16 Drupal questions off the top of my head

Hi there,

First off I just wanted to say thanks for taking a minute to reply to these. I have been reading bits and pieces of the Drupal handbook. But since I've been hearing these forums are a great help, I figure I'd save myself some time (for now) and ask away. If my question seems vague, it probably means I'm asking for an explanation or URL to a page where it's explained how to do something. Here goes:

1: Can the news system show the 20 latest headlines on the left-top side of the site? With that I mean that it doesn't just look like a blog with the news in the centre of the frontpage. Kind of like this maybe www.saeger-in-web.de only more like newsitems on the right side as a website like this www.fok.nl Maybe this can be accomplished by shrinking the font size?
2: Is RSS automatically put on the site, like installing the Syndication script? Will RSS be syndicated from the Drupal newsitems automatically, or do I need to do something aside from enabling it in Drupal ? (What's Atomfeed or Feedburner for, do I need to subscribe to that and link it to my site running Drupal to get RSS to work?)
3: Is Statistics tracking included for visitor#/url tracking? Or is that new in 4.6?
4: Can the user login menu be made smaller or put at the bottom of each newsitem? It kind of looks like YES, see http://drupal.org/node/13777
5: How do I devide my newsitems into categories?
6: Should I add "captchas" to the user registration process to prevent spam, when registration along should/can prevent this already?
7: Is a mailinglist an option in Drupal?
8: Is a Comment Closer module needed to close down topic replies every week on a busy site?
9: Can the top design of the page (where you usually put your logo/slogun & sub-pages) be changed from a straight horizontal line to a (to me) more stylish dropping-to-the-left bottom line?
10: Can newsitem comments be moderated by a set user (mod) in case of rude language?
11: My (future) webhost claims it will allow me to auto-install Drupal 4.4, is this too old? I ask this, because for one of my sites I would like to use a 4.5 theme (Lincoln's Revenge) but don't know if it will work with Drupal 4.4? My 2nd question here would be, does Drupal 4.5 offer more options over version 4.4 for me(newbie) to try and install 4.5 or 4.6 myself?
12: I really like the blue drupal.org theme, does this come standard with version 4.4?
13: Is there a 404 error page you can set and have forward to the frontpage in seconds? If yes, are the node numbers easy to figure out? - http://drupal.org/node/15366
14: On Blogger they explain how to add Adsense ads to the sidebar, is it the same in Drupal? http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=974
15: Is Post scheduling possible in Drupal? Then I can use it via Ecto as well.
16: Is (thumbnailed) image posting possible in Drupal?

Thanks a million.

[edit-moved post to pre-installation questions]