"The Hobbit" needs a fan edit to bring it below the two hour mark. This should be easy for part 1, though the real editing challenge would be to do it for the entire trilogy. Tricky, but possible, because it's not a long book.

I much preferred the LotR approach of releasing shorter versions to theaters and then releasing long versions on DVD for dedicated fans.

No, that's not quite right. Let me refer you here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Establishment

The BBC certainly is part of the Establishment. But it is not part of the government.

I mention this because it's an essential part of understanding how our power structure works. Authority and privilege does not flow downwards from government. There is something above government, something more powerful than it, something which ultimately gives the government the authority to government. This we call the Establishment. It's the word you were looking for. But I don't know if this helps the argument you were making.

The word you are looking for is "Establishment".

The Establishment includes both Houses of Parliament, the Cabinet and the Civil Service - collectively, these are the government.

But it also includes the monarchy, and all the major national institutions - hospitals, courts, police forces, national broadcasters, unions, national newspapers, universities... All of these hold some authority and influence over the nation, though this power may be informal and wielded indirectly. For instance, the BBC's main power is its ability to command public opinion.

Mr. Dawkins doesn't go around beheading people for having different beliefs.

No, instead he merely calls them "uneducated, ignorant, probably stupid, too". And: "You've only got to talk to people who call themselves creationists to realize they haven't the faintest idea what the evidence is, or indeed, what evolution is."

Now, I am personally aware of a number of highly educated and intelligent people who also happen to be creationists. Each one of them can explain exactly what evolution is, and what the evidence is for it. They're not convinced. They have good reasons... reasons which I personally have trouble with, but which I can nevertheless respect.

But Dawkins has no respect for their dissent. He will call them stupid simply because their interpretation of the world is different to his own - as if he is omniscient, and in possession of all the facts. Is this not the height of arrogance? Is it not, in fact, intellectual bigotry?

Windows 7 included backup is quite capable. It can make full system images (bare metal) as well as pretty much any other type of backup you desire, either on demand or on a schedule. Recovery can be done from within windows, or by booting from the windows install disk, choosing repair, and selecting the option to restore from backup. If you only do a full system backup, remember to make a new one every once in a while, as it can be tedious to have to apply a long series of updates to an out-of-date backup.

That is useful to know. My concern about the WIndows Backup software was that it would only backup documents and settings, not the system and applications, but maybe I just did not look hard enough at the features in the Windows 7 version.

Indeed, this should work, but I prefer to use commercial tools for this purpose because I am still wary of open-source tools for reading/writing NTFS, being a veteran from the time where the kernel warned you not to use the "write" feature on the NTFS driver or bad things would happen.

For backup software I would rather pay for a licence, since it is so important that the job is done right, and the FS is restored without any corruption. Furthermore, the commercial tools don't require a reboot for backing up. In fact they can back up a mounted filesystem through VSS while it's in use (thanks, Microsoft).

I maintain a machine much like the one to be used by your son. You are right to give up on trying to get these games working in Wine. Even if you succeed, the next patch might break it. It creates an unreasonable amount of recurring effort, which you can avoid entirely for the cost of an OEM Windows licence, which is really, really cheap in comparison. Sure, this is not what Stallman would say, but then he does not support PCs for a family.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Windows 7 on a new laptop.

2. Install Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free (beer). Don't bother with Norton.

3. Create a regular user account for your son. Ensure the account is not able to modify system files without asking for the admin password. This prevents most of the nasty things malware tries to do. WIndows security is actually really good these days.

4. Order a Blizzard authenticator to go with WoW. This excludes more nasty things that malware might do... just in case!

5. Back up the machine after you install the games but before you hand it over to your son. Use backup software that will generate a disk image like Macrium Reflect Free Edition. Restore this disk image from a live CD (Reflect can create one for you) if your son has any problems. You have to use a full disk image for Windows because restoring an install is not just a matter of copying the files and rerunning update-grub.

