Like others, I recommend traveling, but internationally. Go somewhere beautiful, affordable, and that has a few world heritage locations. Europe is nice, but very expensive. Go to Peru, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. Get out and see other cultures, eat interesting foods, struggle with foreign languages and communication. This will be scary and fun and exciting and stressful and will give you more perspective than simply doing the AT or getting drunk with other foreigners in hostels around EU. Any international traveling will give you perspective, but IME I prefer the less traveled path. Live cheap, travel light, take nice photos and have fun.

A bit OT, but you shouldn't care about OS except Linux vs Mac OS.

My reasoning is that you can buy a Windows license for 7 and reformat nearly any laptop except Apple laptops. You can use Linux on many laptops, but you should do research to ensure compatibility. Since you are a student, a license for Win 7 will be very inexpensive, especially when distributed over the average 4 years of college. Since you are not in college, you have time to deal with reinstalling a Windows operating system, so the time factor is also moot (if you're using Linux, you'll need to do that anyway unless supporting a Linux vendor).

Unless I totally misunderstand secure boot and UEFI and all that other new lockdown junk Win 7 will work on any Win 8 machine.

So, in my opinion you should be asking: "Which portable laptop will have the _highest resolution_ and fit in my budget"

All things being equal, this (and an SSD, which you can upgrade whenever -- but is DIY and should be done ASAP) is the biggest factor to productivity on a laptop. GET A NICE SCREEN! You're going to look at it every day for 4+ years! High resolution, IPS. Buy the biggest SSD that fits in your budget and swap out the one that comes with your machine (again assuming you don't go with an Apple machine). Now you have a responsive machine and a portable hard drive (throw the large drive that came with your laptop in an inexpensive USB powered enclosure)

I was fine with Unity and Gnome 3, liked them both. But I'm in the same boat as you -- compiz would crash and disrupt my workflow. Switched to KDE and I now have a different set of gripes and crashes, but not at the WM level. Better, but...sigh...when will it all work and have a nice integrated desktop?

Never lived up to expectation? Tell me about it! I never got mine! Just a $400 (2009 USD) donation to someone else's hobby project.

Of course they're going to do it for the linux desktop, at least for source engine games (provided DRM continues to function), they are in a position to out compete the entire market, PC, console, engines, development tools.

IMO current and past games are not the big win for Valve. The Source Engine will quickly become THE most attractive engine for future development. It's easily the most disruptive idea to the video game market in a generation. As if digital distribution via Steam wasn't already disruptive, I think this is on the order of...I don't know of a good analog...optical disc vs cartrige? Microsoft's game SDK thing?

• Easy cross platform PC
• easy distribution
• easy drm
• Nice SDK with all the trimmings that come with it
• easy community
• big market
• digital distribution
• (as yet unreleased) steambox console
• and STILL have potential or physical distribution on box or other console platforms

It's a masterstroke IMO.

Woah, hang on. Lets not get crazy now. At least try Chromiumo or Opera before going back to IE and stick with something that tries to embrace modern web standards as well as new proposed standards. Or Safari, as that is also based on Webkit. Or try webkit itself.

Please. Anything except IE. While the IE team is getting better, they are still holding back from widespread adoption of great new developments in web development.

Or if you like Chrome but do not like their privacy policy, consider SRWare Iron (a.k.a. Iron) - a modified version of Chromium with many (all?) of the privacy violating pieces removed. Or just go into Chrome itself and check out the "under the hood" privacy settings).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chromium - does not have the RLZ tracking enabled

Of course you have a choice. You chose to use facebook, despite the fact that it screws you over daily.

It's not exactly the same logic. The last service pack for XP was released April 21, 2008; it has been updated since with security patches. The last release for the 2.6 kernel was May 30, 2011, it has been updated with security and features. (yes, I know 3.0 is just a number change. It's a feature!) Guess it depends what you consider noteworthy. Security is noteworthy (and XP is supported through 2014), but generally users think of features as noteworthy updates.

Agreed. This is just a matter of engineering the reaction, not engineering the disposal of waste. Same goes for any waste - how do you solve the waste problem? Produce less waste!

They moved the buttons to the left so that per-window indicators can be used on the right. The keyboard window menu still work (Alt + whatever). The "why we did this" seems to change but AFAIK aptana + Apple OS are the reasons for the button change.

Even better would be if you could be turned into an npc that could do a little harassment but not enough damage to hinder the game. Kind of like the bob-omb in Mario Kart 64, but less of a threat to the game outcome.

Any good ideas about how much the gap could be closed if energy consumption was reduced through efficiency, policy, and awareness?

And James Earl Jones, who should have been in the credits (for SW 1 and 2) (and who should have been advised to take percentage vs flat fee).

Yes, that is the best solution, fall back to local if the CDN fails.

~272kB is with EVERY jQueryUI plugin, which few sane people would ever need. That is also a non-gzipped figure.

Using your example with all the bells and whistles, both (jQuery + jQueryUI) total only ~73kB gzipped.

jQuery 1.4.2 itself weighs in at ~24kB gzipped, and with just a few plugins enabled, jQueryUI is much smaller.