Raising a group of children to think that as long as they have enough money they can do whatever they please... Sounds like humanity to me. What's the issue here? Is it that we're teaching them this lesson too soon instead of letting them figure it out for themselves the first time they have to buy their way out of trouble as an adult? I guess that's a big turning point in the life of any financially successful "bad" person, and we shouldn't take that sense of discovery away from them.

The people who rate things in the WINE AppDB have no standards. It seems to me that if you can get an application to launch that gets it Gold status, if you can get it to do anything after it launches, that's Platinum. Pardon me for being picky, but if it doesn't run just as well as it does under Windows, that's not a great accomplishment, and certainly not deserving of the highest rating available.

Some Steam Game
Works perfectly, but only if you disable the Steam Overlay: Platinum.
What Works: Installing (with a laundry list of tricks and hacks, see notes).
What Does Not: Moving your character, interacting with the game world or game interface, chat.

Yes, great. Platinum indeed. Just check the Top 10 Platinum list and really look at how broken the best running things are.

If I ever completely give up on gaming, or if developers pull their heads out of their ass, I'll be rid of Windows.

Development, file management, general usability, I'd take GNU/Linux any day. But I still want to play StarCraft II, Diablo III, Borderlands, etc. and it's just not happening under WINE.

If it's worth remembering, I remember it.

The obvious downside to this method is people always think what they tell me is worth remembering and I tend to disagree, or I forget that I need to actually do something. If someone says, "Hey, don't you need to do [something]?" I immediately recall all the details of the task and can set to work, but the only thing I often forget is to start doing things. It is distinctly different from being lazy.

I imagine most enthusiasts/gamers don't purchase PCs - they build them. I know I have no real interest in adding another $100+ to my build costs with no hardware improvements.

I've been forever waiting to see what would happen to the software world if game developers released official versions of their games for GNU/Linux (instead of, or in addition to, Windows).

This happens all the time in film, but I've never seen it happen in real life. I know a few people who use passwords that have some sort of personally important bit of information nested in it, but having known the passwords of various friends and family members throughout my life the creation methods have never been related to what's around their desks.

How is this different from current meat substitutes?

I can't speak for the parent, but I live in Myrtle Beach (not exactly a ghost town) and it's unbelievably hard to find metal albums here. Same thing in the upstate of South Carolina. Stores stock what the majority of their customers demand - pop, rap, classic rock, country, top 40 type stuff. If they can't move Pantera albums what do you think the chances of them stocking the shelves with some of the more obscure European power metal bands are?

Anyone who has different tastes from the majority of the other patrons is going to have a hard time finding music. Yes, there are probably roads near him, but if he has to drive to a different city (likely not very nearby) to purchase an album I can't say I'm in the least bit surprised he wouldn't be willing to.

I don't like having to explain to people that they didn't understand their own post, but...

Ah, you'll figure it out.

FTFY.

I frequently find myself working for the IT department wherever I am, but not high enough up the food chain to know anything about policies or what is "officially" supported - not caring may also be a factor. I man a help desk, people approach me with a question/problem, I answer/fix it and then send them away. I, personally, support Windows, Linux, Mac stuff, and the occasional smart phone. Only one of us worked that desk at a time, so I have no idea what the others did.

Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless?
At my old university you were fine as long as you could handle WPA2 Enterprise. At my new university, Windows users are required to use the Cisco Clean Access Agent and everyone else just gets to connect (for both wired and wireless).

How does IT support Linux users generally?
At my old university the best route to Linux support was to go bug the guys in the Clemson Linux Users Group. At my new university they seem pretty clueless, but there are a lot of people I haven't met yet.

Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
I've never had a reason to ask the IT staff for help with anything, but it seems more practical to ridicule the Windows users who can't find where they saved an e-mail attachment than the Linux users who are having trouble with what always seems to be a more technical issue.

I think it would be more reasonable to make unsolicited pop-ups illegal than offensive images. Pop-ups with offensive images would then be handled, as would many scams and sources of malware. This is clearly the better solution.

I don't think it would ruin the story for the developer to just bump the age by one year.

Coming out of high school I was a computer geek with all the street cred but knowledge of programming. I thought computer science would be interesting. I took it. I passed it. I changed majors to it (from chemistry). I don't know about everywhere, but they did a good job of teaching us things in the first few semesters of computer science at Clemson. A lot of the 400 level courses were more along the lines of, "Here's an assignment. Figure it out." I'm pretty sure that's what documentation is for, though.

The elderly can't even handle most CD players, I really don't think design has anything to do with it. They're unwilling to attempt to use things, so they just ask for help.

My grandmother had no music in her car for over a month because she put a CD in upside down and never bothered to press the eject button. It didn't work, so she assumed it was broken and didn't think it was worth getting fixed.

My fiancee's grandmother constantly asks how to make her standalone CD player... play. Never, has she put a CD in and pressed the double-sized button in the center that says "Play" under a big single forward arrow. However, she can work a cassette player that has identical buttons (with slightly different text on FF/RW instead of Skip and the like).

In the case of "adding an alarm" and how terribly confusing that must be: if there's only one button, press it. Also, isn't this exactly the market Samsung makes the Jitterbug for?

I can't speak for everyone, but the big ad at the bottom of my Skype contact list really makes me not want to run it.