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I find your position easy to relate to. I've spent years being aware of the show, somewhat tempted to try it, but the number of season has always put me off. I've spent a large chunk of my life watching all the Stargate (among other series), so I knew that such number of seasons is a big commitment, particularly when I find it hard to relate to the older stuff.

But then when Season 5 started and all my sci-fi-watching friends were jumping around from happiness, I couldn't resist anymore. So I started at the rebooted Season 1. In retrospect that definitely was a good place to start. It's fairly new, so I could relate to it rather easily. Everything is explained as if it's the first time you see it, all characters and concepts are well introduced. Plus the series picks up the pace quite fast and as soon as you reach Season 2 and the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) you will find out why he's one of the most popular doctors. Once I went through all the new seasons, ending with the end of Season 5, I suddenly had a lot of time to spare before Season 6 came along. And so I started exploring the original series, the first eight doctors.

Someone recommended to me to check out the Fourth Doctor and particularly to start with the episode the Ark of Truth and then watch the next few episodes. That was a great idea. I was introduced to the character in an interesting, but not too important episode, then suddenly I was watching one of the key origin episodes in which the Doctor is present at the creation of Daleks. After watching the series since reboot, this was really a big deal. Afterwards I watched a few episodes featuring other doctors. Eight Doctor is just a movie, which is easy to find. The others were a lot harder to track down.

It turned out that BBC has taped over a lot of their archive tapes, destroying many of the key episodes. That became the number one reason why I didn't try watching the whole series from the very beginning - a lot of it was missing. Amazon surprisingly features a decent collection of a few episodes in its videos on demand. I got a gift card for it when I was buying a textbook, so I tried it and in the end was quite pleased, as I found some episodes I couldn't find anywhere else.

And so watching the rebooted series and then picking up a few (often random) episodes from the original series worked out quite well. The new series provided a good foundation, so I could follow all of the old episodes...

Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?

Also an important difference from Europe - Verizon and Sprint don't use SIM cards.

It's time to let them know how bad of a move it was. Don't buy their games (even though no full cracks exist) - buy direct competition, scan the receipt and send it to them, explaining that this money was originally intended to go for their product.

I'm a long time Splinter Cell fan. I own all four PC versions and was looking forward to play Conviction. Criticism about making the genre more action packed aside - I was still looking forward to the game. Now I'm not going to buy it, because such DRM is just ridiculous. I'm going to buy Alpha Protocol and send Ubisoft my receipt.

Either way the lawyers win!

On the contrary, everyone who has sufficient knowledge to understand the subject knows (and in this context prefers) these units. There is really no point in using kilograms in this context, unless you wanna account for the 11th grader creating a scale of mass...

I'm in University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and I feel like Linux is well supported here.
It goes without saying that one doesn't get the same level of support with setting up certain systems as they would with a PC or a Mac, but everything works fine, and all the essential programs (Remote Desktop access through an NX client, ssh, engineering programs (like MATLAB), VPNs) are available from school's servers in Linux versions, and there ARE detailed instructions on our web, describing how to ssh that even a user that doesn't know what bash is can follow successfully. About a third of all computer labs here are running Red Hat and all engineers are required to take introductory CS course which among others teaches the basics of using the terminal (stuff like file management, submitting work, creating/opening archives, etc).
So if you're an engineering student here, you have this nice intro and then because the system is all around you, people get used to working in it.

Oh and all online course materials are almost always available in multiple formats, but with the current support of MS Office files by Open Office, I'm not sure whether the opposite would really be an issue...

Resetting the human race? That's ROBOT talk!!

It's about convenience. Provided good internet connection you can get pretty much anything at any time of the day without leaving the warmth of your room. And the choice is enormous!

You can buy it online...

Operating a reactor isn't exactly a one man job though. So the matching hot female crew better have advanced training in nuclear engineering!