It was mostly what the British called "short beer". It was pretty watery and had just enough alcohol to kill much of the bacteria.
Nearly. ISTR it was called "small beer" not "short beer". Even modern beer doesn't contain enough alcohol to kill bacteria; the important thing is that to make beer you had to boil it, which kills off any waterborne bacteria that were in your water supply. So up until the advent of treated water supplies you might well get cholera or dysentry from your water supply, but not from your beer.

Support for (traditional, non-Android) Linux is also dodgy in Skype, with the Linux versions of the software being a long way behind the Windows version. I am not naive enough to think that Google are non-evil, but if MS can get away with using Skype as a lock-in lever for Windows, I don't have much sympathy with their whine that Google are doing the same thing with YouTube.

That logo is hideous. Who's going to be putting that on their packaging?
At least it doesn't look like two people performing an act unsuitable for discussion on a family website ( See here for the canonical example). You can pay graphic designers a LOT more money than was spent on the DRM Free logo and still get something that is astonishingly bad.

FVWM is nice, but it is a relative latecomer. TWM is THE window manager for old gits. Honestly, the stuff kids want today. Where are my pipe and slippers, dammit?

I'd go for R --- it's free, it can be used as a generic scripting language (#!!/usr/bin/Rscript) and it can do all your data analysis, plotting and stuff too.

But the biggest pluses of Matlab is being able to plot your results, and work interactively from the command line
This. Precisely this. If Julia can reasonably rapidly acquire plotting capabilities that approach those of R (and hence are much better than those of MATLAB) then it may have some traction. If it remains the case that you have to dump your results out of Julia and use another tool to plot them, then you are better off using R/MATLAB/Octave/IDL/SciLab/Yorick for everything except the most number-crunchingly intense tasks. And you would probably do _those_ in a traditional compiled language anyway.

Usually ones with "taxonomy" in the title are doubly tedious.
... beaten only by those with the word "ontology" in the title.

Apparently, in the distant past, TV announcers in the USA would use the phrase "Film at 11" to mean that the film that was normally on at 10pm, after the 9pm news, would be an hour later tonight, as momentous events required an extra hour of news coverage. Hence the non-sarcastic use of "Film at 11" to mean "That's big news" and the sarcastic use meaning "That is not really news at all."

C-film: a new spermicidal contraceptive.
New? I remember it being new in the 1980s. I also remember it being demonstrated to be jolly unreliable, before (I hasten to add) I had any reason to be involved in the use of such a product. Keep wearing those condoms, kids!

Presumably "this summer" means the next summer to occur, i.e. summer 2012. But if they are taking a road trip across the States, then maybe they are not wussies. Such a trip is perfectly possible in the winter. The wife and I drove from Mississippi to California and back over Christmas 1987, in our '76 Dodge dart, taking in the Hoover dam, Carlsbad, the Grand Canyon, San Francisco etc. Meteor crater was officially closed when we visited it, so we drove down the snowy road and hiked up to the rim. Never mind the museum, it is worth just looking at the big hole in the ground.

If you are in LA, drive up the mountain to the Mount Wilson Observatory in honour of Edwin Hubble. If you like observatories you can do the one in Griffith Park in the same day (if it isn't closed for refurbishment). It has appeared in at least one Star Trek episode. If in the southern deserts, visit the Hoover dam and Carlsbad Caverns. In San Francisco, I thought the exploratorium wasn't bad as science museums go.

I also don't think that driving without power steering is a hazard.
Indeed. My Ford focus dumped its power steering fluid during a long drive. I was able to keep going; the only hard part was parking at the end of the trip. Once you are up to about 20mph you hardly even notice that the power steering is b0rked.

Not only that, but manual transmission cars sold in the US often have the bizzare feature that the headlights go off if you put the handbrake on. How are you supposed to do a hill start in the dark, for goodness' sake?

Not an Android app, nor for Canada. But UK readers might like to know that they can get email alerts from http://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/ Not that they are a lot of use if it is cloudy, as it was last night.