They're not moving to Linux though, they are simply moving from a customer Linux distro (called "Linex") to Debian, purely because they were finding maintaining their own distro too much of an overhead.

If you rely on one company to copy your data on to 10 bazillion drives, it counts as 1 back-up.
The company is a single point of failure; it goes down, you lose all 10 bazillion copies.
Keep the master local (on a RAID, if that makes sense).
Dupe the master to a first back-up
Dupe that to tape or something, move it off-site.
3 copies; 2 media; 1 off-site. [minimum]

Simples.

That's what you have with the Pi - a full GNU/Linux system. There's demos of it doing all kinds of crazy stuff, e.g. running Quake.
About the only thing it does not come with is an enclosure.
And if you are confused about price variations - that's because there are two model.
I can't wait to get my hands on one.

Ah yes, oft to get the error message:
"Something is using the drive but I'm not going to tell you what and I am not going to even let you force the matter. You'll have to close all applications, then I may deign to let you have the device back. Maybe not. You'll have to reboot me, sucker. Bu-wa-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

Windows holding on to USB devices is a bloody PITA. Sure, I can find the lock after a bit of process inspection but I'd hardly call that intuitive.

Recent OpenJDKs; as in, withing the last year? No, not one hiccup (loads of third party; Apache Commons, Faces etc in use). My employer doesn't even support OpenJDK or the OS I'm using for dev, I just treat it as an extra layer of testing (and I can swap JDKs/OSs easily enough). Curiously enough, my "illicit" system seems to run much better than a lot of the others - not sure if that is a function of OpenJDK or the OS. Hmm...time for some metrics methinks.

I have seen comments of some issues with some of the Collections (usually disparity between hashCode and equals) and am pretty sure that bit us, but as I say; nothing of late.

JRockit however? Thar be dragons! Just glad it's no me who has to deal with it.

You are right, I mis-read.
min-40mp-USA-g would be around 54mpg. I guess that's not so bad, still not that great either compare to some of the figures one sees quoted.
And nothing in comparison to a C50, 400+mpg! (If one believes Wikipedia) :-)

40mpg, I'll assume that's 40mp-USA-g. So that;s around 49mpg in real money.

49mpg from a hybrid? Dear god, that's pathetic! Either there is something wrong with your hybrids or you both drive them like loons. Any semi-decent non-hybrid modern car should be able to do 45mpg. A hybrid should be getting nearer 60mpg. Unless, of course, you are doing large amounts of motorway driving, in which case a diesel would probably be a weapon of choice.

I will admit though, it can vary depending on where you live so probably best to compare to your neighbours.
But 49mpg still sounds low.

Yes, because Amazon do not track you. Oh no. They don't have a vast database on what you buy when. No. Not Amazon!
If one's tin-foil hat is twitching: visit local stores (not national chains), only use cash.

This, in spades. They have the means to stop the crawling. if someone is ignoring that, deep-linking or passing-off other's work, then deal with that on a case-by-case basis (just like everywhere else in the world).
Just because people know that all the major press entities are now corporate* owned, biased, not trust-worthy and now are being ignored - is no reason to go around and attempt legalised extortion.

*By "corporate", I mean owned by faceless trusts held overseas, oligarchs or others rich enough to buy the laws they want. At least, that's how it is here.

I agree, although the USA is not alone in misguided attempts at nation building (USA's biggest failures: Supporting Saddam, training Osama, supporting the Taliban etc). Britain (to pick one) has a fairly glorious history of screw-up in this department, who do you think carved up the Middle East to cause many of the preblem we now face? Basically when any nation for a very different culture tries to "help" (for relatives values of "Doing whatever Big Money wants") it seems to blow-up in their face about 15 years down the line.
Maybe there's a lesson here?