1) He retakes clear photos of the merch at a variety of angles - something that many craigslist postings lack
2) He himself has a threshold of quality, and inspects the product before picking it up from the original seller - I would much rather trust a guy who buys 10 cordless drills a week on craigslist to know the drill is bad, than relying on my limited knowledge of cordless drills and their common defects.
I'm willing to pay a few extra bucks for his vetting.
I skimmed it - It's boring. From my reading, George can't hack any more Sony products or talk about hacking Sony products, or direct anyone to talk about hacking Sony products. No money, No promises (though there is some talk about where they promise to sue each other if they do this again). That's it.
I have a sheeva plug. It's been running my home phone system (based on Asterisk) for the last year or so. It was easy to set up and has worked well for me. Several services are running on it, including apache, which serves a webpage i use to get my voicemail. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'high performance', but it does the trick for me.
I know you're already aware of it, just thought I'd share my experience.