Digital camera advice

A few points:

(1) They'll ALL have USB.
(2) Digital Zoom is worthless. 100% worthless. You'll get better results enlarging the image in Photoshop.
(3) Megapixels are an e-penis myth. You won't notice a difference when printing until you basically double the number of megapixels. For a standard 5x7 print, anything 3.5MP or higher will be file.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Nikon and Canon are of course the kings.

Minolta, Olympus, Pentax all make fantastic stuff. Sony's stuff is like any Sony Product - decent quality but you'll pay more for the same level of quality then you would with other brands.

For a Point-and-Shoot camera, I love my dad's Pentax Optio 555. I think the model's discontinued, but it's compact, it's got a good-grade 5MP sensor (quality over quantity - it's not DSLR-grade, but especially for a point-and-shoot it's a very nice sensor), it's got something like 5x Optical Zoom, and good manual controls. For my personal use, I have a Nikon D50, but that's a ways out of your price range.

Always depends on how people feel about eBay, but I consider something like this to be quite a fantastic deal: Link - Camera, extra battery, 256MB card (enough to get a couple hundred pictures on High Resolution - I think I get 370-some on a 512MB card), $200. Only thing you really wouldn't have is a factory warranty, but the camera's also pretty rugged - since it's a family camera it's been dropped a few times. It takes hits surprisingly well, and can also be repaired without much difficulty - The lens wouldn't go back in after being dropped once, and a simple screwdriver fixed that.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Weird how that switch happens. All the Nikons through the D50 take SD, but the D70s and above take CF.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

"Newer" has nothing to do with it, really. Their High-End DSLR models (many of which predate their newer consumer models) take CF since for some reason it's the standard that's caught on the most in Pro Photography. Their consumer Point-and-Shoot Models and the D50 (their least expensive DSLR, although I wouldn't call it "low-end" - for a lot of things it's better than the more expensive D70s) all take SD.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

That also depends in some circumstances on the speed of the memory card. Obviously, the camera can't save any faster than the card can write. A camera that can write at a decent speed is key, but other than reading user reviews it's almost impossible to know such things beforehand. True shutter speed... For 99% of your shots it probably won't matter. While my DSLR goes down to 1/4000th of a second, I rarely take shots any faster than 1/250th of a second, and most Digital Camera have at least that much speed.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I haven't seen a comparison to be certain, but that would be my suspicion as well. My guess would be that a few years ago they were significantly faster, became the standard, and it stuck. Today, I don't think there's a huge difference. For instance, I use a 133X Corsair SD card in my D50, and I can take bursts of up to 20ish shots (6.1MP, Normal Compression JPG - a couple of Megabytes a file) at 2.5FPS before my write buffer fills up.

How ya doing, buddy?