In my country they DO sell game meat in stores.

I block ads because some sites are *so* horribly infested with annoying, blinking, screaming, memory-hogging, loud crap that there is no choice but to install something.
I am willing to whitelist a site that asks nicely AND takes care that the advertisments do not make their site un-viewable. No popups, no animated crap that makes reading text impossible, no flash that bogs down entire computer, no loud sound, no articles divided to 20 parts so they can cram 20 times more ads down our collective throats, no double-underlined words that display a caption add when I move mouse over them. It can be done. Have a look at google site.

Please understand: the vast majority of users out there are too lazy and ignorant to mess with switching on the add blocking. They are even willing to use browsers horribly infested with unbelievable amount of crap. In order to make such user to go and ask someone knowledgeable to install an adblock for them they had to be extremely annoyed.

So, if you want to blame somebody, blame stupid webmasters and super-greedy advertisers that created sites that drove us to block ads.

Well, my very first thought after I started using Windows 8 was that that thing was in many aspects very similar to Emacs.

To use Windows 8 you very quickly learn many useful keyboard shortcuts, like Win-x if you want to start some program that isn't jet on that Start screen. Compare that with Meta-x used in Emacs to run commands. There are many other similarities.

That said, I personally prefer Vim ;-)

well, before jumping to conclusions you should have looked up previous names:
1.0 - Ada
2.0 - Barbara
2.1 - Bea
2.2 - Bianca
3.0 - Cassandra
3.1 - Celena
4.0 - Daryna
5 LTS - Elyssa
6 - Felicia
7 - Gloria
8 - Helena
9 LTS - Isadora
10 - Julia
11 - Katya
12 - Lisa
13 LTS - Maya
14 - Nadia

This way it makes much more sense, doesn't it?

The problem is, you do not get the same results.
Mint also makes it difficult for you to change their Google search, restoring the config to the default after reboot.
When I discovered this fact, I actually went and tried out several other distros. Sigh ... I guess I am too spoiled by Mint and I wasn't satisfied with other systems.

When I type something like '1.2 * 123 Usd in Eur' into a vanilla Google, I get the numerical result. When I type those into the search box in firefox at Mint Linux, I do not get numerical result. There are many more examples.
Fortunately, it is trivial to *add* (not change the one installed by Mint ;-) ) additional search engine, so I added a Google.com search engine - the one that doesnt redirect you to regional version of Google.

For a time I tried to switch to the search engine provided by Mint for searches that I knew would provide very similar result, but I do not do that anymore. Sorry Clem. No revenue from my hijacked search queries.

In later versions Clem made pact with duckduckgo search engine and made that default. I tried to use duckduckgo as well, but, somehow, I gravitated back to using Google.com.

At the moment I use Mint Linux Maya KDE as my main home desktop.

Yes, you knew that, and yet you called them "The Santa Cruz Operation." Santa Cruz operation was entirely different company. This bankrupted company is Caldera, later renamed "SCO" [that is: NOT Santa Cruz Operation] in an attempt to muddle things. Apparently they were highly successful.

Try just setting the hinting to the highest level. The fonts will look extremely sharp. I have done just that in Mint 11 and 12 and I am very pleased.

I do that differently.
I have one large partition for the /home directory and two primary partitions for my Mint Linux installs. On one of those I keep working Mint Linux installation that I use for everyday activity and the next is for trying the new stuff. When I am finally satisfied with a new install, I switch to using that as my main workhorse and use the old partition for experimental stuff.
Just do not use the same login name when you install the new version, so you keep your entries in /home/WhateverLoginName separate. You can of course use all the stuff from your all home.

Just take care to keep all your stuff in /home directory.

One more thing. Always install Grub (or whatever bootloader the distro has) to the partition with the distro and use Smart Boot Manager in mbr to choose what you want to boot.

He is going to teach other English Literature majors.

I wish I had modpoints.
There are two possibilities:
1. Excel gets ported with full support of the VBA scripts and Macros, user defined functions, and control elements (such as buttons, checkboxes) and gets shot down immediately
2. Excel gets ported without the above functionality and will be useless for business users.

When I tried to deploy OpenOffice.org in our company all users(*) that were fighting tooth and nail for Excel were claiming that they can't possibly live without "advanced" Excel stuff like macros, basic scripts and 100% compatibility with documents created by our business partners.

(*)Yes, there was small handful of users that started using OO.o Calc with no problems.

It looks very promising. Simple, neat, clean-looking. There was discussion on /. a few days ago.
http://razor-qt.org/screenshots/

One day my pre-teen-aged daughter wanted to set up an avatar for her Google mail account, like her best friend had. A nice pony or whatever. So we have opened the settings and one of things that Google wanted to know was the date of birth. After naively filling in the date (*not* the real number, but still way low age) ... poooof ... the account was gone. And mind you, this was account my daughter has created in an "IT" class. In my country we do not have educational accounts the article talks about.

In one second the account is there, the next ... gone.
Google wanted scan of my ID or something.
YOU ARE NOT GONNA GET IT GOOGLE!!! You Do. Not. Need. A. Copy. Of. My. Passport.

So we have created another account with a slightly different name, but my daughter has been upset for quite a long time. Still is, in fact. And I had to explain why Google are such ... bloody morons.

The same day I have made backup of my entire Google mail account. I do not trust them anymore that they won't pull the same stunt with MY personal account.

A friend of mine keeps policeman hat on the back seat. Says that it helps. It might depend on the neighbourhood and/or country you live in. In some places that might attract vandals ;-). In *my* country, I can imagine it might keep some thieves out.