First, how is physically flipping through the pages of a book faster than hitting the Page Down key? The keyboard is still the fastest way to interact with computers. That's why keyboard shortcuts exist for when the mouse is too slow.

Second, why is flipping through the pages of a book considered a complex task? What do I have to do to navigate to the middle of the document, flip one page at a time? What if I want to delete a comma from the end of every line in the document (if you've dealt with .csv files, you may have run into this). That's why the command line exists for when GUI's are too slow.

Touch screens, kinects, etc, are really only good for doing very simple tasks, slowly. You know the cool screen in Minority Report that everyone wants to make into reality? Ten bucks says it will be coded by some dude using vi.

I'm actually torn on this one. As much as I despise Microsoft products, if adding office to Linux allows industry to upgrade from Windows machines to Linux machines, i.e., helps bring Linux into the mainstream, then it's not a bad thing. Also, since I use R for my statistical/plotting software and vi for word processing, adding Office to Linux wouldn't affect me directly. And that annoying paper clip should be replaced with cowsay.

A free market grants us the freedom to restrict the market. Beautiful, ain't it.

If you want to work at a computer support help desk, I recommend majoring in Religious Studies or Philosophy. All kidding aside, you're just a frosh. Take courses in both EE and CS areas and choose the path you enjoy the most. Heck, lots of colleges allow you to customize your major and pretty much all colleges allow independent studies, so you can combine the two areas however you see fit. Speaking from a CS perspective, having the motivation to teach yourself programming languages and spend some of your free time tinkering with, and writing, programs of your own is a very useful skill for a programmer (it could very well be the same for EE). Getting back to my point, college is a time for you to figure out what you want to do. If you can't figure it out in four years of college, there's always grad school. Go out, drink some booze, and don't let strangers on the Internet tell you what to do with your life.

I'm not familiar with XBMC, but I've hosted media servers in which I had personal data on the disk that I did not want visible to others. One simple way would be to have a different user account with read permissions granted only for movies appropriate for a 4 year old (your son's account), and a second user account that has read and write permissions to all media (your account). For my media server, I used bindfs to mount the directory containing my media to a different location with altered permissions. In my user account, I had full access to the disk. In the other user account, the media directory was mounted using bindfs so it appeared as if the media directory was the root of the file system, effectively denying them access to the rest of the disk.

Right on. Schools do a horrible job of teaching how to code. Too much theory; not enough memory alignment or thinking about cache boundaries. Not enough about error checking or the graceful handling of errors. But hey! They teach Chomsky Normal form!

It comes down to whether the user likes to browse source. There's clearly things that make open source software good: a large community of experts (or `nerds', but I prefer the term `expert') ironing out the bugs and adding useful features. If Linux closed their source, would it still have the same expert community working on it? Maybe yes, maybe no. If you do a code freeze of your open source software now, yes, it's good, but will it be good in the future? Maybe yes, maybe no. Who knows. Certainly the user will NOT know if it's good because the source is closed. There is PLENTY of good closed source software. However, the openness of Linux/BSD/etc is one of my favorite features of those operating systems. Would I stop using them? No. I'm a software developer so ultimately I need to use a computer.

I take that back, there is a con: there's a 1 in ~300 million chance the lottery picks George Bush.

Only Pros. I've always felt it's a damn shame that our leaders have to be politicians.

ext4 may show better performance, obviously depending on the many factors listed above, but an ill-timed crash in extreme cases can cause massive data loss due to data not hitting the disk until long after metadata has been written to the journal in ext4. You can use the nodelalloc mount option for ext4 to get around the data loss problem, but then you lose some of the potential performance gain by using ext4. I am not as familiar with ufs or zfs, so I can't help you there. If it were me, i'd go ext3.