thousands of photos of a single event in the future.
- Think twice before you backup a RAW file. How big are the chances that you are ever going to work on this file again? Just backup the JPEG instead and keep the RAW locally if you want.

I know it's hard to delete photos but I prefer having 200 nice photos of a vacation instead of 1000 so-so ones that will bore people to death.

Let me get this straigt. We, the French, should not have attacked Gaddafi so that your corrupt Prime Minister can honor the contracts that he concluded with a dictator?

> The workarounds include higher efficiency devices (e.g. iPad/Mac Mini/laptop instead of a massive gaming desktop)

You do realize that such devices are only a marginal part of our energy consumption? Transport and Heating/Cooling are the biggest energy consumers today. All the rest is peanuts.

Remember, if everyone saves a bit of energy, humankind as a whole also only saves a bit of energy.

As a French atheist I am really having trouble modding you...

Never really understood why most people buy ink jet printers anyway. I suspect stupidity though.

What is nice about there implementation is also that the shared connection is separated from your private connection. This means that someone who is leeching on your community connection will not slow down your own connection.

This difference might be caused by different default settings. In France for example, all the WiFi routers provided by the ISP I've seen so far have WPA pre-activated.

Nice try. 1) actually happened in France and we now have a choice of our iPhone provider. Also, other companies than Microsoft have been tried by the EU. It's just that Microsoft is generating more headlines.

Nature has a nice summary of the original research paper published in the same journal: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091216/full/news.2009.1143.html