In the UK you can get that for £6, which probably works out to about $10ish

Funny, I get the opposite problem with my N95 - with my pretty sensitive sennheiser rippoff in ears, the minimum volume without being muted (10%) is too loud for me sometimes. I get a similar problem with my ipod (running rockbox) - the minimum volume is still pretty loud and it just mutes if I try to go lower.

Regarding the last note, read Altered Carbon - interesting book on that topic - murder in a world of resurrection.

Good on you, but not everybody thinks that. (Originally I put "Unfortunately not everybody thinks that", but I guess it's their/your choice).

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I can't see iceweasel doing anything proactive to change the menu system. I thought they were just rebranding But yeh, a fork would be good. Why in the name of god can't they just make it an option!?

Firefox's greasemonkey allows you to have javascript of your choosing execute on sites - you can do a lot of this sort of funk with it. I've seen things to remove annoying sections from myspace and display full size photos when you rollover the thumbnail, among other things. On the downside, it requires a bit of knowledge on the behalf of the person creating the scripts. But it's pretty braindead to actually install and use them.

I love how the least popular option is the one that every linux user, without exception (I'm including upstart etc) actually uses. (Preemptive) I use kernel init=/bin/bash and start everything manually, you insensitive clod

In DOS, without a memory manager, if you use pointers / arrays you have unrestricted access to every byte of RAM on the computer. Completely raw. Think about every time you get a segfault or a "Program performed an illegal operation" - that could easily be a dead system right there.

By toys, I mean my smartphone, ipod, laptop, xbox 360, microprocessor development tools. Which are all rather recent. I wouldn't say I have anything from childhood that I would regard as a toy. I do have some cool gizmos though - a mostly working ancient dymo labeller and a big box of tapes.

You assume by the first part that everybody on earth who codes Free software is from the USA... Not everybody might think it an advantage that the USA saves money from their work. (Although, I agree that by releasing it as Free software they forfeit their right to give a damn)

My first real encounter with programming was The Games Factory and later multimedia fusion from ClickTeam - it did a darned good job of teaching the concepts of programming, while being easy enough to get something very decent quickly and easily, but being multipurpose enough to be surprisingly useful (Multimedia Fusion along with MooSock and a little creativity was sufficient to crash remote windows machines running a particular firewall software...)
I was later taught a tad of VBS inside access by a friend, and moved onto VB5, and reluctantly VB6. A lot more powerful, not quite as easy and fun though.
I then taught myself C and later C++ from scratch by Sams' books. I never really got the hang of programming for the windows API or any particular GUI toolkit, but I've latched onto the core of the language more and learnt to love embedded programming in C and assembler (Microchip PICs).
So, for anybody with young kids showing an interest in that sort of thing, I can recommend Clickteam's stuff, and Sams' books if they want to get more serious (Although the Sams' books teach the ANSI standard and stuff very well, they lack any information on system libraries which would be needed to actually do anything useful, so bear in mind, until you read up on that, you are going to be seeing an awful lot of the command prompt. Without the means to do anything really useful like graphics / networking, I can see a lot of people quickly losing interest.)

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Is there anything to stop you taking a fridge and putting it the wrong way up, out of curiosity?

I'll agree with that, though I'm curious as to how hibernate doesn't make much of a difference to your startup time. For me, booting and logging in on vista is pretty bad, whereas from hibernation it's not toooo bad (Shutdowns to hibernation take ages with 4GB RAM on this laptop, but I don't mind that.) I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm asking for your help :D