Debian operates under the "It's done when it's done" philosphy. I usually just disregard deadlines when they mention them

So let's say, hypothetically, that I'm the grandson of Lee Harvey Oswald's landlord and I made claims that she once overheard Oswald conspiring with others, that I could get my report in a secret file too!?

a text editor with a web browser, email client, irc, calculator and tetris......oh wait

At least you can metaphorically break into the linux kernel at all, even just for your own fork to mess around. I would literally have to break into somewhere to look at windows code

It really depends on where you will located the most, like 30 people before me have said. I know everyone likes to bash AT&T but in my situation its the only major carrier in the Dayton-Columbus-Cincinnati area that will get coverage around where I live. I went out four wheeling with a friend into the middle of nowhere and had 3G coverage west of Dayton close to the Indiana border on my iPhone. I also travel back and forth between Dayton and Columbus all the time and have mostly seamless coverage. Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint don't get coverage at all and I had horrible customer service issues and phone hardware problems several times with both Verizon and T-Mobile. I have a few friends who had Sprint who had to get boosters from the Sprint store in order to even use their phones at their house. Its all about location, just do your research and ask peoples opinions around where you will be located the most.

Go for Slitaz, it works well and its even smaller than DSL...and it keeps its kernel up to date. It works well on old hardware, had a friend who got it up and working on hardware similar to the OP.

CS&E is the only department that you will really get any exposure at all to Linux without doing your own exploring. The biggest gripe that I have about Linux support at OSU is that the help desk is completely worthless when it comes to Linux support. Although you can't really complain much when they do flat out say they don;t support Linux. I'm part of the Open Source club and one of the biggest questions that we get from people is in regards to wireless access in Linux, which one of our members ended up writing an article on our website for since we got so many questions concerning this. If you called the help desk they would give you a link to a page on OIT's website that just had a sample wpa_supplicant.conf and essentially just told you that you had to figure it out on your own. 98% of the members in our club are CS&E students, not that that is surprising in any way, but it just goes to show how little exposure there is in other departments. I am a business student and you won't see anything except Vista in their computer labs. On another note, I have actually heard someone from the help desk chastise a guy for using Ubuntu on the ResNet claiming that he was creating a security issue. This was around the time they started requiring the use of the cisco clean access agent in order to get network access but just ended up cutting off half the residents from the internet in their dorms. That lasted about a whole month. And if reference to your emacs comment....yes, they worship emacs. The only professor I have had that hasn't exclusively talked about emacs was for a COBOL class, but he only briefly talked about vi.