The ghost of Christmas future?
http://www.collapsemovie.com/

So if "Energy conservation or efficiency doesn't really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption." then the trick would be to create conservation/efficiency without spurring economic growth... so compensate with a tax at the same time?

e.g. mandate more fuel efficient cars and increase the tax on gasoline at the same time to make the average cost of driving cost/km the same in the future as it does now...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3942-masturbating-may-protect-against-prostate-cancer.html

"A team in Australia led by Graham Giles of The Cancer Council Victoria in Melbourne asked 1079 men with prostate cancer to fill in a questionnaire detailing their sexual habits, and compared their responses with those of 1259 healthy men of the same age. The team concludes that the more men ejaculate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to develop prostate cancer."

As the dad of a four year old who uses flash in Ubuntu Linux, I have to ask, what distro/version are you running?

In 9.04 (and for the last few releases as I recall), when Ubuntu encounters a flash file in Firefox for the first time, it *offers* to install Flash.

When you set up the system, you could install the flashplugin-installer package which downloads and installs it for you. If you enabled the Canonical Partner repository when you set it up, you can install adobe-flashplugin and then its all done.

Xvid would require a codec download; similar to the flash plugin, Ubuntu will offer to do that when you try to run an Xvid-encoded video file without the codec installed; alternately just installing a big batch of gstreamer plugins when you first set up the system will ensure you don't have to install codecs later (I would recommend: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse, gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly, gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse).

DVDs are almost all encrypted and its a little more work; you need to add a suitable repository (Medibuntu) and install the libdvdcss2 package.

Now, if you can't be bothered to act as the OEM for your sons or invest a couple minutes figuring out how to help them, that's one thing, but this isn't 1999; Linux in general, and Ubuntu specifically, is easy to use and there's quite a lot of help available, e.g. http://ubuntuforums.org/

This, BTW, is why Windows systems are sometimes less expensive than their Linux counterparts; Windows is adding negative value to the system, while Linux can only hope for a $0 cost ;)

You think it's creepy in 2009? Imagine seeing something like that in 1940:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms
http://www.archive.org/details/Experime1940
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap1co5ZZHYE

The thing with Linux distributions is that while there are a huge number of them, there are only a few major ones (note how the 'popularity' rapidly drops off on DistroWatch). In fact, there are probably no more major Linux distros than Vista/Win7 versions. And even among those, they aren't all equally popular; see Google Trends There has basically been a single distro leading the pack since mid-2006: Ubuntu. So without forced interference, a single distro has emerged as the leader. A positive feedback loop with OEMs (e.g. Dell) should keep it in first place unless there is a major disruption. Now as for Vista/Win7... Really, all there is is Ultimate and various crippleware versions of it.

So basically indistinguishable from a regular new Windows release? ;) Simple joking aside, I wonder how good a 'Mojave Experiment' using Linux+Wine would be in terms of fooling average Vista users... Based on reactions I've seen from simply showing people Ubuntu, I imagine pretty good.