I think people in the USA with a brain will be able to grasp kelvin/Celsius fine... The others don't need to be reading this.

Hardly true. Unless you're talking of really low level stuff(ie pre-university), most of the time you find yourself with teachers doing exams extremely biased to what they said and not the actual subject.
This means you can be smart, and know the subject fairly well but find yourself not getting good grades because you did not explain it the way the teacher repeated it in class.

Alternatively, it is quite obvious to anyone who actually went to school that those leading their classes are rarely the smartest, but those that worked their ass off.

Intelligence certainly does not give you academic success.

Is it? At least for me, most of the work I do I learned out of school. School I only did to get diplomas and degrees to get the job in the first place. It's not so much education anymore as just a way to prove you're smart enough to matter.(and even that part is not so true, since dumb overachievers will do better than lazy smart people most of the time)

Wait... So a $400 camera attached to fiber optics worth $5k... I think there's a slight misconception of what is the costy part of the system.

something as simple as placing the file menu on the same bar as my address bar.(yes I know there are some custom buttons to do something similar, but it's hardly the same since they don't behave like a menu)

Also, it is true that jemalloc(the memory allocator) of firefox is quite broken under linux. It is however quite good under windows, and there are very few leaks from firefox itself nowadays. Most leaks come from non-updated extensions/a couple known culprits(see firebug/video download helper/menu editor, and a couple others)

I think that the problem is actually that the higher firefox devs. seem to be focused on looking like chrome/opera... and keep on introducing new features that break the rest of the browser.
People don't move to chrome because of the ui(well okay, some do, most I know didn't), they moved because it was faster and less buggy.

What firefox needs is optimization/cleaning, not new features.

I will personally stay with the fox until chrome or opera allow for both real gui modification(which both opera and chrome lack) and extensions(chrome has that, or at least starting to pick up).v

Uh... What about if you want your box to do good 802.11n? That's faster than 100FE. Considering the OP talks of a router to replace his wrt54GL one can safely assume he intends to use wifi devices. And reasonably one can expect ether devices too, possibly on GbE. So sure internet<->router requiring GbE is rare, but device<-GbE ether->router<-wifi->device is hardly uncommon.

Between apple and sony, the world seems to be going towards lawyer locking of everything as fast as possible.
I'm not sure about other people, but that sanitized future world is kind of really depressing.
Next step is you'll have to spend all your digital money to the 4 big corporations that control and enforce each of their platforms integrity in totalitarian ways.

News... that only come from a couple big media agencies.
Games... that check permanently online they're unmodified, and require trusted platforms banning any form of liberty/homebrew.
Videos&Music... that only come out in DRM form with you-are-only-renting-from-us terms.
Internet connections... where you can only do what the isp deems safe.
etc...