There are many anti-virus programmes for Mac, including most of the same big names as for Windows. A quick Google search led me to this site with reviews and whatnot:
http://www.antivirusformac.org/

They're out there for Linux too (not least the ever trusty ClamAV). If you don't have AV on your Mac or Linux box, it's because you don't think you need it, not because it isn't available.

I love both my grandmas, and neither of them are stupid. But neither of them would know which way up a computer is supposed to go, let alone how to protect one from malware. Neither of them have ever owned a computer, so they know as much about them as I do about sailing a boat (which is to say- nothing).

My grandparents-in-law DO own a computer- I built them their first ever computer last year, at their request (Ubuntu, since you ask). Again, bright and clever people both of them, and they've taught themselves how to use it; but they're still at the "I click on the picture of a fox and type in Yahoo email in order to see what my daughter has sent me" stage of computer use; pretty much all they know about viruses is that they're bad and that if anything happens on their computer which seems out of the ordinary they should call me and ask for advice.

New Labour is, thankfully, almost dead. If Miliband manages to win the next election, it will probably be buried. Why do you think grandees like Blair and Mandelson are so quick to put the boot in to him? They're terrified he might win by pursuing a platform other than New Labour. If Miliband loses, it'll throw Labour right back into the throes of New Labour again, in the belief that it's the "only way to win".

Of course they said the same about Cameron and the Tory "Nasty Party", and that didn't exactly turn out well. But we can but hope.

We in the gamer world have been complaining about lens flare for about a decade and a half now. It's a relatively cheap gimmick which is fine, as all cheap gimmicks are, if used occasionally. In video games which overuse it, it is extremely irritating.

I've not seen Star Trek, but if they overuse it then it is a bad thing, whatever Mr Pegg has to say on the subject. I think it's fair to say that sci-fi fans have seen enough CGI action shots in their time to know when a visual effect is overused.

That would be a good feat, seeing as Hadrian's Wall is dozens of miles (more than 100 miles at one point) south of the Scottish border for most of it's length. For that stonework to now be all over Scotland (but not all over England) would imply those Scots are some seriously greedy pillaging bastards!

(It's a common misconception that it is on the Scottish/English border. It was built by Romans to keep out Picts, two groups who have long since gone extinct and who's borders were only passingly related to the borders between the two Anglo-Saxon groups, the English and the Lowland Scots, who would come to inhabit the area centuries later.)

No comment on the Pulse Audio saga, but as for the other three-
- Everyone, on all major distros, is replacing X. Most of them are replacing it with Wayland. Ubuntu have announced that they will be replacing it with something else (called "Mir"). The controversy was around Wayland supporters being cross that Ubuntu wasn't joining their party; if you don't like the concept of replacing X with Wayland (as your post implies) then you should be no more cross with Ubuntu than with all the rest.
- Unity is not slower than Gnome 3. Unity was forked from Gnome 3 due to the terrible unpopularity of that platform; although Unity is up for a lot of criticism, there aren't many people arguing they should have stuck with Gnome. The most popular opinion seems to be that they should have ditched Gnome (as they did) with either a Gnome 2 fork (al a MATE) or that they should have forked Gnome 3 but made different design choices than they did with Unity (al a Cinnamon, which looks at first glance like a KDE 3 clone).
- They aren't replacing dpkg, they're adding a new second package management scheme. As per the details, it looks like this is mostly intended as a way of distributing Ubuntu Touch (phone & tablet) programmes in a less process-intensive way than APT does, for performance reasons (remember that Ubuntu Phones are going to be targeting the budget-smartphone sector). I don't have an opinion at this point as to whether that's sensible, but I can't see anything fundamentally wrong with the concept.

Basically, don't be hysterical. Each of their moves had sound logic behind them, even if the results aren't great (I don't hate Unity, but I'd hardly hold it up as a shining example of brilliance either). If you're using Mint instead of Ubuntu, you're still using an OS that ditched Gnome, uses Pulse Audio, and intends to migrate to Wayland. Hardly makes the case for switching compelling for "in-the-know-nerds". Most of the people who switched to Mint will have done so either because they prefer MATE/Cinnamon to Unity, or over the privacy shenanigans. The rest will have just been the usual nerd hipsters who insist on always using the next great "fringe" product.

The UK's monarch can have her own opinion. She can even state her own opinion (although this one, wisely, doesn't). But she cannot voice her opinion on that exact moment, because at that moment her job is to voice the opinion of "her" government. In theory the government has been appointed by the monarch to act on her behalf; the Queen's Speech is her formal way of affirming that they are acting with her consent. If she refused to giver her consent to their plans, it would trigger a constitutional crisis.

Note that giving consent for something is not the same thing as believing it is the best thing to do.

The US style is not the only style of presidency out there. Take the German style as a far better alternative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_President

Contrary to popular belief, the monarch still has a fairly important, if theoretical, role in the UK. I would far rather that that theoretical power be held in accountable democratic hands than that of someone chosen by the fickle finger of birth-right. I mean we all agree that Liz has done a good job; but must we play genetic roulette once every generation? I think Prince Charles already gets far too involved in politics for someone with no democratic mandate, so I dread to think what a meddling petty autocrat he'll be when he's king...

