One would think that sand, having a high surface-area to volume ratio, would be cooled relatively quickly when flung through the air?

None of the windows 'home' editions can join a domain. As has been stated earlier, you can add this functionality back to Ubuntu free, but to upgrade from a home version to a business windows version costs money.

Slightly offtopic, but when we say light cannot escape the gravitational pull of a black hole (past the event horizon), do we mean all electromagnetic energy? And if so, how is hawking radiation able to escape? Is it emitted by the singularity (inside the horizon) or by some phenomenon outside the event horizon?