Man, this just made my day. Love the idea and I just created an account on their site. Sounds like a fun way to help preserve old books!

I ended up ditching Firefox because it became rather unreliable and buggy a few versions ago (I've lost count at this point). I eventually switched to Chrome, indeed, but I found that I preferred Chromium.

If you're running Chromium on Linux, you can avoid those automatic and hidden updates by compiling yourself. I set up a fairly friendly build environment to make Ubuntu packages, and I build packages from bleeding-edge SVN every week or so.

You'd be surprised, but I've found Chromium a lot more reliable (and less crash-prone, in my experience) than Firefox in recent times, even with a build right from trunk. I've had to adjust a bit to find analogous extensions, but otherwise it's been quite nice.

I have a ThinkPad Edge 14" that I run Ubuntu on as well, and I'm actually very happy with its performance overall. Suspend works out of the box, though I haven't tried hibernate in awhile (it was previously causing problems). I've not really had any issues with resume at all, though sometimes the computer will have issues rebooting from Ubuntu. I'd highly recommend that ThinkPad at least.

Speaking of bsnes, byuu, its creator, is working to preserve SNES games and their history -- he just began a massive undertaking to catalogue, photograph, and document all known SNES games. Cf. here for more info. If I had access to my old SNES games (stored thousands of miles away at my parents' house), I'd help him out, but maybe you and some of the ./ crowd may be able to be of some help.
I used to be able to run bsnes without any real problems, but I think my desktop is getting old, and I've fallen back on ZSNES for the time being, unfortunately.

Obligatory:
Rule 34.

Seconded, they can indeed go fuck themselves. I refuse to bow to any *AA demands -- they can't tell me what to do with my own software, on my own computer. Especially not on Linux.

Yahoo is a terrible search engine. I don't remember using it for anything of substance since about 1996. I'm no Google fanboy, but it really is the best search engine out there; I'm not a fan of Bing on principle.

He should have named her Rei Toei.

Brilliant. Spoken like a true Epicurean.

I've overall had a good experience, although I finally bit the bullet and did a clean install of Karmic on my desktop, which fixed all my gstreamer issues (which had been a problem since at least Hardy). I like it very much -- it's been quite impressive. The "New Wave" theme is one of my faves now, and I use it on both my desktop and laptop. So yeah, I've had a good experience in general.

This is basically my only Linux story until I installed Ubuntu in 2007 (try #2). I installed Slackware in 1996 or so after painstakingly downloading and copying it onto at least ten floppies, and all was well for awhile.

Until I tried to repartition my drive and failed miserably at it, nuking my DOS partition. As this was the family computer, my parents were none too happy. My dad complained for a long time afterwards about LILO coming up at boot when Linux was no longer there, and I don't remember how I eventually fixed it, but yeah...

Thus it took me about ten years to get back to Linux again after that disaster, but I have Ubuntu now and haven't looked back to XP after I replaced it.

Don't forget China, apparently.

You've a good point there. It's not so much of an issue for me since I'm pretty experienced with computers, but for the "grandma" Linux adoptions it's more of an issue. Unless, of course, you have your whiz kid grandson around to clean up the mess, which is generally an unrealistic expectation.

Or you could go to GetDeb and download their cutting-edge VLC packages, which haven't caused any problems for me at least.

Try Deluge. I've been using it on Linux, so I don't know how it works on Windows, but it's worth a try. Many have said it's the "uTorrent for Linux," but it's pretty lean and mean overall.