To address the question in your title- the 1st/2nd/3rd world thing is a throwback to the Cold War. Traditionally it was defined as 1st World = America, Western Europe, Australasia + Allies, 2nd World = USSR, China, other communist countries + Allies, 3rd World = everyone who isn't 1st or 2nd World, in practice most of Africa, South America and south Asia. The connotation of 3rd World being impoverished is based on the fact that 3rd World meant "not aligned to a super power".

The whole terminology is largely meaningless now, but 3rd World remains a convenient shorthand for "less economically developed countries" (the official term).

You miss my point. I do not like Sharia courts. I think, to put it in very simple terms, they are a bad thing. However they have simply slotted themselves in to a perfectly acceptable pre-existing place in English law. The UK hasn't "accepted" them, per se- they've cropped up in a perfectly legitimate slot in our legal system, and we haven't as a nation gone out of our way to single them out for a specific banning. Seeing as the same legal slot is used by a number of other legitimate organisations (including as I said Christian church Ecclesiastical Courts, but also including while we're on the subject Jewish Beth Din courts), it would be impossible to ban them without singling them out for specific criticism; which would be quite an incendiary attack on a sizeable minority of our citizens. It also needs to be remembered that none of these courts can contradict or overrule the law of the land- being found innocent of a crime in a kangaroo court does not make you innocent of it in the eyes of the law, and any judgement it makes in a litigation matters are subject to tests of fairness and legality by the civil courts.

You seem to have a lot of confused views about religion in general. Islam certainly has some violent tracts of nonsense in it (and as an atheist, you will find no hesitation from me in criticising it). But then so do all religions; these are things that were written in the Middle Ages at the latest, and the Bronze Age at the earliest, and those people had some screwed up notions by our modern standards. Take this chestnut from the Old Testament- Numbers 31:14-18- Moses' army has taken the women and children of their enemies captive, and he instructs them to kill every women who has slept with a man, kill every boy, and keep the remaining virginal women "for themselves". The overwhelming majority of modern Christians ignore these grizzly bits of nastiness, just as the overwhelming majority of Muslims ignore the grizzly bits of the Quran- it is only the hardliners who insist on interpreting these things literally, and those hardliners are what we usually call "extremists". It is unfortunately true that the Middle East is packed full of crazy dictators who would fall into this hardliner camp, but that has more to do with geopolitics than it does to do with religion.

I have nothing against Israel. I don't have a problem with "zionism" necessarily. I don't see any reason why Israel shouldn't remain a happy and modern country right where it is. But I equally have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians; 4+ million people who also want autonomy and a country to call their own. I support a two state solution (as does Israel, officially), but I think that the hard-right politicians in Israel seem to be doing more to work against it than they do to work for it. Violent and vitriolic Hamas in Palestine are to blame too. I think that building settlements on occupied land is a bad thing. I think that bulldozing neighbourhoods is a bad thing. I also think that firing rockets into civilians (as Hamas is wont) is a bad thing too. I want everyone to stop doing bad things and start making some progress towards good things.

The UN seems to agree with me- every resolution I have seen supports the notion that both sides need to start behaving properly and bring this horrible conflict to a much needed resolution.

I'm sorry that you disagree with me. Calling me a "closet racist" seems a bit much just for holding geopolitical views that are not the same as yours. But then that is the quality of debate that you get when you discuss Middle Eastern politics on the internet...

Although folk etymologies are always a dangerous game. Sometimes words (especially short ones) can be the same simply by pure coincidence. This fits in with the linguistic concept of the False Cognate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate

I'm not sure that's quite right as a definition.

It's almost a distant cousin of trolling. It's where you basically post something which you know will cause a nerd to "nerd out", with the intention specifically of getting them all fired up. The meme-maker was probably this XKCD comic:
http://xkcd.com/356/

Other examples might be asking in a sci-fi forum about which spaceship was bigger, the Battlestar Galactica from the reboot series or the Mothership from the computer game Homeworld 2. Suddenly the whole place descends into heated discussion about the pixel count of the cockpit on the video game fighter-craft versus the size of the maintenance hatches on Cylon Raiders, in a passionate forum thread that runs for 6 months and 50 pages of comments. That would be a "nerd snip".

I wonder idly if he has drawn every frame and they are now sat on a server waiting to be served up each hour, or if he's still drawing frames for it as it goes. Obviously he must have drawn them with at least some buffer space, but I wonder how much? A day? A week? If he's drawing them as he goes, is he going to keep it up forever?

I don't want to get involved in any discussions about whether it's high art or low nerd sniping or whatnot, but you've got to hand it to that guy for dedication to the art of internet stick men. Between this one, the massive pannable one, and his excellent log-scale ones, he's a man who puts some serious effort into his website...

Be careful with that sentiment, it can be dangerous!

https://soundcloud.com/dirigibleplums/john-finnemores-souvenir