Is it at all possible to close the browser and use the tablet as a proper computer? That would be magical.

With matters like these, fortunately, the solution is very simple

Here it is:
http://thepiratebay.org/

Here you have a case where you are willing to pay for a legitimate product but you are unable to acquire it due to arbitrary and pointless restrictions.

It's the same sort of problem as DRM. Region locking, device locking ... primarily serve to piss off customers. So go wild.

(When you CAN legitimately purchase the product you desire, of course, piracy thereof becomes a totally different matter).

Let me summarize your requirements
-> Runs cool and quiet
-> Heat, humidity, dust resistant
-> Portable
-> Low power requirements
-> Integrated UPS
-> Very beefy server
-> Cheap

If you find one drop me an email, I want to install Duke Nukem Forever on it.

That's actually a pretty common what the hell were we talking about?

A lot of (most?) people do it this way -- the kernel and wine for example. There is a "central" server that everyone commits to. Beauty of distributed version control is that you don't need to be connected to branch, commit, bisect, checkout, etc. You can sit in a coffee shop, implement five features, commit them all separately, and then push those commits to the central repo when you have access.

Or, if you're in a coffee shop, and you find a regression, you can bisect and check out revisions to check until you find it, write a fix and commit it, all without needing a connection.

Is this story's bar red for anyone else on the front page? It's freaking me out. Is the beer robot mad at me? :(

There's no way to pull from a repo that's behind a NAT unless you have sufficient control over the NAT to forward a particular port to a specific machine behind it. This is the same as svn -- how can you access an svn server that's behind a NAT? Only by having its relevant port forwarded.

However, if you are in a coffee shop and you want Sue to have your devel history, you can push to Sue instead of having Sue pull from you. Sue will then merge your pushed changes into her working copy when she feels like it.

Equivalently, you can set up another git repository on your home server which has a static IP. Then, you pull from and push to your home server, which you can access from anywhere with your laptop, and other people also pull from your home server. I used this approach when I was developing from home and didn't have time to make sure permissions on everything were okay and granting other developers ssh accounts on my machine, and didn't have time to set up an http server for the repo.

I don't understand why they made IPv6 the way they did.

Sure, the size of the new address space is absolutely staggering, but this was done at the expense of making them impossible for a person to remember. Right now, I can go to some internet cafe and ssh into my home network because I can remember the IP.

Were I using an IPv6 address, I would have to pay for DNS service just so I could log into my own network remotely, or keep a scrap of paper and laboriously type it out.

Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet? For example, instead of using 8 bits, use x bits where x is specified at the beginning of the address. For example, you can use x=10 and create an address up to 1024.1024.1024.1024.

This still allows people to remember them easily, as there is no difference between remembering, say, 189 and 857 from a human brain perspective. It's three digits in each case. And, you can go as high as you need to. You can never deplete it, as you can just keep using more bits to represent the address when necessary, and all of the applications supporting such a protocol would be able to support that natively.

Best of all, assume x=8 unless explicitly specified, and voila -- perfect backwards compatibility with the existing IPv4 protocol. You no longer need to have separate treatment of IPv4 and next-gen address spaces, because IPv4 will be a subset of the expanded space.

Why the current mess of horrible alphanumeric sequences? Why didn't they make it easy on our eyes and do it like this?

Again? Didn't they come out with software to detect this sort of thing last time it happened?