Just so you know, the MBR is only 512 bytes. If you write more than that (in your case, 1024 bytes), some of the first partition on the drive will get written to. If your goal is to wipe the drive, write the whole drive with zeroes, as erasing the partition table (and even the first 512 bytes of the first partition) doesn't get rid of anything. The reason I say this is because if you ever want to back a partition table up, copying the first 1024 bytes and then writing it again to a different drive or after making changes to the first partition stands a chance of breaking the first partition on the drive - which you may not want.
As for the GP's S3 drives, the (mostly windows-only) tools available do nothing to the part of the drive that presents itself as a mass-storage USB device. They twiddle some of the firmware bits in the drive (usually through a custom ATA command). The drive then no longer emulates a CD-ROM drive's USB device ID. This, by the way, is lower-level than what anything you can do to the mass-storage part of the drive with dd can affect. The ATA commands only do it through what is presumably an ugly hack on the part of the drive manufacturers.

I like NCDU myself. Windirstat is fine for Windows boxes, but why bother with a bloated GUI app when you can do it in the terminal?

No, you don't. Motorola locks down their phones so they will only charge on Motorola (or motorola-clone) chargers. If you plug a Moto phone into a standard mini-USB charger, it'll give you an "unauthorized charger" message. Go ahead and try it with the charger that came with the G1 - that's what it'll tell you. Same deal if you try and plug it into a computer without the Motorola drivers (which they want to charge money for) installed. Thankfully, the G1 and other HTC phones don't give a damn what kind of charger you have them plugged into, and will even ignore the non-standard resistor on pin 4 in Motorola chargers. HTC does its own non-standard thing on pin 4, but in this case it's just to tell the phone it can pull a full amp from the charger for a faster charge.

This is immediately what I thought of. I really enjoyed reading this guy's Deus Ex "walkthrough" where he breaks the hell out of the game. Similar things exist for most first-person RPG-esque games, where the possibilities to totally destroy the game mechanics are there.

This is not true. Lithium-ion batteries continually lose charge, and batteries stored in a hot warehouse will typically drop flat within a year or so, rendering them useless (if the cell voltage level drops too low, the cell can no longer be charged.) The GP's figure of about 20% a year is correct for fairly new batteries stored at room temperature. A generation or two ago, Li-Ions tended to lose charge quite quickly - after as little as 6 months, a battery could be dead flat. Storage temperature has much to do with the rate at which they lose charge.
The only batteries I know of that are in common use and can be stored "however you like" and "only lose capacity when used" are lithium primary cells - not to be confused with Li-Ion batteries.

This is not true. Glass was made via a process that made it thicker at the edges of the sheet, which was then cut into a rectangular shape and the thicker side placed at the bottom of the window to help with structural integrity.
See Wikipedia for more info.