All the MagSafe supplies I've owned broke after a few months after the pins got stuck into the plug.

I got a cert that works in all the browsers I tested for about $10. That's plenty affordable for someone who can afford a domain.

I've seen this done. Driving a manual car doesn't put people off, it just makes the task they are doing while distracted harder.

The Internet Archive has a project to do this: http://www.archive.org/details/software

How often does a website or IM link you to Windows Help ?

I also found video calls somewhat spoiled by not working when I had my first 3G phone. Having an "oh cool, I can video call" moment followed directly by "but it doesn't work" kinda put me off.

The firewire thing is not really a fair problem to pick, any OS with DMA could be vulnerable.

Wholesale phone minutes is a sleazy business. If you have a good route to an obscure country making loads of calls to it would probably pay off.

I've only seen one ISP with a cap in the UK, excluding mobile broadband.

Uninstalling Symantec products == reinstall

Also, losing my /. comment history wouldn't bother me in the slightest. I don't think I'd even notice.

Having an "I hate this ad" button under every ad, with an opportunity for comment would be useful. Possibly that could be tied in with some way to say you like a particular advert, even if you have no interest in a given product. Kinda like a spam filter

Flash is also (mostly) an open standard http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/. It's just there is lots of it to implement, so the OSS versions are incomplete.

There are also OSS tools. I had a play with BoonEx Dolphin recently, and it did lots of the "internal Facebook" sort of stuff. It was pretty easy to deploy, and allows nice little bits like chat/walls/video/photos. Might be overkill for a small group though. Places I've worked, Jabber/XMPP is really handy. I found that IM neatly bridges the gap between "warrants a phone call" and "can wait until you check your email". Also it's a far better way to get alert messages.

Also many of the prepaid deals have free international minutes or some discount deal