While this is indeed a silly move it does mean that nobody in Pakistan will be taking my development contracts... of course this also means there will likely be an influx of developers into surrounding countries.

Except that multitouch has been around a long time, since the early 90s.

Just because Apple was the first to put it in the phone, and even arguably did it the best shouldn't make it patentable. Just because you have the best or most popular version of something doesn't mean you thought of it first.

I don't think that's the argument. Direct Linux support is going to be very unlikely anywhere, but using open standards should be common in universities and the difference is between "do you support" and "is it possible to use".

As for the whole "noone allows linux on their work desktops", people used to say this about macs too (outside design), now almost 1/2 of my office uses them. Not just coders/designers either.

Typed at work on my Ubuntu-running Laptop.

O'Reilly publishes the Subversion book, and it's also available free online (and as a full PDF)

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

This might be an interesting avenue.

"I, and more than a few others, don't really have any interest in grouping in WoW"

Then you aren't actually interested in WoW. I left almost 2 years ago, but unless things have really changed Blizzard has never said the game was intended to be for people who want to play alone.

I use Evolution on a daily basis at work for my gmail, Domino-via-IMAP, and Exchange ( not 2007 ). About once a week I need to run a tiny script to restart evolution and reset the exhange connector. Other then that I haven't had any issues with it, and it was updated (Ubuntu repos) last week so at least a little dev is still going on.

Of course I might just be lucky, but it seems to work fine for me.

Well, Flexbuilder (Adobe's big RIA flash toolset) is an Eclipse plugin. It's not free, but the sdk is, and you can get AS3 syntax highlighters.

And if you're a big Java guy, there is even a very functional Maven mojo for flex.