I also tend to get headaches from 128kbps and lower mp3s. When it's a better encode it tends not to bother me as much. This is if I'm listening with headphones or on my home stereo. If I'm in a car or other noisy environment then it doesn't affect me. Maybe it's all in my head, who knows. I also have pressure issues with my ears (probably due to ear infections as a kid). I live in Colorado now and the altitude plus caffeine makes my ears hurt really bad, especially if I put on headphones. I gave up using headphones for a few years before I figured out that I just had to stop drinking caffeine. My ears would be ringing when I got into work from the road noise.. now I'm fine with the drive.

There's also a spinoff project of torrentflux, called torrent-b4rt. It adds support for other torrent clients, grabbing torrents from rss feeds, nzb support for usenet, etc.

Regular Tylenol does have 15mg of caffeine. Not a lot compared to your average daily intake.. but it does help lesson the withdrawal symptoms.

I moved to Colorado about 7 years ago. Since then I've had a lot of ear aches due to the altitude change. (I'm from Louisiana, pretty much sea level).. My ears would be ringing a little after the half hour drive to work... But about 8 months ago, I quit drinking caffeine for health reasons (cutting out all the caleries, the acids, etc in sodas). About a week after I stopped, my head stopped ringing when I drove..and now I can wear headphones for longer than 30 minutes without my ears feeling like they're going to start bleeding.. It's kinda weird what caffeine can do to you. I've probably drunk about 4 sodas since I quit (When I come into work exhausted and need the pick me up). If you have ear problems, you might want to try cutting back/quit drinking caffeine and see if it helps you.

Most people I know who've ditched windows have gone to OS X. Looks like the numbers there support it. I'm curious to see what happens when Apple hits double digits. Personally OS X hates me. I'll sit down and start to use it and it'll beach ball on me. I've owned a few macs, and end up hitting an i/o wait wall when I do things on them. The strange thing is I'll use my girlfriends for a second..which is running fine.. and then I open a web page and it beachballs on me for 20+ seconds. I think it's programmed to not let me use it. So I went back to Linux.

The hosted services are insecure is a bit overhyped. Hosted services (such as Amazon's S3) tend to be more secure, do to the providers actually caring about security and hiring people who know how to do it. In general the cloud has much better security than whatever your company is using that's net accessible.

I've gotten a nice, full featured arch install from grub to quiet X in about 8 seconds. Unfortunately the BIOS POST crap takes 9 on my laptop.

Linux will never be considered ready for the average user's laptop/desktop because it's not Windows. It doesn't have programs called Internet Explorer or Microsoft Office. The average user has a wide variety of reasons for not learning to actually use a computer, instead preferring to learn to use a strict set of programs. People in general don't like change and don't enjoy learning new things that aren't in their sphere of interests. (Geeks in general have a much wider range of things that they find interesting than the average person)

I'm also wondering if she really got a Dell fanboy, or if Dell is giving this line their phone people to try to avoid having to exchange a computer.

There's been work on getting an eeepc 901 to boot in 5 seconds to usable minimal XFCE. (Though I guess usable depends on your needs.. I find a minimal xfce rather usable). Right now My aspire one boots from off to usable desktop in ~17 seconds.. Unfortunately about 8 of those seconds is bios. Takes 8 seconds to get to a grub menu.. Kinda sucks considering my eee 701 takes about 1.