If they would not do everything to publish in those journals from those companies, the companies would have no chance to be evil.

But backbones are unfortunately rare things among scientists who will do close to anything to get funded and even more to get a high-impact paper published.

Thats true and highly relevant for people who have no chance to get close to a mains plug within 24 hours :)

that I cannot, for example, do with Maxima and octave on my Nexus 7, much more quickly and without that feeling of being trapped in the distant past?

How about not going an burning down houses of innocent people, how about not going and killing and hurting innocent people because somebody made a drawing or a video about some stupid old fairy tale?
If there is something that would be good censoring then it is the utter nonsense the comes from an islamist dictatorship.

Red mud is dangerous because of two reasons: first, it contains sodium hydroxide which is a chemicale base and caustic so that the pH is somewhere betwee 10 and 13. However, I would suppose that the pH drops quickly in the river after a few kilometers and only fish at the location where the mud entered the river would be severely affected.
Second, it contains heavy metals but not in a concentration that would have an immediate toxic effect -- problem with that is that it will accumulate in organisms.
The biggest portion of material in red mud is iron oxide in a very fine suspension and this can color a river red even when the mud is diluted with lots of river water already. I would suspect that with the traditional yellow mud coloring of the Yangtse, the final color of the mixture would indeed be more orange-ish.

Unity, Gnome3, XFCE, KDE - and each distribution swears on its own combination of Desktop and default apps.
A user who is not already a Linux expert is lost and unable to see why this plentitude even exists. Visiting any of the distro web pages will not help at all and asking in a forum will start a flame war between supporters of Unity and supporters of XFCE.
I personally like that there is competition and that there are different developments taking place for different preferences and different groups of users.
But there is nothing to communicate those differences, nothing to help users to choose and to make it easy for them to choose. Distributions do not communicate any of whay they think are their advantages and disadvantages in comparison to other distros and they do not tell the user what his choices are when it comes to desktops.
Even long-time Linux users are pissed off about this.
Do not make the desktop to a battlefield of religious wars. Make it into a friendly store of choices and make the different choices work together.

Aluminium plants produce a huge quantity of "red mud" which is red from iron oxide. A spill could well color the whole river red.
See e.g. here where the mud spilled through a broken dam in Hungary: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/10/05/GA2010100502818.html

but since you did anyways, here you go: nobody knows and nobody will ever know.

Yes, as sad and humiliating for the human intellect this may be, there are questions where nobody knows the answer and where it is very unlikely that anyone will ever know the answer.
If you go around asking such questions you will find lots of people who claim that they have answers -- most of which involve some fairy tale about some "god" or similar chidlish stuff. Preserve your sanity and avoid doing this.

which happens to be Linux on all the computers I and my family own.

I have a wonderful plan for a project on Unicorns - can I have 5 million please?

If you, like me, disapprove of the way how Google deals with that matter, tell them! Send them your opinion as feedback. Rate down this page - http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271 - and click "the solution is not ideal". Comment on posts of Google employees.

As long this is just a matter that affects a couple dozen people amont millions, Google won't give a shit, but if a large group of people complains, they will have start to start moving their asses.

So, it is the same effort but the effect will be bigger if you post/address Google instead of the Slashdot forums.

You are right: "A UI is a type of interface, which is a "contract" for consistent interaction"
The problem is that GNOME3 broke that contract more than any other UI until then, and in ways that made it harder and harder for professional Linux users to get their work done. GNOME 3 broke the contract of being useful for being cool or for being like some "UI designer" though everyone has to interact now.
I hope they just send the whole failed effort to /dev/null and start over.

"GNOME 3 is much worse than GNOME 2" .

A lot of people who do actual work on their computers (as apposed to using it like a smartphone for browsing, web email, and youtube mostly) and have tried both will agree and will have a long list of good reasons for saying that too.
Most of them are using XFCE for now and won't shed a tear if GNOME becomes history.

It was the hybris of "UI Designers" knowing better than anyone else what is good for us.

The sheep have been voting for the wolves for decades. Do not complain to me.

People who are "concerned" are fucking pathetic. Why not instead of being concerned, do it the way they think it should be done? Nobody is keeping them from putting up math lessons the way they think is right.
But they won't do that because they are lazy incapable snobs who really cannot get anything done except "being concerned".