It is known that boot times for Windows grow exponentially in the number of Windows-updates performed ;-( (This is true for at least XP, Vista, 7, and 8.)

Or PCLinuxOS (or Mageia) with KDE...

So shortened Memes trump their long versions and they get reused in new places and new ways?

In other words, FB users are lazy and attention whores. You really needed a study to find that out? I'd have a few studies I could do, where's my grant money!

Email attachments are the bane of a smooth user experience for grandma.

She probably has a web mail account, and uses a browser to access it. She's going to receive all kinds of weird attachments from friends, and she will want them all to just work. There are Power Point slideshows, Word documents, spreadsheet files, movies, embedded images, links to images on mailing lists, flash animations, PDFs, MIDIs, and more. Any of these can be in several layers of forwarded messages, or stuffed into an .eml file. They can be messed up by a friend's email setup that does crap like "soft" line breaks-- breaking lines and indicating this by adding an '=' symbol to the ends of the breaks.

To get as much of that to work as possible, need lots of software. Libre Office to handle the Power Point, doc, and spreadsheet files. But that's not enough, need codecs so Libre Office can play whatever video or audio is embedded in the Power Point. Got to have Thunderbird for the .eml files (which still often do not open properly), and a PDF viewer.

Finally, a weak point of Firefox, and I think all browsers, is association. Firefox is quite poor at remembering which program to use to handle a particular file type. Often the user is forced to browse around in the file system. Grandma is not going to like having to slog through /usr/bin to find a suitable program, if she even gets that far.

I am really glad this came up, because my WiFi at my house hasn't been working as well lately, and it gives me something to try... maybe manually placing it on a different channel will help.

Nice analogy... You know those cheesy ads BP is always running since the Gulf Coast disaster to rehabilitate their image? You could help them make a new one - "BP! We're just like paint huffers!!! You'll never stop us! BhaaHaHaHaHaaaa!!!"

Perhaps you are referring to this http://www.wikihow.com/Find-th.... So problem is already largely solved it just requires full implementation, the fine system seems like the logical route.

I came out on the music reward scale at 32, well below their mean of 50. However, I spent fifteen years learning to play, I write for myself and have also published an album.

I don't use music as wallpaper, which is very much what the questions seemed geared around. Also questions like "Music calms me (agree 1-5)" - well, which music? Some of it very much does not calm me, and some quite definitely does.

Not sure that data collected by the questionairre wil be useful in drawing the right conclusions.

Well, typically, you start by grabbing the file by its strings, give 'em a twist and get it on its back. Then you lift the tail[*] such that all the loose bits run off onto the floor as you make your first pass. Some prefer Occam's Razor when shearing data, but I find Hanlon's Razor works, too.

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[*] I find that tail -n 100 is enough to get a decent grip, but it really depends on the size of the RAM....

Let's say you live in an apartment building and you can see 16 different SSIDs. Is it slow because there's a lot of data in total being transferred, or does CSMA just collapse (gridlock) so hardly anybody is getting anything? It seems like back when ethernet was actually used as a shared medium (hubs) throughput was good up to about 85% and then it would just die.

Sure, but first you have to let me take your photograph, to prove that you're not afraid that it's going to steal your soul.

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The simplest most logical solution is often correct. With bitcoin security being down to nothing but user name and password and there being a whole world full of suitable drugs to help elicit that information and provide side affects to silence the witness. The simplest solution is she was used to facilitate the theft and then was eliminated as a dangerous witness.

The odd thing of course that the thieves forget, the more bitcoins that are stolen the more devalued the pseudo pretend currency becomes (as it has no government backing, backing it with the assets of whole countries). Bitcoin is truly dangerous to hold as your username and password give 'TOTAL' access unlike bank accounts where access it be reversed or withdrawn a whole trail is created with access, allowing investigation and prosecution.

Let me guess -- it's all Silverlight, right?

Ok, allow me to rephrase it. Science does not ask for the meaning of things. Science does not ask why this world exists. Or why the universe exists. Why human walks the earth or why we have our self consciousness and the ability to ponder these things in the first place. If any field is interested in this, it would probably be psychology and philosophy. Certainly not physics or astronomy.

Science does not question the meaning or purpose of something. Science tries to find out how something works. Not to what purpose it does it. Science does not anthropomorphise the world and try to find its purpose or some "grand plan" behind it. Science is concerned with how things work, what makes them tick. The "why is the sky blue" question is, from a scientific point of view, a question for the physical reason behind it. Not trying to give it some higher purpose in the grand scheme of things.

Religion usually does just that, and answers these questions about meaning and purpose. That's its appeal for people, people like it when things have a purpose. The idea that some things "just are" seem to make people uneasy. Especially when it's themselves that "just are".

*IS* Red Hat giving them a compilable version? I doubt it. I think they acquire it from a third party who legally acquired it.