6. When working with Windows, use the same patience you have to use when working with an unfamiliar Linux distribution. Don't expect everything to be straightforward or logical, and be pleasantly surprised when it is. The only extra thing you need to beware of, but Linux users do not, is that there are scam sites which offer to "help" you with common problems, e.g. device driver issues, and serve up malware instead of help. Good practice is to research Windows problems on a Linux machine.

Yes, particularly as this hack circumvents the need to pay for international iPlayer, where you pay a monthly fee for access to iPlayer programmes.

Though don't tell LibreOffice you want "PDF A/1-a" format (i.e. embedded fonts) because if you do, it will generate a broken PDF that Acrobat Reader(!!) will not be able to open.

"There was an error processing a page. Invalid colorspace."

Maybe having fewer options makes it easier to test for this sort of thing. I bet Word's PDF exporter has been tested with Acrobat Reader...

It's depressing that people can be told, in the article, "I'm sorry 'The Cloud' is not an acceptable nor practical solution", and then reply "Hey, why not store your data in the cloud?" And so many replies along those lines, too! At one time this site was full of smart people who had passed their exams. Now it's full of people who don't even read the question. Like I said, depressing.

The rest of what you say, I don't even know why you are arguing with me. Obviously if you have only a small amount of data, the cloud is a good solution. $20/year is no big deal. The problem comes in when you have a lot of data and it would cost, say, $2400/year to store it on S3. You see the problem? How many fire safes and external drives can you buy for $2400? How many do you actually need in order to have a reasonable chance of keeping your data?

But I entirely agree that ludicrous RAID5 servers and piles of disks are a silly idea. I know so many stories about people keeping all their data on RAID5 and assuming it is safe. RAID-anything seems to increase the risk of catastrophe, probably because everything is in one basket. And that is the core of the solution: spread the risk. Different disks, made by different companies, stored in different locations. Bit like the cloud, really, except entirely under your control, and without a recurring cost.

I could agree with all of that, and indeed I think multiple external/removable HDDs are the most practical backup solution for ordinary people.

But I think it is better to do the backups from within the OS since the backup software can avoid copying unused parts of the filesystem, and is able to create differential/incremental backups, which is very fast and space-efficient. Disk cloning has the advantage that you can get up and running very quickly - but it is slow, it copies everything, and you can only store a single version of the filesystem.

Right. Other than buying new disks, there is no good solution.

The asker seems to be looking for some kind of "join all my small disks together" solution. And yes, he can do this. RAID-0 or LVM. But... don't do it! If even one of those disks fails all the data is effectively gone. The solution is cheap to implement but totally worthless. Sorry, your 250Gb SATA disk now belongs in a museum.

RAID-5/6 is, IMO, also a bad idea; there are too many instances where the controller has failed or multiple disks have failed.

The asker explicitly excludes cloud solutions. It's depressing that people have recommended various cloud solutions nonetheless. Apart from not being answers to the question, these solutions are totally awful for large quantities of data. Amazon S3 may be nearly free if you want to store a few gigabytes, but if you want to store a few terabytes you are going to pay through the nose, and all the other service providers are the same. 2Tb would cost $234 per month just for storage, transfer cost not included. For the price of two weeks of S3 storage you can buy a 2Tb external disk. For the price of upload, download and a month's storage, you can buy four or five such disks and have as much redundancy as any normal person could ever need.

It's a work machine so I'm stuck... it is Gnome 3, KDE 4, or Unity. The KDE 3.5 option disappeared years ago, and the most recent upgrade got rid of Gnome 2. Ah, progress.

However, the lack of an obvious way to change workspace is really the only problem I've hit with Gnome 3 in the last few months. That's not bad at all by Linux standards. It actually seems mature and well-built!

Thanks. But how do you change desktops? How do you move applications to a new desktop?

On Gnome 2 the bottom right corner of the screen lets me change to another desktop ("workspace", in Gnome-speak). And I can move an application to a different workspace by right-clicking on the title bar. But Gnome 3 doesn't seem to have these features. No doubt there is an easy answer...?

Multiple desktops are sometimes useful, but what I would really like on Windows is the ability to pin applications so they are "always on top". If anyone has any suggestions for that, I'd be very pleased to know about them.