...put a sign in your front window or building lobby asking if anyone else is having the same problem, or uses electrical equipment only between those times. Make it a friendly note, with smiles, rainbows, and unicorns, so you don't offend anyone or make it look like a witch. As a bonus you get to know your neighbours.

Where are "we" drawing the line? We're not. Google is. It'd be nice if they told us where the line is, but I can't see that happening any time soon, since Google is pretty much a black box (though it is a pretty, shiny black box).

I use HostGator to host Headphone Reviews, which gets 1M+ hits a month, 300K+ of those require 2-3 MySQL hits to create the page. I host another dozen or so domains too, total monthly hits 2M+, for about $10. Uptime's great, performance is great, and the technical support is amazing - their tech support knows far far more than me, which is fairly impressive.

Most engineers have some the intelligence and power to change their situation, even if it is by changing jobs to avoid stupid or ignorant managers. You and Dilbert should definitely look elsewhere. Alternately you could educate that pointy haired dude. Good luck.

Without music at work there won't be any more programmers, the issue will be moot

Go for it, having knowledge and qualifications will always benefit you. I haven't done hiring in a while, but maturity and experience counts for something.

I think there's a great opportunity around at the moment - learning mainframes and COBOL. The people who understand them and who are good at it are retiring, and once you're decent at it you could make a shedload of money as a consultant/contractor. It's not sexy, and it's not leading edge, but I think it could be a really good niche and great earner. Legacy systems are definitely not going away.

I have a 10Mbps line running off a Telstra Clear fibre infrastructure in Wellington, New Zealand, using a well seeded torrent I can often saturate my 10Mbps connection on weekday evenings. A friend of mine has Telecom ADSL in a building in central Wellington, she's lucky to get 1% of that - 20KB/sec is good for her. Maybe you just need a better ISP.