A 90 year old grandmother can defend herself against a knife wielding rapist if she has a gun. Without it she is relegated to only being a victim. Unless she is some sort of Navy Seal that can fight the criminal on his own terms.

Or she could use pepper spray. Incapacitates faster than a gun and requires less accuracy, plus the enormous benefit that you're much less likely to kill someone with it (including yourself or loved ones).

Amazon Prime Video is working fine for me with the XBMC add on, and XBMC has a Linux client.

I have not idea if VLC natively supports SMB streaming (I didn't even know that was a feature desktop VLC had), but SMB streaming is wroking great for me with cifsmanager.

You're really not thinking very hard, Android runs on more than just tiny phones. I just installed the VLC alpha a few days ago on my (rooted) Kindle Fire, which is great for watching video (that's one of it's selling points). Combined with cifsmanager, I can now browse and play my entire music and movie collection on my home server, without having to transcode everything into the limited formats that the Kindle supports. Very, very useful indeed.

If your income has stagnated after 10 years of experience, the root cause is that you have stagnated your own career

I'll try to explain what I think the grandparent means. Say I am a mechanical or electrical engineer at a large company. Here are the requirements for promotion:

Level 1: Starting (college grad)
Level 2: Minimum 2 years experience.
Level 3: Minimum 5 years experience.
Level 4: Minimum 9 years experience.
Level 5: Minimum 14 years experience. Also needs a "business case" to justify promotion. These are typically technical lead positions, but are not management.

The numbers above are real numbers from a large US company. As you can see, once you've reached Level 4 you've reached the end of your career advancement if you want to stay a grunt, and you can easily get there in 10 years from college. Many Engineers stay at this level for the rest of their career. Level 5 is doable if you don't mind being a lead, but still that's only 14 years in and then you truly have reached the end of your career advancement. Beyond that, the only options for advancement are:

* Go into management.
* Company hop to increase your salary.

This has nothing to do with whether or not you keep your skill set up to date. If you do that you may get higher yearly merit salary increases (which hopefully exceed inflation), but no more promotions. The salary grades just don't exist.

there are three ways to establish trust. Something you have , something are , something you know.

This is incorrect, there are only two. "Something you are" (fingerprints, retinas, etc.) is really just another kind of "something you have". The only differences between biometrics and something like a physical key or access card is that biometrics are horribly insecure (how many objects have you left your fingerprints on today?) and nearly impossible to replace if they get compromised.

It's about doing something simply to show that it can be done, like the explorers of centuries past.

Most exploration in centuries past was primarily motivated by monetary gain (new trade routes, new sources of natural resources, etc). Just sayin'...

Every security briefing I've been to they say don't write your password down on a piece of paper.

Bruce Schneier disagrees with you and your security professionals.

along with a reasonable shell

Have you tried the native Windows port of zsh? It was unmaintained for several years but has recently been picked up again, might be worth checking out.