I'd say it was definitely an isolated occurrence. I use Crunchbang on all of my machines, and have found the community surrounding the distro to be very friendly whenever I've popped into the forums. I was able to meet Phil and Becky Newborough at a barcamp a couple years ago as well, and they're one of the nicest couples you could have at the forefront of your distro. :)

It seems to vary widely by region; in Upstate NY, our basic service is 5mb down, 1mb up and costs $55 monthly after all of the first year deals fall away.

I'd love gigabit service, but at their current pricing model up here, $11,000 a month is a bit steep.

I found myself in the market for a graphics card recently, and after the research and hassle of figuring out what has been released as open source, I decided to delay the decision by sticking with an older NVIDIA card I had kicking around.

Now that I know this series of AMD cards is supported with open source drivers, I'm much more comfortable running it in my Linux desktop than my old NVIDIA card, which requires their proprietary drivers.

I would be curious to see what effect services like PayPal would have on the ability for credit card companies to sell your data to advertisers. Do they still receive the relevant data, or is that retained at PayPal's level?

Granted, there's also nothing to prevent PayPal from doing the same thing with the customer data it collects. Back to gold doubloons handled with gloves, I suppose...