I haven't seen anyone as good as Clay Shirky in studying and predicting the effects of the internet on society.
http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536

If loyalty is what's keeping you in the old company - then don't. Any sign of trouble and they'll get rid of you. In my experience when companies speak about loyalty, it's just in one direction.

Since I dicovered "Gnome Do", I don't care much about the window manager.
I actually like the screen real estate I get with Unity.

Second that. IMO Schems's simplicity makes it great first language.

Does it means I can expect Netflix on Linux soon? I can't believe that nobody hacked that so far.

Hello, I suggest Python (http://www.python.org). It's cross platform, has good UI support (I recommend wxPython, http://www.wxpython.org/) and is easily extendable with c/c++ modules. (See http://www.boost.org/libs/python/doc/index.html for example). Pluse it has a very good mathematical library (http://numpy.sourceforge.net/) which is cross platform as well. Write most of the logic in Python and only the time critical section in c/c++ (ANSI C will be best cross platform solution for this). HTH. Miki