Apparently Private Internet Access (VPN) is quite a popular way of getting around the great firewall of China...

It costs money, but it's pretty cheap, and apparently quite a reliable way to work around the firewall.

My only recommendation is to set it up before you get there since it requires OpenVPN, and http://openvpn.net/ is blocked within China. (The website, not the service)

You can search verbatim characters in DuckDuckGo, but not in Bing (Go ahead, search ":wq" on both, and notice that DuckDuckGo doesn't ignore the ":"), how is this done if DuckDuckGo uses Bing?

Is there something in the API maybe?

I investigated this, I really wish I hadn't...

Not because I wasn't expecting it, but because it wasn't scaled to epic proportions so I did it for pretty much nothing... :(

There was also a Minecraft Creeper chasing a miner...

References are everywhere.

I love how hilariously likely that comment is, but it also makes me kinda sad since I use Opera. :(

Year of the Linux desktop!

I find absurd names endearing in a way...

I personally much rather saying that my old Android ran "Cupcake" instead of claiming it used "1.5"... It's kinda cute in a way, and when used in conversation, it almost lightens whatever the topic is...

Really, try to sound disgruntled when saying that your phone runs on "Ice Cream Sandwich".

Remix

If you are looking for a free program to filter with... Snort does a good job. It is an IDS (Intrusion detection system), but it is flexible enough that it would work as a very good filter, allowing you to filter by keywords, domains, ports, have-at-you...

You can combine that with lists of questionable content and you'd have yourself a pretty effective and versatile system.

These kinds of rules are probably most relevant to your interests.
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.ids.snort.general/33780

It sounds like you may like Deep Freeze. http://www.faronics.com/enterprise/deep-freeze/

It costs a bit, but pretty much on every restart it will revert any "frozen" drives to their previous state, this is usually done in unison with a second partition that is "unfrozen" so people can save files... And if you want to update your system, you can turn Deep Freeze off temporarily. It also has a user permission system so some people can save files.

Fantastic for management, and as someone who was on the user end of it for a while, it wasn't that bad because of the unfrozen drive for my files. (You could permanently install with a password if you needed to)

I know this may sound a bit weird to some, but I always found Emacs org-mode to be the most effective way for me to take notes in class...
Here is a Google Tech-talk about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM

It's pretty much just plaintext, but the way org-mode handles it makes it very effective. It's one of the easiest parts of Emacs to learn, and it is known as quite a killer feature in the program. You can even export it to PDF (ala LaTeX), HTML, and a few other types of formats (Like GameFAQs style text document, complete with table of contents and headings.)

Since there really is no overhead, you are only limited by how fast you can type. It is also very easy to navigate after writing them.

Besides, I heard the movie was to die for.

I haven't written off Google+ yet... I actually quite like it...

Sure, there is less people there, but it's nice seeing only a couple posts from a few good friends as opposed to posts every couple of minutes about what some acquaintance of mine ate.

Circles was an awesome feature, I always quite enjoyed the control I had over views and who viewed what. The simple markdown interpreter worked for simple markup on posts, hangouts were awesome, that and chat completely replaced Skype for me.

I also quite like the interface better.

And recently, I have noticed a lot of people joining.

Well... Even to this day Pokemon is the second best selling franchise out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Selling_Video_Game_Franchises

The 36 people in this article isn't a very large number... A lot of the people that play Pokemon today are actually in our 20s. Addictive? Perhaps a little. But the games have gotten a lot more elaborate than they have in the past. It's more than just collecting them all now, it's about the literally hundreds of things to do in each of the worlds, the oh-so difficult Battle Frontier which very few have beaten, the Breeding to get Pokemon with higher stats and moves not normally known by a particular species, EV training, the mini games, random quests, all of the post-game quests, harvest-moon style farming, and of course, catching them all... Not to mention all of the new multiplayer aspects, like the launcher battles in Black and White (The newest games) which add a whole new depth to battles.

tl;dr I am a Pokemon nut, this article misleads about the general state of the Pokemon franchise, and the age a majority of us are.