A literary illusion?

I think you mean "allusion". Unless that was some illusion passing me by, going "whoosh"...

Indeed, and not entirely incongruous with the premise that "30% of Americans Get News From Facebook".

The latter might go a long way toward explaining the apparent general level of profound ignorance.

Curiously, though, by far the majority of my math professors have impressed me as being exceptionally well-read, erudite and articulate. I can honestly say they were an inspiration to me, to the extent that I sometimes felt that it would have been worthwhile to study math more than as a discipline incidental to my other studies.

However, honesty compelled me to admit that although I can comfortably handle a differential equation, I would never be more than a plodder in the context of post-graduate math, which is where you only begin to scratch the surface of new ground.

Well, part of my edited post did make reference to chimpanzees and Shakespeare. :)

Fix: You'd hope so. But apparently in vain. All too often (if we take the trouble to look, or if we notice that our own submissions are bowdlerised) we see perfectly cogent posts mangled to the extent that any relevant content is entirely non-existent. Maybe there's a new species of crypto-editor that needs to be added to the corpus of cryptozoological studies...

No, he was talking about "Adaucity", which is apparently so obscure, not even Google can find any developers associated with it. So that program might indeed be crap, but we'll never know.

Correction: crippleware if you don't build it from source.

My bad. Sorry. Actually, just to be clear, the OP's submission (pre-editing) does, to be fair, mention "proprietary or open-source"...

Ardour might be fine piece of software, but sadly it is also crippleware unless you are prepared to cough up your shekels.

I had been about to mention that submissions usually get put through the mangle by some so-called editors(*) before making an appearance in public. You are probably fortunate that it is comprehensible at all.

*term used loosely; my original (edited) choice was less polite, but possibly more informative.

On this topic: Unless Hewlett-Packard has changed its policy with more recent machines, every one of their printers I have ever used since ~1997 spits out innumerable test pages at every opportunity. I can only imagine this is a deliberate effort to gouge their customers, and I now make a point of refusing to buy any HP printer, and advise anyone else who asks likewise. It's a pity, because quite a few of their machines are otherwise quite good.

Rule 4 (I guess): Don't let a printer's support for Mac boxes fool you into thinking that it will work with the versions of CUPS that come with any Linux distro. I made that mistake with a Fuji/Xerox CP105b laser printer, and ended up prowling around dozens of forums to no avail. I eventually got it working by hacking the PPD file, but that was a bit more of a learning curve than I needed at the time.

I would second the recommendation to look for a machine with an ethernet port. A host running lpd or whatever needs no user-side configuration.

No, indeed. And even when we are "plugged in", far too many websites have a ridiculously high-frequency autorefresh (via scripts that I haven't found a way to disable) that serve up exactly the same inane drivel that we were foolishly attempting to read in the first place. Serves us right, I suppose... :-|

Ancient? Come here and say that, you whappersnipper! My X.25 modem is only 25 years old and as good as the day it was made. Now get off my lawn...

Then don't. NFTables is (as I see it) simply another (supposedly/perhaps) more elegant way of approaching the issue. I don't believe there is anything that makes it technically superior to iptables, and in any case, there is nothing that says you have to use NFTables. If your distro won't work properly without it, it's time to change your distro to a more sensible one.

The most recent update to the 2.4 tree was in 1st May of this year. So it looks like it is indeed still being supported.

To be fair, the kernel developers have (to my knowledge) never done this. If you have ever compiled a kernel yourself, you will have seen that new features are flagged as "experimental", older features as "deprecated", and defaults are applied judiciously.

You will most likely find that it is your distribution that is most guilty of foisting bleeding-edge, half-tested stuff on to its users. Linus and the kernel devs are (and have to be) almost fanatically conservative.