The idea of democracy is great... but where's all this "free" wifi coming from? In my 'hood you can choose between Cablevision cable or Verizon DSL. But thank god I don't have to be on the hook to those big corporate cell companies! I guess I can go to McDonald's or the bookstore for free wifi, but in reality most people are paying some major corp for their internet access. So the argument for democracy ignores the whole 'net neutrality' issue... if the company you get the net from can decide what net you can get your democracy goes right out the window, no matter what kind of machine you're hefting around. And to the iPad naysayers... well, I'm sure Apple will take your thoughts into consideration while they're depositing their billions into the bank. In regards to macs and netbooks, you get what you pay for... As for netbooks having the potential to change things, I could give credence to that argument, but don't think that everyone who jumps on the internet is there to change the world. cf google's recent video "What is a browser?"... 8% of people questioned knew what a browser actually was, most responded "Google" or "Yahoo" or the like. That's the niche that netbooks are really filling.

Ok, no you're just trying to make me feel old. Never used an _electric_ typewriter? That's where I learned to touch type. Although they'd probably be billed as 'word processors'. And those were fancy compared to the old manual typewriters. With those you'd have to push the carriage back by hand. LF vs. CR comes in handy when you're right aligning some text. If you do CR+LF you'd have to tab (or space) back to the right margin. A LF lets you stay on the same margin, so it is/was useful to have the distinction. The problem usually only comes up these days when you're converting between systems, and gets really bad when you're doing layout because it can be maddening converting large text files for characters you may not realize are even there.