I think "power users" know that they don't have to go with the default DE when installing Debian, and they probably also know that they can install most any DE they wish.

I'll trade you some for a horse

Have to agree with that sentiment. I have not had any major problems with win7 since replacing old outdated hardware. The last big problem I had was the AMD software which kept prompting me to update to the latest drivers, advice which I stupidly accepted; the AMD driver developers dropped support for 'old' chipsets but never modified the updaters to advise against installing drivers that were no longer compatible.

At the time I believed I was doing the right thing by keeping up with the suggested updates, this is not necessarily true all of the time. Sometimes you are trying to be too cheap instead of updating your old hardware. Also you should usually be able to track the cause of the BSOD and work out what hardware, driver etc. is being reported. Thats why the BSOD has all those scary numbers on it. So you can fix it. Instead of complaining about your daily BSOD.

Even with a non-functional kernel, you can boot from a rescue disk and add other kernel versions in there, can't you?
My Debian install usually has a couple of kernels to choose from in the boot menu.
Graphics driver problems shouldn't stop you from getting a working command prompt, allowing you to fix or replace the driver.

I can usually find some way to boot into a repair mode and get things running again in Linux (I usually go with Debian) without having to follow the Microsoft approach of restoring my whole O/S from the install disk - which some people have been forced to do with these recent update bugs as they can't even get a boot into Windows safe mode.

I have never had an update hose my Linux system so badly that I cannot get in there and replace or remove the offending driver or whatever.

Thats a bit unfair. I had a need to convert some output into PDF a while back and started looking thru the many proprietary and open source options, and there were a lot to choose from. It was awfully hard to determine which were quality and which weren't. Installing and trying to program a working solution against each API would have taken up a huge amount of time. There is nothing at all wrong with asking if others have been thru some of that process and found a favorite. I certainly would have liked to see some comparisons or good product reviews to help me decide.

Also, one thing I started to suspect; a number of the supposedly proprietary PDF tools and API's that I investigated appeared to just be a GUI and some wrappings around a GPL PDF library, usually Ghostscript, with little or no attribution given. Once again, there is nothing wrong with asking for other peoples experience with these tools and libraries; you don't want to find out you have breached GPL licensing AFTER you have created your solution, do you?

I love my PRS-T1 too, but sadly the dictionary app got grundled and if I accidentally activate it the unit freezes and needs to be rebooted.

It would be great if Sony could unlock these readers to allow us to add different reader apps. There are a few hack instructions on the web but they seem to apply to specific regional versions, so I don't want to brick the thing entirely by taking the risk.

The main issue with putting a standard Android app on the T1 appears to be getting its display mode modified to remove scrolling and unnecessary animations, also they need to be lightweight apps that the slow CPU won't have fits on.

A better analogy would also represent the space time continuum and the gravity well relative to the ant.
See if your ant is walking on a large rubber sheet, then you drop a bowling ball on the spot the ant is currently at... oh wait, the universe just made my ant 2 dimensional.
But you will notice that it is travelling much slower now...

Or maybe humans already achieved interstellar travel then, being the warmongering destructive bastards we are, went out and destroyed every non-human intelligence they could find. Afterwards, being the warmongering destructive bastards we are, we turned on ourselves and blew ourselves back to the stone age.
 

I guess your spin through was a little too quick then. The purpose is to create a porous " electrocatalyst". Not a fuel.

I'm sure you can get some kind of medical treatment for that

Unless after they achieved interplanetary travel, but before they achieved interstellar travel, they moved onto zero-g space stations and evolved into a form that cannot come down our gravity well and dig for minerals themselves. Hence the need for a planet with it's own stock of slaves waiting to be taken over, like what happened the last time they came, according to some of the web sites I have been reading recently.... maybe I should google something different next time...

I've heard you can get Power over Ethernet, so what you need to do is, invest in some of this PoE gear, run the cables out to your flag holders, and when they start to tire just hit em with some electrical charge until they start waving enthusiastically again.

What are you confused about? You don't understand purchasing a license to use a game because you prefer to pirate a copy?

What a twat. Your purchase cannot be completed without ticking the little checkbox saying you have read and agreed to the terms of the sale.