Do people actually do this? I've seen donate buttons before, even clicked them a few times, but I never imagined anyone received a sizable chunk of money this way.

Wow. I've never really read much about Stallman in the past, but he really comes across as an arrogant jackass in most of those answers.

There's nothing wrong with that. In that context, "a water" is the same as "a glass of water".

if I recall correctly

* Owned my own incorporated business at the age of 15 (Looking back, it was kindof dumb. It was essentially just freelancing with a shitload of paperwork attached). I dissolved it at 18 when I went to college.

* Self taught every programming language I know (Started with BASIC, then JavaScript and PHP, did some windows programming in VB, then later VB.NET and now doing asp programming in C#. I've also toyed with Objective-C/C/C++) I'm really impressed by some of the comments here. I've had a better understanding of these languages than most of my professors (which probably speaks more to the quality of my school than my programming ability)

It said the rest went toward production of the xkcd book. I don't know if that means solely inventory and production costs, or if it includes administrative overhead as well (I would assume some)

Costs were for inventory & production (we don't have any employee salaries):

Book production (cost of printing, binding, shipping to xkcd fulfillment center) - by far the most expensive thing Contracted design work ISBN registration A few FEDEX shipments for prototypes

[Ultimately, we agreed with xkcd to share the costs and deduct those from the total revenue before splitting the profits, but I needed to put a hefty downpayment and it helped to have the $ in the bank.]

I agree that there is a premium placed on mac products, but I would guess you are overstating it. I'd be willing to bet that the difference in price lies in the RAM. Apple uses DDR3 while most other manufacturers use DDR2. If you look on Newegg, you will see that there is a substantial price difference in the two (at least at my last check).

You can do it, its just not economical. Last time I looked the cases were pretty bulky as well, but it's been a while.

AJAX and Flash is a generic technology, telephone guided co-browsing is a specific implementation, most likely using that technology. There's a big difference there, especially when Flash and AJAX are ubiquitous on the web and the phone guided browsing is more innovative.