Can Internet access seriously be considered a human right?

I've read a lot over the last year or so about whether access to the Internet should be considered a human right and while I think some of the discussion is motivated by good intentions it shows just how out of touch a lot of the current technophiles are with the real world. Now the UN is weighing in and I just have to call BS on the whole thing. There are a lot more important things than Internet access: Food, clean water, shelter, sanitation, health care, freedom of speech, freedom of association, the list goes on and it's a long time before the Internet comes up.

How come the Internet is so important to the world? Surely it's more important that people have a roof over their head and the means to feed themselves and their family. If the UN wants to make a big hoo-ha over the Internet, should we now assume that we are entitled to be housed, clothed, fed and cared for by the state as a fundamental human right? Does this mean that banks are abusing mortgate defaulters by evicting them? Would a company be be denying someone their human right to make a living by firing them?

I mean, I can understand that people who are being oppressed find the Internet useful to communicate their oppression to the outside world but seriously, if they had a right to freedom of expression a lot more good would come of it than just touching the bleeding hearts of the disaffected westerner who wants to make it their cause of the month.

The ongoing saga of Microsoft vs Samba

At least we have another milestone on the road towards interoperability. How long until we get a definitive judgement on this and force Microsoft to play by the rules and pay up?

This really needs to be sorted out soon so that we can all settle down and use the solutions that work best for our own situations and get some proper work done. Personally I wonder if the problem now is going to be that nobody in Microsoft really knows how SMB works and the Samba team will probably have to educate them. If you look at how resource sharing is managed in Windows 7 you really have to wonder if the Windows development team (if that's an accurate way to describe them, I don't think there's much in the way of teamwork in MS) are living on the same planet as the rest of us.

When am I going to find a new laptop that suits me?

It's not that difficult really. All I want is:

• A decent keyboard which doesn't require contortions to reach the delete, backslash or cursor keys.
• A decent resolution screen (1600 x 1200 or 1920 x 1200) in something like a 14" or 15" form factor.
• A screen which is actually designed for presenting infromation, not doubling up as a mirror or fingerprint & dust magnet.
• Reasonably lightweight.
• WiFi and Ethernet drivers that don't chew up the CPU.
• Reasonably well-supported graphics drivers so that I don't end up finding that programs fall back to software rendering half the time, especially in web video.

I don't think that's too much too ask for, but with the current trend for shiny screens, dinky keyboards and netbook/tablet-style form factors I think I might have to go second-hand which is pretty sad. I think the truth is that my ideal laptop is out there and it's about 3 years old.