Hell yeah. Protect yourself. I agree 100%

As someone who did just that (well over 10 years ago,) you will absolutely be pigeon holed if you go into some type of sysadmin job if that's where you start. Generally, in the technology sector (usually referred to as IT in the corporate world) there are programming jobs and infrastructure (sysadmin type) jobs. Whichever side you 'grow up' on, it makes it harder to move to the other side. Management will always pigeon hole you as a result of your experience. The more of it you have, the more typecast you'll be.

Differences in the OS's may account for much of the difference. IIRC it was Phoronix that posted a graphics benchmark that showed that 3d games on linux were faster when run under KDE than Unity or GNOME3 (which was the slowest.) Also, differences in X,gcc/glib could also account. Don't assume that newer is faster. Often times it's not.

I'm running SC2 on Ubuntu with an NVidia card with all the settings max'd out and it runs just as fast as on windows. There are known issues with the ATI drivers under Linux and SC2. Actually the ATI drivers are not the greatest on Linux to begin with.

Just wondering, this is China we're talking about (and it's not a racist statement b/c I'm ethnically Chinese.)

Here some information from that article I posted:

Shan Bilimoria, a professor and molecular virologist, said the bees may be taking a one-two punch from both an insect virus and a fungus, which may be causing bees to die off by the billions...

"researchers discovered through spectroscopic analysis evidence of a moth virus called insect iridescent virus (IIV) 6 and a fungal parasite called Nosema."

This is the last I read about it:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101007183018.htm

Something like that. They cross bred a very docile bee with a very aggressive african bee which produced lots of very good honey. They though that by doing so they could get a docile bee which produced lots of top quality honey. Unfortunately they ended up with a bee that would kick your a$$ if you even looked at it funny, never mind trying to get the honey.

Just goes to show you that most people can't or won't think for themselves. Most people just follow the herd, no matter what that herd is... and if you disagree with that herd you are a moron or an idiot, etc. Another posted mentioned " what we see as reasonable is VERY often decided by the range of views we are exposed to" and I think he's got it spot on precisely b/c people don't think critically and usually aren't informed (but are more that willing to render an opinion.)

The problem is probably due to the fact that public high schools (most people only have high school education) generally teach people to memorize and recite rather than think critically. Think back onto most exams you've ever had (secondary and even post secondary) and how many of them required critical thinking ability? Very few. But you probably got great marks in most subjects if you could just memorize and recite data.