the elimination of an often used shortcut (CTRL+ALT+Backspace, on the default install)

If the X server needs to be killed often, that is the real problem, not disabling c-a-b. The average end-user shouldn't have to be killing the X server. For the technical-minded, there are trivial ways to kill X if need be: switching to a vterm and remedying the situation, using the magic SysRq combos, and setting DontZap to false so c-a-b does work.

I'm a fan of Midori (also in the repos), which uses WebKit for its rendering engine.

I would have been somewhat amused if their laptop got stolen as well. Yes, I know I'm a terrible person.

Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasels.

Does this mean that clicking a button multiple times and yelling at my computer will finally make my it go faster? Sweet!

Actually, I prefer unsalted sometimes. Also, there's nothing stopping you from sprinkling a bit of oil on the popped popcorn before adding salt. It works well for me.

Not to be callous or anything, but I wouldn't call her "unlucky". Tragic? Yes. Unlucky? Getting hit by a drunk driver is "unlucky". Driving a car at 100 MPH while on cocaine is incredibly poor judgment. I agree with your point, though - I hadn't heard of her either. Sadly, three of the top four Google results contain pictures of the accident.

$17/month, not $77/month. At that price, watching 3-4 movies is a bargain. The nearest rental place to me costs $4-5 per DVD. It's also about an hour round-trip on bike (1.5-2 if I'm walking). It's worth it, if only just for the convenience. Buying the 3-4 DVDs a month is going to cost me more than $17, not to mention that some movies I have no intention of seeing a second time.

What part of Wisconsin? Madison is a genuinely nice place to live. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the rural areas live in "willful ignorance".

Indeed. 50-60 years ago, a "computer" was a person or group of people performing computations.

I used to get 4-5 hours of life on my laptop battery (T42, the larger battery), but now I only get about 10% of a full charge. The cost of replacing it just isn't worth it.

OGMRip has been my favorite for a while. The only downside, as of now, is that you have to manually tell it if the video source is progressive/telecined/etc (the author is working on that feature). However, I might have to try handbrake again. When I last tried it, there was no good Linux GUI.