A good analogy I read somewhere is that CS is as much about programming languages as Astronomy is about telescopes. Both are tools you use to perform the work and research in your respective field. That's why the professors at my uni never really cared what language we used to do the assignments as long as we could justify the techniques used.

I think Apple want's to level the playing field when developing for the mac and using the Mac App store. They wan't everyone to program in c (and direct derivatives). The fact that the jvm isn't bound to one programming language is, I think, one of the reasons. When you see that a dev team can develop faster with a language like Scala than for example ObjC, you can see what kind of advantages that might have.

Anything other than complete functional neural interface is a fad at best, and will never ever be used let alone replace keyboard and mouse or touch interface.

No, they don't own it anymore. PalmSource, the owner of PalmOS and BeOS was sold to ACCESS Co. in 2005.
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History

Because a digital hearing aid doesn't just amplify sound, it also filters.
Amplifying all the sound in a room is just about as useless as hearing nothing.
Depending on how advanced the system is the more expensive it gets.

What type of hearing aid you need you should figure out together with your audiologist, it all depends on what type of environments you frequent, live in, work in and your type of hearing loss.
If you work in a noisy office with lots of background sound you might require a more advanced system than someone who works in a quit room with little background noise.

The price itself is dictated by the number of microphones in the hearing aid + the proprietary algorithms to filter and represent sound.
What you're basically paying for are the features (you want or need) of a hearing aid and research that has gone into developing them plus all the stuff that goes with it being a medical device.

You can watch the reviews for a couple of different hearing aids at http://www.youtube.com/user/HearingAidDocs.
Building something yourself which only makes sound louder will eventually damage your hearing even more, so be very careful with that.

Well, now since Oracle assimilated Sun we can say "We're getting the hardware from Dell and everything else from Oracle". I think that's one reason Microsoft did this, trying to stay ahead.

No, I think it makes Linux equivalent to bad hygiene.