I have an E6400 with the Nvidia option; how can I test to see if my laptop is throttling the CPU too low? (I run linux)

Oblig: http://xkcd.com/605/

Would you like to suggest one?

Reality suggests exactly the opposite. Adblock, Noscript, and whatever other browser plugins you use, in addition to most of the UI code on web pages, is written in JavaScript. Browser speed, and particularly JS execution speed, does matter. In fact, since you are running these applications, which run Javascript to customize your viewing experience, you probably depend on speed more than you think.

I use vim and jrunscript for testing and syntax checking. JSUnit does unit testing. vim has code completion and syntax highlighting for every language anyway, including javascript.

E.g. did the students have to really learn long division in school? That's their first exposure to a rigorous CS-style algorithm. How was the student's algebra education? That's the introduction to the abstraction of variables. The computer scientist who doesn't deeply grok abstraction gets precisely nowhere.

You sound like you haven't been in school for awhile, so let me remind you of something: HIGH SCHOOLERS ARE IDIOTS. I know, I was there 3 years ago. As to the "innate ability" argument, I convinced 3 of my friends (all took AP calc, one is a math major at W&M) to take AP Comp Sci with me, and none of them did well. They just didn't "get it". The asian kid who is now majoring in math did the worst. It really seems that you don't have the slightest clue of what you're talking about. NOT everyone can learn CS if they want to.

TAOCP? Computer Org? Are you kidding? I'm a 3rd year CS student, and most people who went to my high school, probably including myself, could never get through ten pages of Knuth. The math background to start out with theory just isn't in place in high school, where the highest level math class available was entry-level Calculus. I learned C++ on my own in middle school without ever having heard of "Discrete Math", and learned Java in high school before I even knew what a register was. But once I knew how the high level stuff worked, I could then delve deeper into another level and learn a little more, and then a little more. You have to learn incrementally, not by starting a HIGH SCHOOL kid with the hardest (albeit "fundamental") stuff and working your way from there. That's like learning trig simply by giving the students a bunch of proofs to look at before they know how the mechanics work.

I did a google search on this topic but I can't really determine the significance of what a 'half-node' processor is. Is there something inherently special about it? Can someone more knowledgeable about processors explain this?