...and the only place that will hire me with that description is the place I'm working at now. Very few private subcontractors are flying remote sensing satellites.

As an addendum, the day I put 'engineer' on my resume is the day my career is over. My degree is in theoretical physics. I have zero engineering background or training. I'm a scientist, and I can't compete with engineers for engineering jobs, nor do I want to. I've spent decades keeping the word 'engineer' off my job title and resume despite stupid managers trying to tack it on.

Um, I'm a calibration scientist. My job is to pick through data and look for errors, which I then correct. I'm a scientist, not an engineer, because the data and its errors are from real physical processes. (The data I work with comes from multispectral satellite instruments.)

If I can't call myself a 'Data scientist' on a resume, what term should I use? Approximately zero jobs are available for a 'Calibration scientist'.

Oh, well, it sounds like your experience is much more representative of things than mine. I've only had two PCs since 2006. Good to know that my impression was overly pessimistic.

Well I'm not surprised that you can configure a machine so that under linux you get good performance, but if you pick some decent and otherwise random hardware, chances are much higher that you will have slow/broken 3d performance if you slap on some reasonably popular distro, than if you go with windows. It is irrelevant to most of us that there exists at least 1 person on the planet who has managed to run minecraft well under linux, as long as most of us have a great sense of trepidation every time we run, well, virtually any graphics intensive application.

And before you accuse me of being a windows fanboy or something, I'm posting this from ubuntu.

Oh gee, I wonder who this anonymous commenter might be??

Yeah but none of them work well in linux. Half crash, the other half are slow or glitchy. Let's face it, we're not going to get good 3D on linux until a) someone makes some decent drivers, and b) X dies.

And then people have the audacity to be surprised when teenagers "rebel" and go off the deep end by resorting to drugs, petty crime, and general disobedience. Here you have a human being whose brain is telling them "you are grown up; time to start doing shit on your own, so you're not a burden to the tribe; your mom has about 8 kids younger than you to feed and look after", but everything around them is designed to deprive them of responsibility and autonomy. School is run by fascists armed with zero tolerance policies, parents are no better because cable news has convinced them that giving a teenager an inch of freedom will result in them doing vodka enemas, and popular culture feeds them the image of the typical teen as an infantile, bumbling idiot, whose greatest possible accomplishment is successfully sneaking out of the house to go to a pool party where they can drink to the point of throwing up and touch a few genitals.

Considering Mt. Gox's original business -- as a Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange -- I'm much more worried about how this will affect card prices. I don't own any bitcoins, but I have boxes of cards in my spare room that I've been counting on as retirement income.

Yeah, I figured that my approach to MMOs was 'wrong' for GW2. They designed it for a different kind of player. No harm no foul.

The question is, how many players like me were driven away for the same reasons.

You're right, I don't think I ever found 'sPvP'. WvW is a button on the GUI. I don't even know how to get into an sPVP zone.

All the discussion about traits goes right over my head. My max level character was 26. I never got high enough level for traits to affect my gameplay. At all. They are a completely useless mechanic for new players -- 'new', in my case, meaning I had played for a full year. A game mechanic that means nothing to players after a year of play is a badly designed mechanic.

I think you missed the fact that I was leveling several characters simultaneously, all of a different race. Yes, I could have taken my Human mage off to the Charr newbie lands and leveled there...but I had already done that content with my Charr engineer. It's still repeating content that I had already played. There were no level-appropriate zones that I had not already completed. That's how I play MMOs -- I try several different characters until I find the one I like best.

Good suggestion, though. If I ever feel the urge to pick GW2 up again I might give that a try. There may be some replayability in re-doing content as a different race/class. (In other games I'd say there definitely would be, but in GW2 I'm not so sure.)

I did my storyline as far as I could. I completed every heart and every exploration point for every zone up to where my storyline was. (So, the first two zones for each race. I think my 26th level mage got to the third zone but didn't complete everything.) I did dynamic events when they happened near me, but I didn't go out of my way for them. I even tried crafting. With all of that, I was still underleveled for my storyline missions and could not handle PvE in the next zone.

My only choice to level was to re-do all the heart content that I've already done, pour more money into crafting, and just generally whack monsters to grind for xp. I can't get into dungeons, I can't survive in any new zones, and I can't progress in my storyline. I had five characters with no choice but to grind or give up on, so I gave up. I'm a casual player; I don't have the time to waste grinding the same content over and over.

(I did have the option of entering PvP. I don't like PvP in general, but I'll play it if it's fair. It's not in GW2. While my low-level character was boosted to level 80 upon entering the PvP zone, everyone else had three more skills than I did and better equipment, not to mention guilds backing them up. PvP in GW2 is very, very unfriendly to solo casual players. I'd prefer grind over PvPing.)

The poorly dressed/shirtless analogy doesn't really work. Businesses that enforce a dress code do so for practical reasons. Legally speaking, it's only discrimination if [you can convince a judge that] the criteria used by the business to refuse service have no direct relevance to their interests as a business.

That leaves the door wide open for a lot of arguments. "If I let a black person join my club, all the white people will leave" wouldn't be a very outlandish statement, especially not 50 years ago. Today, same goes for "if I allow a gay marriage to be performed in my establishment, I'll lose a lot of straight couples" in a lot of places.