I believe the day will come when online forums are exclusively filled with shills and astroturfers, with each side flaming the other back and forth endlessly. And then I wonder how I will ever tell the difference.

This is tangential, but I had a big snafu when using --link-dest. Which was largely due to my use-case, but I like to mention it on threads like this in case it saves someone some hassle. Link-dest seems to work by creating the directory structure and then populating it with hard links and changed files. This takes time and if you interrupt it, you wind up with a lot of empty directories. If you then use this as the model for your next backup, the number of changes is huge and this will take a lot of time. If you have an automatic script that backups over ssh (say) and you tend to use your laptop for short periods (say), you can end up with a lot of incomplete backups. If you then (say) delete the partition that your OS is on while you are using it, things can go badly for you. Nowadays, I use rsync to update a single mirror of the filesystem, and then snapshot this periodically on the server using cp -l.

That has not been my experience. On my n9 I comfortably last a day with Skype, google and Facebook chat open.

I do, been using skype on my n900 for the last year or so.

I wonder if price point is an issue. I know I am not ready to drop £500 on a tablet, largely because I find it hard to justify it as an essential device. Apple hardware has always been expensive, so fans of the platform may be more willing to part with that kind of money. As prices come down, there might be more adoption of Android.

I agree. As I understood it, the RIAA etc just got themselves some torrents and read the IP addresses of their peers - Im assuming encryption would not stop this (but I invite correction). I suspect that the safest and easiest way to avoid detection is to crack someone else's wifi. I imagine someone with better script-fu would find it pretty straightforward to automate aircrack so it just runs down the list of available networks hadopi-router-style. This is why the legislation is really dumb. I don't see any serious torrenter getting caught. But I see lots of regular folk who don't know much about network security getting disconnected because they live next door to a university hall of residence (for example) and only have WEP security on their wifi.

I would be tempted to have two tab rows, one horizontal and one vertical. The vertical one is a tab of horizontal tabs - effectively a new window, but in the same window. You wouldn't have to need it if you didn't want it, but if you did, it would allow you to group the normal tabs as you want. So for example, I could have a vertical tab with all my webmail accounts on it - each in a different horizontal tab. Provided it was easy to drag and drop tags around so you could group them as you wanted, this would be my choice. I don't know if anything like this exists already though.