I took the time to register about 50 products for my Mother's site victoriantreasury.com that has some handmade products - handmade valentine gift cards based on real antiques in her collection. Anyway the site shows up on the top page of google's results so I thought it might attract people interested in buying in this niche area.. she's really a collector and runs a collectors' society so it is not like Hallmark or anything. But it seemed it would be a perfect long tail kind of niche to fit Google's merchant area.

Well, despite even having to update the spreadsheet more than once as rules changed and putting much time into it, we never got many hits and finally when it recently seemed like it should start working the results list got filled with other vendors spamming tons of identical products to the point that our company didn't even show up in the list of vendors. The engine was very susceptible to be gamed. If they did an ounce of work trying to make a serious engine I would not begrudge them a percentage of any sales made but as it is, I am sorry I wasted my time on Google which you never know if they are going to stand behind a system they build or trash it the next week. Sure glad I didn't get into Google Wave, either. Maybe Google is its own worst enemy?

How much is that in bitcoins?

Yes, just see if she actually needs any Windows-only software. If it's just Internet, media and wordprocessing, OSX is all she needs.

As poster below says, two fingers or control key plus one finger will simulate a two button mouse.
Not an issue.
Brush two fingers up/down and screen scrolls smoothly.
Do that while holding down control key, and screen zooms ultra quickly, which may be useful if you ar running that resolution on 15in.
One thing I can tell you is, the 17 in. MacBook Pro, which I have had for 2-3 years, is quite awesome even now, but it's heavy. The 13 or 15in would be lighter.
There also happens to be a boatload of free software for the Mac, both mac original apps which tend to be supergreat, and unix ports. I have an old Microsoft Word but prefer to use the latest libreoffice.
I've use pc, linux and mac and I have to say there is a reason why macs are so popular. They work awfully well. She will be much happier and you will be too with less worries. Set up the mac firewall, fail2ban, sophos, vlc, libreoffice, dropbox and her Mail account, and you're done.

Unless they pay vendors to preinstall it. Anyway, if they brand it as the "Facebook browser" and promote it on their site, it will certainly get installed on a lot of phones.

Damn. I've been using Opera for several years now. If it comes under the thumb of Facebook, I'll jump ship. I don't want those fuckers backdooring themselves into everything I do online.

I hesitate to ask what it sounds like when you stand next to a boiler being blasted with energetic sound waves.

Fair enough, but Amazon's P/E is more than double that of Facebook's, and I don't hear many people calling on it...

I thought "pirates" were those who made the files available. Not those who download them.Anyway,it's still trivial to download any MS software. The hassle is you have to look out for malware and then find a WGA crack. Rather than go through all that crap, when I was given a used corporate laptop with a heavily passworded Vista setup and faced wiping and reinstall to get a useful system, I just said "fuck all that" and got Ubuntu. My daughter complained, but she got used to it.

Answered #1 myself, answer is YES.
http://www.space.com/15479-seti-telescope-space-junk-search.html