This isn't actually plagiarism - plagiarism is ripping off the work of another writer. This is simply paying someone to write something for you; in that sense, you might as well call a politician a plagiarist because the letter he sent you was written by his secretary.

What it is, is cheating - which is really, really pointless. You might get better grades in classwork, but you won't learn anything: so you will lose out when it comes to the exam, and in 10 years time when you are being asked questions in an interview your lack of ability to construct a decent argument will lead to someone else getting the job.

It's really easy to make LaTeX not look like an academic article: just use the right documentclass. If your file starts \documentclass{article} then you probably will find it hard to play with settings to make it not look like an academic article...

This is exactly the way most lecturers would love to operate: if you don't show up to my lectures, and you fail my exam, tough.

The problem is that what actually happens is students don't show up to lectures, then they realise they don't know the material shortly before exam time and take up huge amounts of lecturers' time. We are not paid to spend five hours trying to deal with one persistent student who wants us to basically give them personal lectures on a moment's notice, and we usually have better things to do (i.e. research, which we are paid for, and dealing with more legitimate student questions). Then the student will often fail anyway, because you cannot explain in five hours a 30-hour lecture course to someone who really doesn't understand anything.

And then, occasionally (but often enough for it to be a worry) the student decides that having paid his tuition he is entitled to pass the course. And since he hasn't, it must be someone's fault, and therefore he will go through the university complaints procedure (or even sue). And then the lecturer ends up wasting part of their summer (when we probably wanted to be attending conferences, where we promised to give talks which will now be cancelled, thereby annoying colleagues), sorting out some argument that in fact we did everything we reasonably could to help the idiot pass the course. And, very simply, the easiest way to make this argument is to pull out the attendance record. If I can say the student has only been to half the lectures, I won't have to worry about my summer plans being disrupted: the university won't even listen to student arguments that the course was too hard.

In many countries the police are obliged to protect you; and the name (and US motto) would suggest it. People watch TV, and see policemen responding to 999 calls (UK) and think that applies in the US as well. Equally, in the UK there are criminals who demand to be 'read their rights' - which is nonsense: if you know your rights fine, if not, the UK police have no obligation to tell you; but the US crime shows give a lot of people the wrong idea.

50 lashes with a rope whip is not something you go to work the next day from, it's something that has about a one in ten chance of putting you in a morgue (damage to internal organs). Maybe you mean a cane?

That really is an exceptionally ridiculous situation to be in. If you cannot call police and expect that they will come, why bother with a police force? I'm well aware that sometimes it may take an hour for the police to arrive because there is some distance involved, but to not bother coming at all..? Another reason not to visit the US, though at this stage I don't really need more reasons.

Unicode support depends on the operating system and the specific compiler. If you want to be sure everything will work on everyone's computer, escape everything that isn't standard ASCII-128. If you only care about your machine and you happen to have a nicely behaved compiler/OS combination, you can happily type an u-umlaut directly instead of \"u and it will work. That said, the escape codes are not exactly hard - it's not HTML where they're non-standard; if you want an acute accent then you use \' followed by the letter, et cetera.

If you use LaTeX, since it's built on top of TeX, what you are basically doing is accepting Don Knuth's idea of good style. Some of it is good, some is not so good.

If you use HTML, you aren't really taking anyone's idea of good style; HTML rendering is supposed to be minimalist, the browser is not meant to try to fix pretty hyphenation or whatever.

HTML is not, originally, designed to do document design. It's not even really meant to do 'pretty' web design, which is why websites are typically a mess of CSS and set styles forcing the HTML to do something it's not basically meant to do - and the later HTML spec confuses this further by trying to make the ugly forcing style standardised. What HTML was originally for was a very basic markup, enough to cope with a few text sizes and colours (and pictures, badly) on a screen that could be anything from ASCII-text only (i.e. drop all the markup and pictures), 12'' mono, 21'' VGA, et cetera - the point being that the markup should be easy to parse for the browser to render as something intelligible.

LaTeX is not especially antiquated; there's not much 'modern' that you can't do in LaTeX. What you can't easily do, is anything Knuth doesn't like. So, you may want to flow text by an image, but because Knuth doesn't like that you can't do it without a lot of work.

But the simple fact for a journal is, if everything is in the same style it looks professional. So the journal will do everything in LaTeX, and your argument that your new style looks better will be ignored; they'll just bill you for retyping the document in LaTeX.

I can tell you exactly what a journal would do with HTML: the same as they'd do with a word doc or a handwritten manuscript, namely charge you a fee for retyping.