All great points, and there are plenty of examples even among geeks where they get caught at a given point and never progress (I work with a very geeky engineer who for the longest time wouldn't move some perl scripts of his beyond perl 4, even though perl 5 had been around for several years, and the time to rewrite would probably have been minimal).

As a chemistry grad student, a couple of my chem profs were near retirement, and just never picked up email or much beyond MS-DOS. The one has gotten into a lot of that since then, the other one, I'm not sure (no one seems to know what happened to him).

radiantmatrix, sorry you had those experiences, that isn't good. Clearly, those folks need to find something else to do. swampyankee, same thing.

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