Just adding that this is the core practical difference of usability between coinjoin (that includes darkcoin) and cryptonote. With monero you don't need anybody else to mix with you at any particular time to make an anonymous transaction. You can be the only one in the world using Monero for the entire day, it won't be a problem at all.
It's beautiful

Not sure about that since the larger fees make it more attractive for miners. If the mining/fees market is close to a free market, the transaction should have the same likelihood to be chosen by miners as a small one.

I don't think the amount of the transaction is derivable from the blockchain.

The exact amount is not, although some range of estimates can be made. There are a bunch of outputs, some are payment and some are change, with no way to tell which is which. In fact there can be multiple payments in one transaction (as with pool payouts) so it isn't even clear that all the non-change ones are going to the same destination.

The current wallet code isn't that great about putting these together. For example, for a payment with one recipient, if the are two outputs of the same size, you know one is always going to the recipient and one as change. But that can and likely will be improved in the future. If wallet code occasionally uses outputs of 1+1 instead of 2 or even 0.5+0.5 instead of 1 then you wouldn't be a able to make this inference.

Oh yes it happens all the time. Since the level of activity is relatively low, the (soft) block size limit is at the minimum allowed value of 20KB, which is also the default size limit for transactions (larger than that, they get broken up into pieces), so there are quite a few transactions of 10-15KB for example.

Hi guys - I'm encountering some nigglies with my computer and my wonderfully fast Internet - the Missive is ready, but it's 1am and it's not going up, so I'll have to try again tomorrow morning.

If you are on linux just try

$ curl localhost:18081/getinfo

From there if you have any kind of scripting skills you can parse out the difficulty and go from there. If you don't have any scripting skills you won't be able to do this I'm afraid.

Dos/Winblows here all I can do on nix is ls and grep. LOL

K, I'll check into it l8r putting my old rig back online now. Don't ask me why I think, it will cost me about 2 bucks per xmr.

Yes because if you are a Japanese guy and trying to be anonymous, the most logical thing to do is use a Japanese pseudonym (or better yet use your actual name like Dorian did). Hiding in plain sight; absolutely brilliant!