Actually, anacdotal evidence suggests that raising a boy as a girl doesn't work.

They didn't "force" electrification, instead the Government provided loans to local electrification cooperatives -- in other words, the small communities that you are talking about. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Administration
Read up on it, the situation is very analogous: large companies refusing to provide service, yet claiming the government was not allowed to compete with them or regulate them.

Sorry, I grew up with Unix before GNU; that was not an option back then.

Because that's a GNUism I didn't know! Thanks, filed away for future use.

Here's a simple one.
Let's say you are looking for a file that has a certain string in it. (I'll use "foobar" because I'm a traditionalist.) You probably already know
find . -type f -exec grep -l foobar {} \;
But the problem is, that only returns the filename, not the line matched. You could drop the "-l", but then you only get the matching line, but not the filename. The quick way to solve the problem is to add a second file to the grep; then grep returns both the filename and the line match. In order to keep things quick and the results pure, the best file to use is /dev/null.
find . -type f -exec grep foobar {} /dev/null \;

ls -l | sort -n +4 -- sorts files in size order, good for finding big files in a directory
du -s * | sort -n -- similar to above, find the biggest files & subdirectories of the current dir
du | xdu -- only when you're in X, obviously. Better grain than above, with the ability to drill down into subdirectories

Oh, they can make a profit. Just not a profit of the size they would prefer. Remember that, now, they're pulling in $1 for a good song. They liked it better when they were pulling in $15 for an album ... with one good song. Okay, that's unfair to a lot of artists who put out albums that were more good than bad -- but even if you're talking about an album with only good songs on it (and I don't think it's unfair to say that there aren't very many of those), it's still only $8 or $9 to buy all the songs individually. eg: "Bat ouf of Hell," which I think has all solid songs, only has 7 of them.

Be careful with the Muvo drive swap. It looks like Creative is now using microdrives that only work in ATA mode. The owner of Digital Photography Review has just run into this problem recently. Here's the thread.