Are you sure you are not confusing King with Patterson? ;-)

I remember reading somewhere that Bram Moolenaar is willing to sell you a special licence for his program if you insist that you want to buy it.
Vim is absolutely magnificent Free Software project - a very powerfull reincarnation of the vi editor. And the left-over money will be used for kids in Uganda.

See this page: http://www.vim.org/sponsor/index.php
Registered Vim user You can become a registered Vim user by sending at least 10 euro. This works similar to sponsoring Vim (see above). Registration was made possible for the situation where your boss or bookkeeper may be willing to register software, but does not like the terms "sponsoring" and "donation".

Even if you are just kidding ;-) ... It does have web interface. But only for browsing your collection.
Preferences -> sharing -> sharing over net -> start server.

I was using Calibre the same way as you - for conversions (and to communicate with my Sony PRS-500 reader), exactly because of that unusual interface.
Nowadays I simply reconfigure the interface, using Preferences -> interface - > Toolbar.
I remove all icons from the toolbar and put the functions I want on the menubar.
Do not saw off the branch you are sitting on and first define the menubar, with a prefferences menu and only then remove the toolbar.

Calibre is extremely configurable and *very* powerfull. It has great support for regular expressions and other advanced things.

Well, the ideal line length for printed text is 56 characters, or some similar number, depending on what study you read. In practice this of course varies for practical reasons, but a text in a well typeset book is seldom longer than 75 characters. Just grab a random book and count 'em. If the page is wider, the [well laid-out text] is usually broken into columns. When the line is shorter, the gaps between words are too uneven in case the text is full justified (needed for columns) and the eyes have to skip too much. When the line is much longer, then the eye has problems tracing back from right to left the the beginning of the next line. Six inch e-ink displays have size close to ideal, from the length-of-line point of view. But you have to set margins smaller than they are set on the out-of-the-box Kindle. Typical Kindle and other books have other problems, like lack of hyphenation, which makes the gaps between words too uneven with the [default] full justification.

OK. I could save one watt by running IE instead of [insert your favorite browser here]. But then I would have to run it on Windows, and install anti-mallware, anti-virus and other anti-CPU measures.
I think I am much better off running a less efficient browser on Linux, even with a memory hog called KDE 4 running the whole show.

I know you do not need ISA for RS232. I wrote about ISA to show that you can buy even more exotic stuff than a PC with an RS232 port. Sometimes you have special hardware that does require ISA.

A few posts ago I wrote about Industrial PCs.
If you need just a serial port, and not complete PC running old software that needs to access serial port directly, there are boxes from Moxa that let you connect dozens of serial ports to one PC.

At work we use Industrial PCs for work with PLCs. You can still buy PC with an ISA slot, and most of industrial PCs have good old serial port. Just contact any competent supplied of industrial automation equipment.
One of manufacturers is Advantech. Have a look at their UNO line of "brick" computers. Plenty of industrial RS232 and RS485 ports even in the most basic models. Computers are fanless and built to last. Unfortunatelly, those machines are bloody expensive.

If you look really hard, you can even find new 486 machines. Those are even more expensive than Advantech bricks I wrote about, but there are still people that need those computers, so there are companies able to provide them at a cost.

In my country they DO sell game meat in stores.

I block ads because some sites are *so* horribly infested with annoying, blinking, screaming, memory-hogging, loud crap that there is no choice but to install something.
I am willing to whitelist a site that asks nicely AND takes care that the advertisments do not make their site un-viewable. No popups, no animated crap that makes reading text impossible, no flash that bogs down entire computer, no loud sound, no articles divided to 20 parts so they can cram 20 times more ads down our collective throats, no double-underlined words that display a caption add when I move mouse over them. It can be done. Have a look at google site.

Please understand: the vast majority of users out there are too lazy and ignorant to mess with switching on the add blocking. They are even willing to use browsers horribly infested with unbelievable amount of crap. In order to make such user to go and ask someone knowledgeable to install an adblock for them they had to be extremely annoyed.

So, if you want to blame somebody, blame stupid webmasters and super-greedy advertisers that created sites that drove us to block ads.

Well, my very first thought after I started using Windows 8 was that that thing was in many aspects very similar to Emacs.

To use Windows 8 you very quickly learn many useful keyboard shortcuts, like Win-x if you want to start some program that isn't jet on that Start screen. Compare that with Meta-x used in Emacs to run commands. There are many other similarities.

That said, I personally prefer Vim ;-)

well, before jumping to conclusions you should have looked up previous names:
1.0 - Ada
2.0 - Barbara
2.1 - Bea
2.2 - Bianca
3.0 - Cassandra
3.1 - Celena
4.0 - Daryna
5 LTS - Elyssa
6 - Felicia
7 - Gloria
8 - Helena
9 LTS - Isadora
10 - Julia
11 - Katya
12 - Lisa
13 LTS - Maya
14 - Nadia

This way it makes much more sense, doesn't it?