The performance increases were negligible (with some decreases, as well) so: No reason to switch other than a symbolic statement and to avoid any potential future licencing issues or litigation. The MariaDB project will mirror the free-as-in-beer (and maybe paid?) features of future MySQL versions while aiming to be a "drop-in" replacement. On the other hand, it's better to do it now in case the projects do diverge and the MySQL upgrade path becomes problematic or expensive.

According to data from here, the XBox sold 24,65MM worldwide and the PS2 sold 153,68MM. I don't see how that worked for them. Regarding stupidity (the removal of the OtherOS feature?); according to data from last month the PS3 has just recently got ahead of M$'s Xbox 360 (though only by a million) with total console sales of 77MM but the 360 had a year-long headstart...and if deviating from a "dominant" duopoly, 98.8MM Wiis have been sold .

I doubt any database has a full listing of all of the names. In the designer scene, names are being decided upon by committee (read: IRC channel/forum) after people are already taking these substances or they're pulled after a fatality before being christened.

Being able to recognise a non-proprietary name of the few most-consumed non-prescription compounds is a bit of a worry though (paracetamol, ibuprofen).

Sent from my generic iPhone-like device.

No, I'm told these are "exciting times" so it'll be next month and "just down the road".

If you can't get it to run normally, try WINE unstable. Possibly one less reason to keep a dual-boot...?

If you're already comfortable with HTML and CSS, I can't think of anything more appropriate than JS via (jsFiddle) and once it's warranted, get some cheap/free LAMP hosting to get into PHP and MySQL. I think everyone's just suggesting what they started with, as I'm guilty of beginning with PHP after HTML/CSS, but for a web master/designer, it's unlikely that pre-compiling languages (?) are going to be useful or interesting to you, given your foundation. You can take PHP further with shell scripting and by that time you'll probably have little trouble understanding or diving right into "real" languages.