Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing. I'm currently using REAPER: while it's not native they are very supportive of WINE users.

How the heck did you manage that? You do know samples are audio files right? What are you going to do when support ends for Kontakt (or whatever it is)?

What happens when a judge demands, under threat of prison time, that you "decrypt" one of your pads?

If you feel so strongly about people being responsible for the circumstances of their own birth, why do you grant people a right to survival?

"what you need to live" is a surprisingly subjective term. After all, do people really *need* to live? What quality of life justifies such a need? Basic sustenance may not provide such a quality of life.

That's a very simplistic take on things. The fact is that government is very used to people threatening to take their business away if they don't get their own way, and it's pretty obvious that it doesn't happen in practice. It's not a good way to shape tax policy, it's a transparent and dishonest way. Perhaps as a government you'd actually rather work with companies that don't just routinely lie and throw temper tantrums?

This is a good case for, as suggested by many in the discussion, a "show password" button, as is widely used. I don't see an argument for making it the default.

Huh, did not know that.*Increases size*

Only if you're a terrible chef

Depends what continent they die on...

Uh, yes, it absolutely makes things worse. See Limits To Growth and read up on the concept of overshoot. By doing permanent (or quasi-permanent) environmental damage now we jeopardise the possibility of every reaching a stable condition with a decent quality of life, and extending this aggrevates the problem hugely.

Hi. I use supercomputers to model materials for next-generation solar cells. If you're working on semiconductors, you need to probe the electronic structure of crystals with junctions and defects; basic atomistic calculations aren't going to be enough (although they have their own uses and are definitely part of the picture). These calculations help us to work out why some promising materials don't perform well in experiments, and figure out which reactions will be suitable for cheap large-scale production and processing. Even simple atomistic models require a lot of power if your system is large enough and/or you want to look at complex processes like melting.

Genuine question- why would you use the steam key when you have direct access to a drm-free version? Was this just curious testing, or am I missing something?

Agreed that Chemfig is painful, but I've yet to find a decent workflow with ChemDraw. Currently using Inkscape, which at least has a comprehensive set of shortcuts and doesn't prevent annotation. What do you recommend?

For me LyX was "LaTeX with training wheels"; after about a year of LyX I've moved to pure LaTeX for more complex functionality. However, I found LaTeX far less intimidating that it might have been as I was already familiar with the concepts and with the names of most functions.

Where it really excels though is in the well-thought-out system of keyboard shortcuts. I used it in the final year of my degree to take down lecture notes, including equations and derivations, and found I was generally able to keep up with a blackboard. Try that with Equation Editor!