If you're buying a laptop for anyone competent, they won't be running Windows on it (or if the do, it's their problem). If you're buying a laptop for anyone incompetent, they shouldn't be running Windows on it. Patching a hopelessly insecure operating system with anti-virus and other bloatware is so twentieth century. Chrome OS is a far better solution for non-technical users.

I wouldn't do any financial transaction from a Windows box, not even buy a book off Amazon. Too many friends have had trouble that way.

Read Neal Stephenson's In the beginning was the Command Line, or, better yet, give it as a set book to the students. It's available for download from his website for free, or you can buy it as a paperback from all good booksellers (and some bad ones)

The OP does not say that he is a 'raving psychopath'. He says that he has schizophrenia, like two million other people in the United States. It's an unpleasant condition for the sufferer, but one that a lot of people manage to live perfectly well with.

You're complaining? I've been here fifteen years, and I've never had a submission accepted either!

Strongly agree about safe-disconnect connectors. I think my next laptop will probably be a MacBook, even though I'll just strip MacOS off and put Linux on, simply because of MagSafe. I've wrecked two laptops, one from tripping over the charger cable, and one from it falling of the arm of a chair and landing on the charger connection. Both times, it resulted in motherboard damage.

OK, you can say I'm clumsy - but laptops are designed to be used on the move.

And Bing is better because it is those nice trustworthy people at Microsoft who are watching everything you search for ?!?

Damn, why don't I have mod points? I may have to tweet that.

Out of curiosity I've just tried, with every terminal application I have (xterm, lxterm, uxterm, gnome-termonal, konsole...). I can't do it. Perhaps I'm incompetent? Or perhaps it's a bug in some specific window manager? Or perhaps Guy Harris is special?

Not in my experience. Over the past twenty years I've run Linux on a large number of designed-for-Windows laptops; I've never seen worse battery performance under Linux than under Windows, and on some machine (including my current Asus Zenbook) considerably better.

The fact that

1. This patch was sneaked into CVS bypassing the proper channels;
2. The submitter identity was (allegedly) forged;
3. The UID assignment was surrounded in parentheses to prevent a compiler warning

strongly suggest that this was a deliberate feature, and not a casual error. I've done a lot of security audits of mission critical systems in my time and I've seen a lot of potentially catastrophic casual errors. You can always see what (innocent) thing the programmer intended to do. There's no 'innocent' thing this change could do. This is intended.

Who intended it? That's another question.

Why have a solar powered CO2 remover when we could use solar (or wind, or tidal, or geothermal) energy and never release the CO2 in the first place? Continuing to burn fossil fuels is unbelievably stupid.

This is a very good reason not to trust any closed source browser, actually. If the source is closed, how the heck do you know what it's doing to show you that nice, safe green password icon? Of course, actually ploughing through and understanding every line of the SSL implementation code in your browser is a lot of work and 99.9% of us haven't done it, but if there were anything dodgy going on in an open source browser it would pretty quickly hit the headlines on Slashdot and we'd all know. Of course again, you don't actually know that a browser (or any other program) was compiled from the published source code unless you compile it yourself.

Gentoo, anyone?

If you're working with an application which hasn't been engineered for database portability, yes, it can be a complete pain. Which is why a good software engineer, embarking on what may be a long-lived application, designs for database portability. You know those 'special features' your favourite RDBMS offers? They're called 'vendor lock-in', and you should avoid them.

To be honest, I still have Ubuntu on one computer but on the whole I've moved back to Debian stable. I did try Mint, but found it sufficiently broken in minor ways to be just irritating. Yes, Debian is broken too, in as much as installing codecs and playing media is a complete pain, but it's broken in ways which don't greatly influence things I actually want to do. For my everyday use - writing software, browsing the web, reading email - Debian stable is rock solid and unannoying.

Yes, just occasionally I curse because something I need to use is in testing, but for all my Clojure stuff I simply bypass the Debian package system and use Leiningen.