You have a good point -- graphics card choices in laptops are limited. But, instead of using windows, or linux without 3D, I just no longer consider laptops with ATI cards (which leaves nvidia choices for now).
I feel your pain though -- I had a T43 with X300 card for a couple years, and that experience is unfortunately burned in my memory.

If you're ok with not-so-open drivers, nvidia 3D cards have worked for years. I am waiting for quality open source 3D linux drivers, but until then, at least 3D can and has worked reliably on linux. (the nvidia-settings tool is reasonable enough that you generally don't need to edit config files)

Stallman was building an operating system. Linus contributed a kernel for it. The Linux kernel and most open source software is built with gcc. I'll still agree that writing the kernel is no small feat. Otherwise the other two or three kernel options considered for GNU would have been completed before the linux kernel.

Really? Maybe you aren't aware of the tools Stallman wrote? Stallman wrote the first versions of gcc, gdb, emacs, etc.
So if you still want to oversimplify it, this is more accurate: Stallman created tools and created open source. Torvalds created a tool.

Sheesh, businesses know how to remove the fun from everything.
Now they just have to come up with a more boring word for avatar.

It there any browser to download that will let us try out WebGL on linux yet?
Would building the changes into epiphany or midori work?
I've also tried firefox's canvas3D, but haven''t gotten that to work yet.
Hopefully the WebGL api will be available from the python plugin in firefox. That would still require a plugin to download, but at least there would be a nice 3D web platform to develop in. (yeah, javascript is ok, but it's not great)

Quake live (and similar apps) require you to download a plugin.

Ideally, webGL will eventually be included in browsers so any webpage could use accelerated GL without requiring you to download a plugin first. (I'm not an expert, this is just what I've gathered so far, corrections are welcome).

That is a good idea. It's not quite the same experience as viewing them on the same display, where both people could point at the same object in the same 3D location in front of them.

I didn't say you were wrong.
The (active) stereo glasses are nice, especially with head tracking. It generally gives a good 3D experience.
The autostereo (no glasses) approach is a good idea, but I haven't heard of great experiences with them yet. They will probably eventually be more useful.

For multiple tracked stereo views, the really good display would need much higher refresh rates and specialized emitters and glasses.
Multiple tracked people seeing their own tracked view would divide the refresh rate in half for each extra person. For example, two persons' view (with 2 stereo eyes each) requires four images. A 120Hz refresh divided by four only appears as 30Hz. Maybe having two views is reasonable, but more than that is not likely (there are limits to eye and glasses refresh rates).

I can just see tomorrow's article about slashdotter road rage victims who took this article's advice. Luckily, if this happens to me, I have a plan to explain the logic in detail to calm the other driver down.

Ok, maybe it's not windows vs linux...

but Linux won!

The believe navit program has this type of more advanced "giving directions" feature (you can probably find more information on the navit website). I haven't tried navit much, since the other GPS apps such as tangogps have been enough for me..