right, who cares. my current few years old desktop is 100 times a cray-2.... some random program that i use, so it's biased, but yes, who cares.

Overall my experience has been ok, except on laptops. I am still not quite sure if it's hibernate/suspend itself in the kernel,or the interaction with Nvidia drivers. Under both Ubuntu 10 and Fedora 11/13 I had issues. Both Dell and Lenovo T60. On Ubuntu 10 it was so bad, that some menus got sticky from time to time, they would stick to the desktop. You would have to kill the app. Kind of annoying. So far this hasn't happened on Ubuntu 12, and - knock on wood - the suspend has been muchj more reliable. Oddly enough Ubuntu has disabled hibernate, but that's another story.
So,overall, my experience has been ok, but could be better.

totally agree. there are many occasions where you want to silence the click. What about nature photography? Right now SLR cameras, by their very nature, cannot turn the click off, but those press conferences sure sound silly with that battery of clicking overshadowing what the president says. But imagine if cameras were invented without them, this would never have happened.
What about video cameras, will they require a beeping noise like a truck that's backing up? The more you find analogies, the sillier this law is looking. Albeit, in Japan it's the law.

Not to mention that "Virtual Telescope" is too close to "Virtual Observatory" which is used in a VERY different context these days.
See for example http://www.ivoa.net/