Don't you just have your other hand on the keyboard all the time anyway? Set FF to open everything in tabs, so that's solved, and then use cmd+: w to close windows, q to quit, c to copy, v to paste, etc etc... they're all right there under your non-trackpad fingers.
I didn't even use middle-click back before wheel mice (when they literally had 3 buttons).
Assuming you're using a Mac, opt-cmd-h will hide all windows but the one you're using...
Personally, what I find worse than 'distractions' is being blinded by whitespace caused by Firefox (/whatever) being way too huge.
And, full-width emacs!? On my monitor (with a rather large font size) that's almost 250 columns, I hope you don't have any code over there! If you're vertically splitting emacs, then, I think we're on the same page. It's not about windows themselves being any specific size, it's about making them an appropriate size for their content.
Really!? Can I ask why? Why not just make the browser about 1050px or so wide, you can view every website out there and you can have other things in the extra space (twitter, client, terminal, downloads, whatever).
I'm not sure who they're arguing with here. Developers that write code in Ruby have a testing culture... I've never heard anyone imply that Matz and the core development team care even slightly about it.
In short, your average Ruby project and Ruby the project are entirely unrelated, they're written in different languages, even!
This happens every time Facebook (or any other major site for that matter) makes a change. A few months from now everyone will forget about it and get on with their lives. At least until they change it again, when everyone flips out and wants the 'old' layout back (eg, the one they're complaining about today).
If you ask me (I maintain a fork of flot on github) there is no reason to use a client-side library for graphing unless the graphs are dynamic. Requesting/rendering/etc tons of images is painful, flot can add and remove data on the fly and re-render -- and that's not even getting into the potential for hovering effects and the like (flash-style).
Flot also supports all reasonable browsers (including some unreasonable ones, like IE6). If you find a bug in either the 'official' flot or my fork (or any of the forks of my fork :)) then you should be able to report it and have it fixed quickly enough (or, fix it yourself, the code isn't especially complicated).
I maintain a fork of flot on github. The graphs function correctly in IE (barring some here-and-there bugs which you can report). The only issue is speed (always an issue with IE), and as a result I wouldn't try too much of the interactivity... But on the whole it works great.
'Letting' students use the internet while they're writing essays? I think I'm missing something. I've never written an essay anywhere but on a computer with regular stuff around, including a web browser, etc.
Because we shouldn't ever have any fun? We shouldn't check out Blake's cool little micro-framework? We shouldn't use our own blogs for things we find interesting?
The fact that it's not available in other countries doesn't have to do with technical limitations of the over-the-air functionality since you can just download books to your computer and copy them to the device over USB.
The problem is the same as it has been for other content distribution systems like iTunes, where the publishers/other big-brother-ish entity decide what Amazon (/Apple/whoever) can do with the content.
Amazon says to pengiun books (or whoever) "We want to put your books on the Kindle." and pengiun tells them where they can go... Eventually they start convincing people -- but start throwing 'Canada' and the like into the deal and it gets a lot harder.
In short, what I'm saying is that eventually Amazon will convince the powers-that-be that the kindle is a profitable business and they'd be stupid to continue ignoring potential sales in other countries... And that's when the rest of us will get it (wirelessly or otherwise).
This sort of thing can really slow an entire company down.
Work on getting it mentioned in performance reviews. If 'non-techies' start to have their bosses poking around asking questions about "so why do I keep hearing that you refuse to use the wiki?", that'll help.
I mean, really. A wiki is about as technical as a whiteboard... they're just being lazy. No one's asking them to make beautifully formatted pages, just get the stuff in there because _that's how we track it_... it's part of their job. They need to realize it.
My technique is super low-tech. In my bookmarks bar, positioned conveniently below the site's favicon, I have a folder which is called "For Later". Into this folder I drop stuff I'll want to come back to at some point. Then (and here's the super part of my super low-tech claim), when I'm done with it I move it to another folder called "x" which I periodically delete and re-create.
This works everywhere with no extensions or anything, I use Foxmarks to sync the bookmarks themselves between machines (which you could skip if you only used the one machine), that's it.