Social Network Analysis and Health Informatics are two fairly young fields that are in all the areas you say you despise, but have none of the ethical drawbacks you list. I was lucky enough to land a job writing SNA applications for a Health Informatics company, and I have never felt more satisfied with my life. I feel I am doing something moral, ethical, challenging, and am doing The Right Thing!. The possible uses of SNA are amazing! So far, it has been used to determine problems in Hospital Emergency Wards, the spread of infectious diseases, tracking Gorilla social structures in the wild to prevent underpopulation of endangered species, and even to determine who will become the next president! Real-world example of SNA: There are some researchers at George Washington University who are developing massively-parallel algorithms which analyse and graph large datasets, like all twitter posts - in real time! That's the university system for you! Real-world Health Informatics: Using software to help hospitals identify and treat persons who have a very painful disease and who need powerful to treat it. These types people show up in ERs and are treated like drug addicts - not medical attention-seeking patients - and have to wait hours for proper identification. By developing applications targeted for these types of people, you can end discrimination, cure diseases, and help improve the like of everyone! All without having to worry about animal testing, war, or anything else whihc may be considered immoral or unethical! (Be sure to check with your IRB before doing any human testing of your own!)

Once a year, I hunt the net for any desktop environment/window manager I can find and try each one out for a few days to a week. I use Linux because it affords me the luxury of learning new things and new ideas of what it means to be productive. Each WM/DE has its (dis)?advantages. When I am on an older computer, I use LXDE. When I am on an even older computer, I use Ion. But when I am at work or at home, it is Gnome 3, because I have never been more productive. Sure, there's a bit of a learning curve, but it is even moreso with KDE4. I never could really get the hang of KDE4, and the KDE/Qt4 widgets seem a little dated to me. I like Gnome 3's interface because it is minimal, uncluttered, and I can change the look and feel with a few lines of CSS(-like) and Javascript(-like). Theming in any other widget set reminds me of using the L&F classes in Java - a real pain! However, Gnome 3 does have one drawback for me - it doesn't run on systems without decent OpenGL support, something I really like about Enlightenment. Nonetheless, I really like Gnome 3 and have never been more productive!