There are already dedicated buttons for volume, mute, play/pause, CD eject further above the keyboard.

You seriously change the brightness of your screen or change the volume of your music more than you edit?

Admittedly your *nix type tools are less function key oriented. In a Windows world though....

Similar to the argument I have with people turning num lock off to use the edit keys on 101 keyboards when there's a full set of dedicated keys immediately to the left of the keypad. That's *slightly* different I feel since either way is one touch. And at least it's an easy key press as compared with a shutdown, enter BIOS and reboot.