@ darklighter,
the best ultracapacitors have a power density of 30wh/kg, which is four times worse than simple Lion cells (a 0.5kg laptop battery stores about 60wh).

So let's say you put a 2kg (4.5 pound) ultracapacitor on a bike. That's 60Wh - the same energy capacity as the aforementioned laptop battery. A typical bus will use about 60kw of power on average for ~30mph city use. For one hour that's 60Kwh, or 60,000 watt-hours. Divided by the ultracapacitor capacity of 60wh, a fully charged bike can provide the bus with 1/1000th of an hour of power, or precisely 3.6 seconds. To fully power one city bus for one hour, you would need 1000 fully charged bicycles, which would save you a grand total of four gallons of gas (assuming a 45% efficient diesel drivetrain). Given the expense of producing bicycles with this capacity, and factoring in the weight penalty to riders, this idea is completely invalid.

Rule #1: Do not purchase a 1st generation apple product
Rule #2: DO NOT PURCHASE A 1ST GENERATION APPLE PRODUCT

This thing is actually pretty awesome - hundreds of movies I can take with me on long trips and it's battery powered too. Decently priced, I might have to pick one of these up soon.

My God...there is so much ignorance in this thread from PC users - have any of you ever been to a college or done video and photo editing on a meaningful level? I have. I have a four year degree in photography and video production. I've made two films, one of which won an award at a film festival for best youth work. They were both made on final cut pro.

If you are a college student who wants to do photo, video, and audio work, a 15" macbook pro is the machine for you. Battery life and weight ARE important. This is because the point of a laptop is to take it with you, which you will do, even if you don't plan to right now. I sold my desktop and used that money to buy a 2nd gen 15" macbook pro with the goal of keeping it at my desk. That lasted about a week and now I take it just about everywhere - it has held up well over the last two years and is with me right now. I'm currently in Africa working as a video editor on a research project - a job I would not have gotten without final cut pro experience. Audio is a similar story. I had a friend who had a top-of-the-line desktop replacement PC with pro-tools and an expensive digital audio interface. He was simply trying to record an open mic night from the mixing board's aux output, but windows and pro tools were giving him multiple errors and he couldn't figure it out. I took out my macbook pro, opened garageband (the free audio software that comes with macs), plugged in a splitter cable from the audio-in jack to the mixing board. In 30 seconds I was recording, and it did the whole show without one single hiccup. After using the machine himself on subsequent evenings, he turned to me on night and said simply: "this is just so much better; my next computer will be a mac."

If you want full-on desktop performance, get a desktop computer. A laptop should be powerful yet highly portable. And for the things you want to do, the macbook pro is perfect. Yeah, you could spend a few hundred less and get an asus or a dell, but then you have something made of plastic, not aluminum, but beyond build quality which is hit or miss the biggest drawback is no OSX for you. Get the macbook pro and you get to run windows, OSX, linux, whatever - you will never have a software issue. To me this has easily been worth whatever minor price difference exists at the register. Don't throw your money away on a computer that will not suit your needs - everyone in my dorm freshman year of college who had a dell/HP/asus laptop switched to a mac by sophomore year...with no pressure from anyone but their own experience. OSX is a much better mobile operating system - both more stable and better thought out. This fact, combined with lots of hardware failures in their PC laptops (you'd be amazed how many keyboard failures and screen artifacts I witnessed), ultimately drove them to a macbook anyways. I hope you can arrive at this point before blowing $1600 on a winPC that you'll want to toss after the first year.

There is only one reason I would not get a mac and that is if you are a full time dedicated gamer. If you are never going to leave windows then go ahead and get a big chunky desktop replacement with a heavy hitting graphics card. If you are an occasional gamer the mac is still worth it as you can easily boot into windows at native speed.

The macbook pro basic configuration is fine. It's specced much better than my 2nd gen mid-option macbook pro and mine has not has any performance issues even when editing HD footage or large photos (but for either of these things you need a nice fast external FW800 hard drive).

MOST IMPORTANTLY: GO to the stores and TRY different machines. Apple has their entire lineup out there for messing around with in their stores (and likely your campus computer store as well). Go mess around and see if you like it. Also go try out other machines in places like best buy or if you are in california, fry's. DO NOT buy anything without trying it first - this is just common sense. Would you buy a car without a test drive?

Other things you will need regardless of which laptop you end up getting:
go to costco and pick up a 320GB western digital passport portable USB drive. Mine was $109 and I backup all my music/photos on it. Good deal. For video you need a full sized external drive. When you need one, get one of these: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEAQ7S1TB32M/ or something else from that site.
a few cheap USB jump drives (costco sells these pretty cheap too)
and that should be it.

Costco has a 320GB passport drive (USB only) for $109. I have one and it works great. Of course it won't be as fast as this one but for half the price it's worth it for cheap portable storage.

I am a graduated photography major, and I just purchased a canon rebel xsi last month and have been using it daily here in africa since I first took it out of the box. I'm using it with the canon 50mm f1.8 lens as well as the canon 17-40mm 4.0L lens. Why did I choose the XSi over the 40D? Because it takes equally good if not better photos for a lot less money, is brilliantly simple to operate, is lightweightand uses SD cards. I bought the optional BG-E5 battery grip, this makes the grip la bit larger and more comfy, allows you to hold two batteries or AAs if you need to, and gives you another control dial and vertical grip/bottom shutter release button for stealth hip shooting or more comfortable vertical holding.

