I've more or less moved out of programming now but I did it for 30 odd years in the finance industry across various projects. I've used something like 8-10 operating systems and 20+ languages. My code is pretty robust, during dev maybe 1-2 bugs a year were raised against my code and post go live I'm aware of 1 bug that turned out to be me and that was a fairly trivial one. 90% of what I did was donkey work, read a message from IBM MQ, parse it, dump it out to a db, make a few decisions, call a stored proc etc. Mostly C and Unix. It was all commented to hell and back and very clearly structured and I also enjoy documenting, which I do in spades. However, I wouldn't have a clue on writing a compiler, doing any graphical work, etc although I'd know where to look should the need arise. Key point though is, I'm entirely self taught and have zero college. I went from school straight into my first job based on a 30 minute interview and the fact I programmed some 6502 on an Atari 800. The message being, a lot of programming doesn't need super skilled people, anyone with a bit of common sense, a logical mind, a chunk of curiosity and hopefully a good quality threshold can do it.

They all run Linux servers, big difference. Makes perfect sense there. Desktop, for most people, not so much.

I guess it's time for the obligatory "You must be new here"

Wow, what's happened to this place? Someone says Linux is better than Windows and gets marked flamebait.

Funnily enough, I probably spend 20% of my TV watching on actual broadcast TV. The rest is watching torrented stuff, usually shows I missed when they were on at the time, sort of timeshift++. As such, I'd say this view of TV winning is about as realistic as the music industry saying they have one over on MP3s.

One wonders if there will be any attempt at bringing to justice the various EU and Greek officials involved in getting Greece in to begin with. The books were cooked to make it look like Greece was ready when it most certainly wasn't and now it's all come home to roost, big time.

This sort of garbage just proves how financially inept anyone who thinks BitCoin et al have any sort of long term future is. Sure, it appeals on a nerdy/privacy/stick it to da man level but most of us are in the real world. This is not how it works, this is not how countries work, this is not how global financial processes work.

And whose ass did those numbers get pulled from?

If this whole charade was deliberate. They've never, ever gone after people for copying CDs for home use even though it was illegal. Then it became legal, got reversed and now they're back where they were PLUS they have a nice new levy.

Fully grown adults don't get any new mainstream music

Well I'm a fully grown adult and I'm discovering more brilliant music than I can keep up with by listening to indie and unsigned podcasts, Internet Radio stations and Bandcamp. My thing is electronic music and love bands like www.ixband.co.uk or soundcloud.com/plike-1

how easy is it to : see world class theatre eat in a great restaurant

As you say, not everyone is the same. I have zero interest in theatre or great restaurants. Skye sounds way more appealing to me. Having to work in London in bad enough, living there would be my worst nightmare,

Indeed. I'd love my son to be interested in coding, given it's what I do. However, despite his teacher saying he's one of the best in his class and has some insightful solutions to the tasks, he has zero interest and finds the whole thing a crashing bore. It's one of his least favorite things. I even tried the angle of it being useful as he is keen on game modding but once he realised it might involve code, he went right off the idea.

As long as one of those 'big updates' put the Windows 7 UI back in place and disposes of all that new Metro or whatever it's called these days junk then I'll be happy.

Never found a feature since Office 97 I had a use for. It was fast, did everything I needed and loaded quickly. I've currently got Office 2013 or somesuch installed because it was dirt cheap via work but I never use it, it's horrible compared to Open Office.

Most of their history was out. The Adventure one may have been the first game Easter Egg but it certainly wasn't the first by any stretch.

Yep. I was a Classic Traveller player and it seemed GW went from having literally hundreds of different games/game systems to Warhammer and White Dwarf only over a very short period of time. I too stopped going. There was another local shop that covered Tunnels & Trolls, all the mini game systems, Star Fleet Battles etc but even they finally folded last year.