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.