palordrolap

Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.

Should have gone for something like “Dennis Richie Advanced Computing University Lab Annex.”

Parses weird, but look at that acronym.

Haven’t seen this in the other comments: Coolness factor. If you’re a successfully popular teacher, i.e. “cool”, then your students will likely want to participate in whatever it is you suggest.

However, if they don’t see you as cool, you might have difficulty, and might even put them off the platform. This is not something that can be fixed easily, and trying to be cool is about as uncool as you can get.

(Making it mandatory will work, of course, but how you go about that could determine whether they choose to stay on the platform once you’re done. This was kind of covered by OP talking about Matrix in another comment here.)

Listen, we’ve had some absolute monsters who were, regrettably, human almost manage that feat. There’s no reason not to assume that a robot of similar mindset might not actually manage to do it.

“Run it better than we do” is then laid bare as the subjective nightmare it really is. Sure, some people will like it, but we have a name for those: Masochists.

Rumour has it she used it for e-mail.

You’re missing the part where “democracy” means what he wants it to mean and he hopes that everyone else thinks he means what they want it to mean, regardless of whether those meanings intersect.

For example, Russia, China, and at least two of the countries with “Democratic” in their official name are democracies. Technically.

Yep. I remember - despite the fact it was old even then - building and connecting a Win 3.11 machine to a TCP/IP office network as a proof of concept back in 2000 or so. I might have even installed Netscape on it. I don’t remember clearly now, but I assume the parts for the computer came out of the spares pile, and were soon recycled back into other machines.

I was mainly thinking in terms of its use as a cheap bulking agent in food rather than as a nutritional supplement. If I tried a straight supplement, I fear Violet Beauregarde’s transformation would have nothing on what would happen.

Fun fact: In a hilarious misuse of the #! script interpreter mechanism, on Linux (and similar operating systems), if you put #!/bin/cat as the first line of a file and make it executable, it’ll dump itself to the current output channel when called by name.

Which is basically what you’re describing.

See also: Perl, which will try to interpret almost anything as legitimate code if you don’t tell it not to.

TIL I’m a robot because whey protein really messes me up too. I have some captchas to apologise to.

It’s a bit easier to not use a website than it is to leave a country.

A combination of browser settings and exceptionally rare usage of short link providers - as creator or user - means I’m not completely sure about this, but … were they putting ads on the short links somehow?

Because I figure if they weren’t they should have tried that.

And if they were, how expensive is running a short link service anyway? This feels like rummaging around in the sofa for loose change. Smacks of desperation.

Weary prediction: They’ll say “We’ve investigated ourselves and determined no wrong-doing.” and that’ll be it.

This was funnier when it happened to Chief Wiggum.

I think that can be boiled down to only cd; echo .*/

Maybe throw a ;cd - on the end if the change of directory is unwanted.

Coming back to this with thoughts. What you’re describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.

“Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B,” etc. 1

“You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]” Y

“Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]” N

“Are you sure you want to run notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47? [Y/n]” N

“Aborted.”

It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn’t that hard, only time consuming.

Well, he does have the retort “Why are you wearing that stupid man-suit?”, which kind of fits the theme here.

can’t afford it

Here’s a thicket of weeds: Why would you want to show ads to someone who can’t afford your product?

YouTube have been doing that sort of thing for years though. Do you remember the push to have everyone switch to a Google+ account with a real name attached?

They’d ask if you wanted to do the aforementioned, and if you said no, they responded “OK we’ll ask again later.”

No “Never ask me this again.”, just the implicit “f–k you, we’re going to pester you with this over and over again until you sign up.”

After they got enough sign-ups they quit asking. And then Google+ went down the Swanee, so they relented and decided that maybe it was OK for people to have pseudonymous accounts after all. It only took years for that to happen.

Can’t see how short-form content is going to fail in the same way, so there’ll be nothing here to teach them the lesson again.

Win7. I use LMDE+Cinnamon now and I have it looking suspiciously like how I had Win7. Old habits and all that.

Though you didn’t ask, Win2K was the probably the best Windows, IMO. Then came the bloat and the ugly UIs. (I’ve kind of got used to bloat these days. Storage is cheaper than it was, and LMDE isn’t exactly the slimmest distro.)

Maybe I would have liked Win10. Similar to how it was with the old Star Trek movies, it seems like every other version of Windows is terrible, and if that remains true, maybe 12 will be better than 11. Probably not going back to find out though.