... who parsed this as 'University of NSFW'?

"Deprived of the ability to use browser plugins, protected content distributors are not, in general, switching to unprotected media. Instead, they're switching away from the Web entirely. "
So what is wrong with this, exactly? If you want to distribute DRMed content, you are fully free to use your own means. Let the web stay DRM-free, as it should be.

"It's way too expensive when I don't know if it's even a good game or not." This is why you play the demo.

"Game prices are too high"? Seriously, is US$ 8 too expensive for you? We're not talking about an US$ 50 game here.
"People don't want to spend any amount of money without knowing what they will get in return."? There are demo versions available.

I wouldn't mind seeing one of those being turned into something useful after the 15-day trial expires, or at least a teardown.

This is why you add a rule, and configure the guest operating system, to allow this application - but nothing else - to connect to the internet. While you're at that, you probably could do a minimal-enough install of Windows which would only run the application.

You can run Windows XP as a VM which is isolated from the internet through a firewall. That will probably help.

Laptops should be using suspend/hibernation - which is still a problem in Linux, sadly.

(Posting to undo mistaken mod) At least for me, in Windows 7 I didn't need any shell replacement (or much in the way of tweaking, really) unlike I needed in XP. In fact, whenever I use XP (I have some virtual machines for ancient software) I miss the Windows 7 interface.

Fake journals let anything and everything in, so you can pretend you have lots of papers published. Some of them pretend to be prestigious jornals: can't get published in Nature or Science? Why not Nature and Science?

While I despise MATLAB for a large set of reasons, I agree that a large variety of toolboxes is available for pretty much anything you might want to do. And those are what most of the MATLAB users look for, in my experience: they might dislike the language, but MATLAB provides/they can purchase toolboxes that do what they need for their research.

I wish FreeBSD added support - however minimal, disabling the power-hogging dedicated graphics card - for hybrid graphics. That would be pretty much enough for me to at least dual-boot FreeBSD on my laptop.

I would like to see how it stands against current CPUs. Aside from making it available for open-source projects which could benefit from testing on not-very-common architectures, I don't see much use for it either.

Some erasing will eventually happen. Smaller forums, newsgroups etc... will eventually die (domain expires, owner loses interest, they become spamfests and then are punished by Google's algorithms etc...).