I can't really respond to the GAE thing as I don't have experience with it.

My personal problem with lastpass is that by default your passwords are recoverable which means that by default lastpass or someone with access to their system has access to your passwords (you can disable this and read the source to their obfuscated javascript app for chrome to make sure that it is really doing what they say, encrypting locally then sending).[1]

Keepass at least is opensource and it works well when you use dropbox so long as you aren't accessing it on many different computers on a daily/weekly basis, then it just becomes a pain in the ass.

[1] This may have changed but I don't think they would appeal to many users if it has, and they do have an option to disable it but the obfuscated javascript is what stopped me from looking further.

The points required to downvote (and maybe for the others) goes up over time.

I really like linode and have been a customer for a few years now so I might be a bit biased.

Ubik is my favorite PKD book followed closely by Electric Sheep.

The His Dark Materials isn't really sci-fi so much as fantasy but it is quite a good read (though if you didn't have a kindle it might be embarrassing buying them from the young adult section, they are quite adult though).

I think a huge thing missing from your list is the Foundation series from Asimov (I recommend going in order of publishing, start with Foundation move onto Foundation and Empire then Second Foundation and more if you are into it).

My 2 cents.

Given that it is password protected even if you had those I would suspect that the window would be extremely short to login if any and the most likely event is your laptop being formatted.

Best of luck, hope your christmas wasn't ruined because of some asshole.

One of the biggest annoyances for me with new windows laptops is that many of the manufacturers no longer send the windows cd to reformat if they send a cd at all it is to recover back to the condition with all crapware installed.

HP now has a recovery manager to create recovery disks for you and the last hp computer I saw had to create 5 dvds in order to recover to that state (which would probably require something like a 6 hour reinstall).

It is a sad state if you ask me that you get this now because it allows manufacturers to take away cost by bundling shareware with the computer, just a few years ago toshiba was still shipping legitimate windows cds which allowed you to reformat to normal windows.

I would much rather a person be honest than take up my time while keeping up a charade about a crazy brother, if someone did this I would probably just tell them to talk to their brother rather than me.

But if you have other worthwhile choices that's great, until you run out of choices and have to go through the same system again. (Most ISPs seem to run a similar support scheme.)