Tucows is still with me - as my cell phone service provider. I don't mind the aimlessness, as long as they're providing a useful service

5th grade as 1965 for me. Don't recall ever having Funk and Wagnalls in the classroom in any grade - always Thordike-Barnhart. My lawn is currently buried beneath a couple of inches of snow. You can play oin it it you'd like.

I've got some carborundum sandpaper ... In all fairness, you did say "pretty much"

This is what I want in my phone (in addition, or course, to the phone actually working as a phone)

In this case, it's easy. Don't build (or buy a building) on or immediately beneath a slippery slope.

Personally, as someone who doesn't have the latest and greatest in terms of CPU horsepower in my desktop PC, I like the idea of a lightweight desktop, and my current favorite in this regard is LXDE. I'm hopeful regarding LXQt http://lxqt.org/ but I'm not holding my breath. My ideal DE would use the same toolkit as the graphical apps I use (file manager, web browser, IM client, terminal, text editor, word processor, spreadsheet, graphical ftp client, image editor, image viewer, package manager, pdf viewer, media player, CD/DVD burner), but not bring in a whole lot of extra crap I don't want. Mixing Gtk2 and Gtk3 apps is as bad as mixing Gtk and Qt as far as I'm concerned.

Actually, LXDE likes Qt so much they're moving forward with LXQt.

My first thought on reading the summary was "gnomification." I don't use KDE (or GNOME), but I hope the KDE folks aren't trying to follow in GNOME's footsteps.

googol = 1e100. And, yes, I googled it to ensure I got the spelling correct

Transparent alumina - there's a difference.

from TFA:

I am familiar with free software guru Richard Stallman, but who is this other guy with the same name?

I have to agree. I, personally, would not trust parents (as a group) with the job of approving education curricula or methodologies without some type of appropriate outcomes measurements (i.e., standardized tests). Given the backlashes to both No Child Left Behind and Common Core (not to imply that either program is the be-all, end-all it claims to be), and the difficulty in finding one or more enlightened despots to determine appropriate standards, I'm at a loss here.

"Improvements" should be optional. Improvements should not be. The question is, how do we distinguish the former from the latter?

If you don't want to be a computer scientist (or, at least, educated in computer science), don't go for a computer science degree. If you want to be trained to be a programmer, find an institution that will train you to be a programmer - it may not be a university.

I've never had a problem setting my Linux Mint search provider to Google, or DuckDuckGo, or Wikipedia (I haven't tried the others. Click on the down-arrow in the search window, select "Manage Search Engines ...", then click on the "Get more search engines ..." link. Google should be one of your choices.