Bah, I just checked and it looks like creative no longer sells the card that I have, and they don't have anything really comparable

I second this. Soundblaster cards, as crappy as Creative is, have good jack support. I have a Xi-Fi platinum (with the front panel headers) and it has line in jacks, multiple microphone jacks, optical in / optical out etc. I don't know what their cards are like these days but I'm sure they'll have one with the RCA jacks.

Also I just want to say the RCA type dual line in jacks have never been popular on sound cards as far as I know

Everyone in the mainland knows that Hong Kong is subject to different laws, this is not a mystery to them, and nobody's raised a fuss yet.

I certainly see a benefit to being able to do things with a pen, mostly for taking notes in class etc.

Typing your notes on a word processor just doesn't give you the same amount of freedom to write in formulas, circle important concepts, doodle, etc.

I agree with everything you said except the 'speed' part.

Eclipse in my experience is consistently faster than Netbeans (at least for small projects, any big project I do in Netbeans).

I don't know if you've ever actually used the ribbon, but every single button on the ribbon remains in the same place, it never changes. Static is in fact a big emphasis on the ribbon design you cannot move anything around.

The only 'context sensitive' part of it is that an additional tab opens up when you select a picture or table which gives you functionality for that table, but that tab always appears in the same place and the contents of that tab are also static.

In fact as a Firefox user I am pretty sure this feature started with Firefox before it made its way to IE

You can still use hotkeys on the ribbon (in fact when you hit alt it even helpfully shows you all the key hints), and it exposes a lot more functionality in fewer mouse clicks than the traditional menu.

I was skeptical of the ribbon at first, but now I love it.