I see you are one of the 40% of healthy adults who struggle with sarcasm. Don't worry, you are in good company.

What should I answer if I receive about 0.5 items a year?

That is indeed an issue, but if I can clean everything up in 10 "apt-get remove" lines, then it's a huge step forward with respect to Android.

As a niche person who wants to be sure that metrics are not sent to google, I am looking forward to Ubuntu phone.

If everything has no dependencies, then all of the dependencies must be included in the install. I wounder how many copies of each low level program would be on a given machine.

And, especially, good luck installing a security update on *all* your copies of a core library.

Winter is coming.

Don't forget all those bright minds trying to syphon truckloads of money out of meaningless microsecond virtual financial transations. This should give you a more thorough picture of how screwed up this world is.

At least for Firefox, you can easily sync your passwords on their servers, and everything is encrypted client-side so they'll never know it. You can even more easily get those passwords out (edit->preferences->security->saved passwords). The problem of the security of the browser/keychain program itself still stands though.

And, let me add, Firefox and Chrome can act as "keychain programs".

I've recently tried OwnCloud 5, but the sync part seems broken ATM --- it seems to be a known issue.

"Timmy, stop slouching off and come play some video games! You need some exercise!"

What what exactly is the value of the US dollar?

Exactly one cheeseburger at McDonald's.

I never understood why a language can't provide both 0-based and 1-based indexing, letting the user choose the one they prefer.

* multiple ways of doing things. should i use \begin{center} or {\centering text text tex}. probably they both work fine, but each of them breaks something else in some obscure case.

Use \centering inside an environment that already handles its own spacing, such as a figure. Rule of thumb: if you need to put curly braces manually around \centering, you're probably using the wrong one.

why are some things \command{text text text}, some {\command text text text} and some \begin{command}

Most {\command text} (such as \bf, \tt, \it) are deprecated. Forget about them and you'll be happier. \begin{command}...\end{command} is mainly meant for things that can contain newlines, but I agree with you that there is some inconsistency here.

* the interactive mode when it hits an error. i am sure there is nothing productive i can do in that shell. why is it so hard to get out of. why is -halt-on-error not default?

Press x, enter. Took me a lot of time to figure out, too.

* can the output be cleaned up? when i run pdflatex i get several screen-fulls of messages. really it should be showing me errors and optionally warnings. * why do i have to run pdflatex twice? why can't it figure out if a reference has changed? latexmk (or a good makefile) helps, but it took me years to find it.

+1 --- I'd love it to be a bit more third-millennium, too.

As my former boss used to say, "if you've never missed a plane, you arrive to the airport too early".