The only advantages of the 40D over the 450D are the following:
- larger viewfinder
- faster and slightly longer continuous shooting

The viewfinder is fine in the 450D. It is bright and clear. I'm sure it's even a bit better in the 40D but in my eyes not enough to justify the huge price difference. Continuous shooting is often always hyped up - but unless you are a sports photographer or paparazzi you hardly ever use this. And if you do, it's always for a quick burst of shots, and the 450D will pull that off just fine. I've not had an issue yet when it comes to taking multiple shots very quickly in RAW.
I also can't stress the weight issue enough. The 450D is a LOT lighter than the 40D (300g lighter, 2/3 of a pound!). When you add a lens and other gear the weight can really become an issue, especially if you are walking around with the strap around yourself. SD cards are also a bug plus. SDHC cards are worlds cheaper than CF cards, and SDHC is the new standard. So already you can buy an 8GB SDHC card class 6 for $14 or something ridiculous like that - and that's good for 500 RAW shots. So go ahead and by two of them, then when you feel like getting a faster card as new ones come out it will never break the bank. A dead end 8GB CF card on the other hand will cost you $85.

So my recommendation get the canon xsi with the bg-e5 grip, the 50mm f1/8 lens, and a good wide angle zoom - I hear the tamron 17-50mm is about as good as the canon 17-40mm and it costs a lot less.

Josh,
The glossy finish makes this unusable for critical graphics/color work anyways, so it really doesn't matter what kind of display is within. It could be a 16-bit nano-OLED display with 150% color gamut and I still wouldn't touch it because it's glossy - how am I supposed to tell my image from the reflections? After using high end Eizo monitors for a few years (before that I was using an apple 20" cinema s-ips LCD), I don't even trust apple's "classic" h-ips matte displays. Apple used to be somewhat of a leader in the display field, but the cinema line has been ignored for what seems like more than a year and they've yet to release a monitor with leading edge technologies that's usable for critical graphics work. Not that I can blame them, that market is pretty small and already dominated by established players like eizo - I just wish those other players had half the design sense that apple does in so far as creating a product that is not only useful but something I don't mind looking at when it's switched off.

Platinum_skeet, you have no idea what you are talking about. RAW 1080P HD footage is what comes straight off the camera. No H.264 compression or anything. It's about a gig per minute.

LarryLarryLarry, let me please clarify a bit of your incorrect logic with some facts.
Fact: the volt costs about $.85 to recharge based on average US electric prices. That's for 40 miles of juice. If you drove a gas car that got 40mpg, it's the equivalent of $.85 per gallon of gas, so roughly 1/5 the cost of operating a very efficient conventional automobile. The average person drives about 14,000 miles per year. 14,000 miles per year, at 40mpg(realistically at best this would be 28mpg or less with currently available cars), and $4.00 per gallon, is $1,400 per year. The volt costs $300 per year to operate. Let's say the volt costs $35,000. We'll compare it with a gas car costing $10,000 less, so $35,000. Let's say you get a 5 year loan with 6% interest. The volt will cost you $675 per month. The other car will cost you 485 per month. In operating costs per month, the volt is $25, so $700 total. The other car is $117, so $602 per month. So during the term of the loan payback until you own the car outright, the Volt will cost you $100 more per month. Not insignificant, but not the 40% extra the inital price tags might seem to suggest. Over the entire five year term, the volt will cost you $6000 more ($100 per month times 60 months). And AFTER that term, that $6000 will be erased in 5.5 more years. So in total, the cars will have both cost you $42,000 after 10.5 years of ownership, maintenance notwithstanding. At the 14,000 mile per year figure we used earlier, that's roughly 150,000 miles total, about 100,000 miles less than your unfounded figure of 250,000 miles. In fact, if you drove both cars 250,000 miles, the volt would cost you $7850 LESS than the gasoline car. An remember, these figures are for a very efficient gas car - the only car that actually exists to fit these figures in the US is the honda insight - you want to talk about ugly now? And that's only a 1.0L engine.

Next, your claim about coal being less efficient than burning gas. FALSE. Gasoline cars are at best 30% efficient. Furthermore, the gas wastes more gas by being drilled for, transported, refined, and re-transported before it gets to you. You use about 10% of the energy in the gas once these losses are factored in. Coal power has fewer steps, so there are fewer losses, and most coal plants are at least 50% efficient in energy conversion. So let's say 10% losses for mining and transport, that's still 40%, four times as efficient as burning gas in your car. By all means, it's still a fossil fuel and still bad for the environment, but that can improve with time as more renewables are added into the energy grid. The point is it's still better than gas, despite how dirty it is.

Lastly, since when is 30% a small piece of the puzzle? I've just shown you that switching to electric cars, even with current energy supplies, yield four times fewer emissions. So that 30% becomes just 7.5% (actually more like 9% as there would be fewer emissions overall, but let's keep it simple).How is reducing emissions by a factor of four a bad thing?
Fact: 30 percent of our total air pollution comes from cars. Not 50, not 70. 30.

In fact, the Nurburgring has nothing on the page mill to pacific run, check this out! (Warning, this is a great drive, but drive it SLOW the first few times. There are some seriously tight bends that you literally have to take at 15mph, and you need to know when they are coming up.) The payoff ending up on the pacific is alway worth the hair raising drive out :)

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=11765391013648551105,37.254458,-122.347254&saddr=page+mill+road,+ca&daddr=37.25356,-122.350616+to:cabrillo+highway+at+pescadero+creek+road,+ca&mra=dme&mrcr=0&mrsp=1&sz=12&via=1&sll=37.316387,-122.289505&sspn=0.160004,0.307617&ie=UTF8&ll=37.310926,-122.287445&spn=0.160016,0.307617&t=h&z=12