So why aren't we all writing 'over zealous' bots designed to identify misuse of that one video we shot as part of a GE requirement in college, said bots which just happens to constantly misidentify content which large studios are selling online, so that the studios are constantly battling nonsensical DMCA takedowns too?

Well, there's a few hundred uninhabited islands listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Uninhabited_islands_by_country but I think maybe 25 of those would be "tropical .. with plenty of fresh water, fruit, and fish". Problem is, what's the other 6 billion people who'd like the same thing supposed to do?

More info would be nice - How old were you? How old was your wife? How old was your milkman?

"If not, what are some effective strategies to utilize to keep these kids off my lawn?"

Do your work faster and better than them. You already know you can do things with a cli that can't be done with a gui, and that you can do many many things faster with a cli than could be done with a gui. As long as you can do whatever it is your peers can do just as effectively, you'll make out fine in most environments; if you can *also* do things that no-one else can do, you'll do better than your peers. On the other hand, if your 'resistance' to the new bright-shiny means you can't do key things that your peers can do, or do them far slower, you need to either change what you do in the world or re-examine your unwillingness to change.

Err.. a) Mexico doesn't have a total ban on guns (gun ownership is a constitutionally protected right), it's just been limted to purchasing from a single army-run shop in Mexico City; b) Mexico happens to have this large nation to the immediate north with relatively limited small arms gun control, and the border heading south is only marginally guarded; so unsurprisingly c) The US Justice Department estimates 70% of guns recovered from Mexican cartels were legally purchased in the US. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5guv1zxttoSAF-NOJzZkAJV2R93mg

I wouldn't be shocked to hear cartels are also buying abroad, but why bother when you can get most of what you need immediately to the north?

"No really, people I talk to that are not at all computer savvy have heard "the new windows" or windows 8 sucks, and are in some cases actually buying used computers to avoid Windows 8."

Yup. My retired parents had heard that and I convinced them to try linux on their 3-4 year old laptops - they were happy with what they perceived as a speed jump from vista (still looked slow to me, but whatever). I know 'converting aged relatives to linux' stories are a dime a dozen on slashdot, but this was the first time I'd actually done it and had the in-person experience of watching genuine aged relatives take to it with relative ease.

Anyway, thanks Windows 8, for producing such end-user horror stories that yet another few aged relatives were willing to go outside their comfort zone and try a free OS.

In the last 10 years I went RedHat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Mint. And more generally the most common 'migration' is pulling a HDD and putting a new larger/faster one in, doing a fresh install at the same time & needing to migrate files and settings from the old HDD. I guess technically I'm also 'migrating' when I get a new laptop or something and wipe the default windows install, but given I've never even booted to the windows install it's not really 'migrating'.

"but over your shortened lifetimes you end up needing LESS healthcare, not more"

Wasn't that the line tobacco companies were trying to sell the Czech Republic a few years ago? Allow smoking because people die younger & your universal healthcare system will cost less?

"If you are a smoker, try vaping instead. Get yourself a good ego-c"

And isn't this the current line tobacco companies are promoting in the US?

So, foreverdisillusioned, which tobacco lobbyist group do you work for anyway?

I thought this was 'news for nerds', not 'failed Republican talking points'?

Until or unless there's a sudden drop in the price of electricity, in which case any economy in which bitcoins play a more than marginal role will go a bit crazy for a while. Then again, a disruptive shift in the price of electricity will probably make any economy period go a bit crazy for a while.

"for example a GUI for editing layouts"

This! Latex and Lyx are fabulous as long as there's a class file or style file available for whatever format you need, but the second you're preparing something where there's no existing class file, you're screwed unless you want to spend hours with the Lamport book learning the intricacies - something that by definition Lyx is trying to help users avoid. Most of the time there's even something close to what you want - I ended up digging through the Lamport book when doing my PhD because there was an old, out of date class file available for doctoral theses for my institution, but it needed to be updated to meet changed requirements for filing. A gui allowing me to edit the layout would have saved me a lot of pain.

I don't use firefox either, so good thing there's been Zotero standalone for several years now (you get offered both the firefox and standalone equally prominently on the download page: http://www.zotero.org/download/) along with plugins for chrome and safari. There's also several guides online to setting up either zotero standalone or the firefox version in 'portable' mode on a usb stick, although I haven't tried that myself.

There's a plugin for zotero, autozotbib (http://rtwilson.com/academic/autozotbib) which exports your zotero collection to a bibtex file then keeps the bibtex file synced (ie every time you add a reference to zotero the bibtex file is updated automatically).

Dunno why this is marked 'funny'. 'Informative' is more like it.

The bit I love is "A yes answer may not necessarily prejudice your application" at the end..