G+'s homepage was a disgrace for the longest time, filled with.. hangouts logs ? And not just at launch, this went on for months, and I gave up.

They could have populated it with my RSS feeds + Google Now stuff, but they cut Reader, and Now isn't that good for me.

Is education about information, or about skills (in the subjects, but also meta-skill at learning in a classroom and by oneself, plus handling deadlines/difficulties/failure/criticism/success...) + socialization w/ peers, teachers, admins, gurlz,... ?

Actually, I read an article on The Economist a long time ago saying just the contrary: freelance cab drivers quit working earlier when they make a lot of money. Easiest explanation is that they set out to make a certain amount of $$, and stop once that goal is reached, regardless of whether it'll take them 3-4x longer to make the same amount the next day.

and by "post", I meant "phone".

That's one of my purchase criteria. Samsung used to have it, now Huawei does. I use it several times a week, and a lot when on trips w/spotty data.

buy a handful of hard drives, encrypt them, do rotating backups on them of everything irreplaceable (that includes photos and documents) at reasonable intervals (monthly or quarterly or whenever you do something momentous such as taxes, for individuals), and make sure at least one of those drives is never physically at your home - your parents', your job, your bank, your SO's, your gym...

Backups are 1- offline, 2- offsite, 3- tested, 4- multiple. Miss just one of those 4, and you don't have a backup.

I think you're both right and wrong. Clearly, a safe tool, especially a tool made safe to the point of being unusable, is not a panacea. Yet kids with motorbikes have a lot more fatal accidents than kids with cars.

The sad truth is you need both: tools with no bugs and safe-by default, and programmers who know how to use them. I agree that if I have to choose, the safe programmer is more important... but show me a project where you can guarantee all devs will be of the "safe" kind (let alone, be that one lone mythological safe dev) for the actual life of the app ?

Compared to the need for killing people on a regular basis ? Not so much.

Actually, they don't care that much if it's someone innocent either.

Executions are by no means done the most humane way, nor is anyone attempting to do them the most humane way. They're done the most telegenic way, so as not to bother the audience: Having your butt stuffed with cotton *before* being executed is not humane, but hey, that way no shit comes out when they kill you, and you die clean and smelling great !
To me, humane (if there is a "humane" way to kill people) would be quick and painless. Drugs or electrocution aren't. I'm fairly sure guillotine is the most reliably quick and painless way, but the blood ! You almost feel like you just killed someone !

I'd do much worse than that to someone who writes in light gray over white. You owe me a couple of corneas.

I'm complaining about, after the standard evening of "new OS install", being mired in non-working stuff, staying up way too late, and still having no solution in sight. I'm not even getting to the App stage, which I'm sure is OK, and a centralized repo must be very nice. But I get stuck before that, at the OS stage.

My most recent issues have been:
- grub2 simply not working with my motherboard
- issues with my dual-gpu, dual-screen config. I never got it to play video reliably, even setting up 2 different-rez screens didn't really work.
- not being able to make head or tails of UpStart, which I think is what I was supposed to use to autostart programs.
- on one machine, having a nice friend recompile the kernel because that was somehow required to be able to access my server's SMB shares
- being unable to get the Start menu on the right side of my main screen (or I could, if I swapped out Unity, but then the menu was written sideways ?), nor to get RDP remoting to work (and VNC is very ugly & laggy)

What compounds the problems is the lack of documentation. I don't mind a few problems. I do mind not finding end-user documentation on how to do/fix things, and having to rely on other-version or other-distro docs in the hope they will apply to my case.

I end up feeling stuck up a creek and w/o a paddle; then realize I could have had Windows up and running a good while ago... and decide to stop my escalating commitment.

I never get to the app install stage, I'm talking about the OS install.
I spent about 10 hours researching how I could use UpStart to start deamons. And another 10 (spread over 3 weeks, the dev was trying to be helpful, but he seems to work at it only on weekends, which is fine, but still...) trying to get grub2 (the default bootloader) not to crash on boot. Then had to learn about free and non-free video drivers when I had the gall to have a dual-GPU, dual-monitor system *and* wanted to play videos...
I'm sure if I got though the OS install, Linux centralized app repo would be nice. Alas, before that I need the OS to boot, handle my screens, and let me autostart programs.

you missed the "extra" between "3" and "hours"

You're right in theory, but in practice, as I said in the OP, my Linux installs never succeed: fatal grub2 boot bug, inability to handle 2 screens *and* play video, inability to configure startup processes via Upstart for lack of doc... and that's overlooking creature comforts such as preferring to have my Start menu on the right-hand side of my main screen, using RDP instead of VNC because VNC is so ugly and laggy...
I'm sure all of that can be fixed (except the right-hand menu, best I could get was with... sideways text ?). I tried. And gave up when after a lot more hours than setting up the equivalent Windows config would have taken me, and still no sure-fire solution in sight.
You"re right that Linux saves some time at the app install stage. If the OS isn't right, I never get to that stage though.