I work for a company that blocks social media, as well as "blogs" and "newsgroups" broadly categorised. Effectively the top 2-3 google results I get when searching for things like puppet recipes, or common faults are blocked. This company does NOT get social media. They asked us recently for comments regarding this policy, and I'll paraphrase mine here: Slacking off is slacking off. If people are disengaged, you don't make them more engaged by banning whatever they are doing to fill in the hours they are spending at their desk. OTOH if people are engaged, social media use might augment, rather than threaten productivity. It's interesting the number of people whose fear of social media is that it will make OTHER PEOPLE less productive. Not them of course, but "those damn kids".

Down here, we call that "Parliament"

...it's strapped for cash. I happen to know a number of doctors, and yes, plenty of them have iPads.

I suggest that if an iPad is indeed critical business tool for a Doctor, he might be able to spring for the six hundred bucks without too much trouble.

He doesn't need John Brumby to buy it for him (or her). In contrast, there are plenty of school kids who could use that sort of investment in technology. Perhaps some of the billions of dollars that were wasted on the latest Public transport fiasco could be spent there.

Investment in health care needs more serious consideration than simply buying the doctors more shiny objects.

Looks like Senator Conroy didn't get the memo, then: Doh!

Oh come on, we all know the planet is only 6,000 or so years old!

I laugh disdainfully at your so-called "science"

Actually, I think if you want to reach the bulk of kids these days, you're probably better off trying to do is *using* their technology.

Look how much time kids I know spend online on FB, MSN, whatever. Imagine an education where kids could collaborate on projects (for example) on Facebook, do exams online...

What would be great is a more progressive education system where technology is embraced. so yes, I think lack of technology is definitely a potential hurdle to education in the future.

And hell, if you can't afford an apple, turn your dell into a hackintosh and quit whining! :)

Man, that's a hole lot of funny right there.

*sigh*

From the OP: "By and large, the millions of Australians who will shortly rely on Linux *will not even know it is there*."\\

Having linux on an embedded device is not "Running Linux" (at least as far as most /. folks would first assume) having an iPhone or iPod touch is "running OS X"

You must be new here.

Yep, that's what they recommend. Let's select a random node from one of my clusters here. Each node has 3sGb of RAM, and runs linux.

Top output:

Mem: 33285824k total, 28389184k used, [...]
Swap: 30736352k total, 50592k used, [...]

So you can see that even with 32Gb of RAM, a node in an 8-node cluster is not swapping even close to 1Gb). That's a LOT of wasted disk space.