I read "Minnesota," (and MOOC) and instantly had flashbacks to grade school, Apple-II, and Oregon Trail. Here's hoping no one contracts dysentery.

I am a nerd and I like Debian stable.

I too scoffed at the clunker's program and continue to drive an 85 Bronco II, its got 180K on it and never had anything more than routine things done to it. Its a serious beater, but I average about 18mpg in it and it has a real truck underneath (Ranger) with decent 4x4 capability. Plus its like $140 a year to insure. I rue the day that it will eventually pass-on, but even then I'll get $250 to recycle its steel at the local recycler!

^^this is my question for Bruce too!

I'm only counting distros I actually used for more than a day or two, and yes I'm counting all *nix's, not just Linux...

In order since 1999 (when I discovered Linux):

Redhat 5.x, Redhat 6.x, CalderaLinux (loved the Novell Client built in), Various Fedora/FedoraCore's, Solaris 10, Solaris Express, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu 10.04, Debian Etch, Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04, Debian Squeeze.

There were a few years (2004-2009) that I really liked and used Solaris quite a bit, but it lost me when the whole Oracle purchase went through. Fedora lost me when Ubuntu came along, and likewise, Ubuntu has recently started losing me to Debian. I like to think Debian's got the right mix of what I'm looking for (I'm posting this using Squeeze) and don't plan to leave anytime soon! Slow is fine with me, I want it to WORK and Debian does a good job of that!

Oh damn, I meant iPhone 5, obviously.

Exactly what I was thinking--does the iPhone 4 have a CDMA and GSM radio in it?? That'd be a boost to its already ridiculous market domination...and might make me consider one when my current Android gives up the ghost...

I'd say the biggest drawback to pot smoking in teenage years is a lack of ability to find and keep a job. Being a loaf isn't conducive to paying the bills, which is the skill teenagers need to learn first and foremost. Self-sufficiency is paramount to heading off to college, or work, or simply moving on in life and I'd wager is more important than grades, social status, or if they are pot-heads or not. Its possible to smoke weed and still have a reasonable income, but the desire to be self-sufficient needs to come first or the stoner mentality wins over.

Aww, tell us how you really feel....

You're very right. I work in IT at a Land-Grant Research University. Its amazing how much time I spend cleaning up the "CLICK HERE FOR FREE STUFFZ (TM)" kind of virii on the PhD's computers. A brilliant scientific brain /= computer literacy.

As has been mentioned quite a few times before you could use a backport or *gasp* compile the newest 'goodie' from scratch...

Are you sure? I thought the correct answer was "ed."

I second this comment; I did something similar with my Mom's Dell Laptop a few years back. While on summer vacation with my kids at my mom's house, she asked if I could "speed up" her laptop. Just turning it on was agonizing, 10+ minutes to get the XP desktop through a bunch of popups, "speed optimizers," and other crapware. I know this is going to sound radical, but I simply fixed it by installing Ubuntu--9.04 at the time IIRC. I just copied her "My Documents" to ~/mom/My Documents and put a shortcut on the desktop, I set the SAME background image, put the Firefox icon on the desktop and restored her Windows profile in to it (she was already a FF user) and installed her copy of Office 2003 with Crossover and put shortcuts for Word and Excel on the desktop too. Done and done. That was 4+ years back and she's still using it--90% of what she does on the computer is in a web-browser, and FF is the same across platforms. I haven't had a call to fix "XP Antivirus Pro" since.

Erm, 2 finger (right click) and drag works just fine on my Early 2008 MacBook Pro...