Orkut already was a wasteland 2~3 years ago as everyone in Brazil moved to Facebook. Not much will be lost.

Probably it will rely a lot on proprietary software/hardware (Brazil manufactures very little in the way of networking/communications equipment, and our government is addicted to proprietary software) with their own backdoors. Besides, our government spies on social movements, unions etc... so they are not innocent at all. Finally: given the deep shit that this government is into, it will likely run over schedule and budget and will eventually be scrapped.

This is what you use MATE for. It's pretty much GNOME 2.

Pretty much any university in Brazil (and other developing countries too, I assume): 95% Windows and you're more likely to find a Linux user than a Mac user.

Linux and most open-source software runs on it. That's pretty much enough for most DIY hackers. Besides, I think that this board would be useful for other applications (robotics, signal processing, etc...) or just as a cheap way of hacking ARM + FPGA.

... who parsed this as 'University of NSFW'?

"Deprived of the ability to use browser plugins, protected content distributors are not, in general, switching to unprotected media. Instead, they're switching away from the Web entirely. "
So what is wrong with this, exactly? If you want to distribute DRMed content, you are fully free to use your own means. Let the web stay DRM-free, as it should be.

"It's way too expensive when I don't know if it's even a good game or not." This is why you play the demo.

"Game prices are too high"? Seriously, is US$ 8 too expensive for you? We're not talking about an US$ 50 game here.
"People don't want to spend any amount of money without knowing what they will get in return."? There are demo versions available.

I wouldn't mind seeing one of those being turned into something useful after the 15-day trial expires, or at least a teardown.

This is why you add a rule, and configure the guest operating system, to allow this application - but nothing else - to connect to the internet. While you're at that, you probably could do a minimal-enough install of Windows which would only run the application.

You can run Windows XP as a VM which is isolated from the internet through a firewall. That will probably help.

Laptops should be using suspend/hibernation - which is still a problem in Linux, sadly.

(Posting to undo mistaken mod) At least for me, in Windows 7 I didn't need any shell replacement (or much in the way of tweaking, really) unlike I needed in XP. In fact, whenever I use XP (I have some virtual machines for ancient software) I miss the Windows 7 interface.

Fake journals let anything and everything in, so you can pretend you have lots of papers published. Some of them pretend to be prestigious jornals: can't get published in Nature or Science? Why not Nature and Science?