That sounds like an awful restriction! May I ask in which state you live?

1. In some cases, but perceived screen size is relative to your distance from it. A medium-sized TV can sufficiently fill my visual field as long as I'm not sitting clear across the room from it. Maybe not quite the same, but close enough for me. Bonus: My sofa's comfier than most theater chairs - and less sticky - and no tall people ever sit in front of me at home and block a corner of the screen (except the cat sometimes).

2. I don't need a group of people telling me when to laugh, thank you very much. My own emotional acuity is perfectly adequate for my enjoyment. When I do want company for a movie, friends and family make for a much more enjoyable shared experience than the random crowds of strangers at the theater.

3. I honestly can't relate to this issue. If you can't ignore your electronics long enough to watch a two or three hour movie, you may need to disconnect for a while.

4. Also can't relate, although I know there are many people like that. But even in the theater you can close your eyes and plug your ears to avoid the scary (my wife does this). Bonus: Watching at home is less relentless in bad ways; in a theater you can't pause to use the restroom or rewind to catch important missed dialog.

5. Theather-quality home speaker systems can be prohibitively expensive, but you can still get good quality for the price even on a budget. I'm not much of an audiophile, though, and am reasonably content with a $100 2.1 sound bar. YMMV.

6. Previews? Ick. I deliberately arrive a couple minutes late to avoid previews. If you like them so much, watch the ones you want on YouTube, not the limited selection they offer before your movie. I don't like paying to be advertised to.

7. Again, can't really relate. I can see how that would affect some people, but I don't watch a lot on the TV so sitting down to a movie really does feel like a time that's set apart. YMMV.

8. TRUE alone time at home, with your significant other, is also a cherished pastime and WITHOUT all those annoying "other people." Not everyone likes crowds - in fact, some of us *hate* them and go out of our way to avoid them.

9. Why not 32 ounces of diabet... er... cola in the dark that I don't have to pay $10 for? At home I can have full access to all my favorite snacks, on the cheap, no smuggling required.

10. Huh? Do you also brag that you wandered Walmart for 30 minutes trying to decide on a nice pillow to buy, instead of just getting one on Amazon in 5 minutes? Unless it's a premier showing of Star Wars, Star Trek, or some other suitably awesome movie, there are no bragging rights attached to watching a movie in the theater. And even then it's negligible.

I'm a security-conscious sysadmin, which is why I spent my Saturday hunting squirrels.* You're welcome, America.

*actually, because free meat. Didn't know about The Rodent Threat until reading this, but you're still welcome, America.

Although most people in Michigan do find themselves within just an hour or two of Ohio and Indiana, there are populous areas in Northern Lower Michgian and the UP that are anywhere from 4 to 6 hours from the nearest state line, and many wealthy people who might like to own a Tesla have homes up there. Michigan is entirely peninsulas (except for the islands, of course), and that has a funny way of physically isolating you from other states - maybe not as much as in huge states like Texas, but still.

Now if they could go pick up their shiny new Tesla in Canada, that would be something else....

Well, he has two options then:

1) Let the firefight play out until he knows which party is the original aggressor (ie, the Bad Guy). If one party is victorious in the firefight but then continues to shoot non-combatants, then he knows who the Bad Guys are. However, if the victorious party stops shooting after the firefight, the police order them to the ground and sort out the situation, determining eventually that they're the Good Guys.

2) Shoot everyone with a gun. This is bad news for the legally armed person, but is a known and accepted risk among concealed carriers (source: I am one, and I know many who are; we understand we could be mistaken for bad guys in this kind of situation, and accept that risk if we choose to engage the Bad Guy).

Either situation is a happier outcome for the innocent noncombatants than just hunkering down and dying en masse until the police arrive.

Now, collateral damage is always more of a risk with more combatants, especially with concealed carriers who don't keep up on their tactical training. However, I suspect that the overall damage is still lower than just letting the killer keep shooting at defenseless people, especially since most people tend to either run or take cover when gun fire starts, meaning there won't be too many people in the line of fire for very long except in very crowded places, and so the overall casualties will still be lower.

+1 to this. I actually switched my wife to Mint with Cinnamon from Mac OS. All the drivers worked without any tweaking. My wife's not technical at all, but had zero issues using the system and finds it very intuitive. She particularly likes the blend of clean aesthetics and great functionality - she's an artist, so I take her approval of the aesthetics quite seriously.

What actions or concessions should businesses take, on a social and practical scale, to help integrate and utilize those with autism, especially those with a particular gifting and working environment needs?

With a name like Plato, I worry it won't see much other than shadows when searching for stars....

Well, to address at least that one point, one model I've heard from some Christian evolutionary biologists which seems to fit the data utilizes the Upper Paleolitic Revolution as a possible point in time at which humankind first became "spiritual" and therefore capable of sin. To quickly summarize the Upper Paleolithic Revolution (though I am not a bioligist/archaeologist/what-have-you; mere computer scientist and mathemetician by training), "anatomically modern humans" - ie, humans that look like you and me - have been found as far back as about 195 thousand years in the fossil record. But it wasn't until about 50 thousand years ago that we begin to see them exhibiting modern behavioral traits such as the creation of more advanced tools than they'd been using for 145 thousand years, accelerated language development, and the first evidence of religion. This sudden revolution occurred in East Africa or the Middle East and spread from there across the globe to anatomically human populations on other continents. It's been suggested by some Christian evolutionary biologists that this revolution represents the first moment in time in which God "breathed spirit" into humans, making them moral and creative beings, and from them it spread to others or their offspring. It could've begun with just two - who rebelled against God, making for original sin - and spread into the rest of the heretofore unspiritual, anatomical human population.

This solves at least two major issues. First, it allows for original sin. Second, it fits our genetic data which suggests that the genetic human population could never have been fewer than 10 thousand at any point in history; the unspritual population provides genetic diversity for the expansion of the spiritual population - or even become spriritual themselves through cultural interactions.

My primary source: http://godandnature.asa3.org/opinion-adam-and-the-origin-of-man.html

Depending on your skill set, some of the volunteer positions with Mercy Ships might fit the bill: http://www.mercyships.org/content/home

Positions available: http://www.mercyships.org/positions/P0/

Seriously, you only found one shortcut for the Windows key? I find that surprising. There are quite a few more: Win+Arrow Keys can be used for window management (only in 7, to my knowledge), Win+R opens a run dialog, Win+D takes you to the desktop, Win+F opens a search window for the system, Win+E opens an Explorer window, Win+Break opens System Properties, Win+Spacebar peaks at the desktop (only in 7, to my knowledge), and Win+L locks the currently logged in account (useful if you live in a dorm or other environment where people like to mess with your system when you step away for a moment). There are many others, but these are the ones I find most useful. YMMV. I'm not sure what other simple key combinations could be used for the same functionality. And if you're using Mac OS or Linux with that Windows keyboard, it works as the command key or super key. So yeah, I'd say it can be quite useful.

I name all of my computers after classes of starship from Star Trek. The netbook is called Nova (small, slow, but for short-term missions/computing only), the desktop-replacement laptop I just sold was called Prometheus (had a lot of power; that's about it), and the desktop I just built is the Dauntless (really crazy fast).

Of course, Nova only applies to the Linux partition on my netbook. Since its Windows install was originally a Chinese version which I converted over to English, some text still pops up in Chinese once in a long while (and usually just with error messages, almost like it's swearing at me in Chinese). I therefore break with tradition and call it Serenity when booted into Windows.