Shell – the “~/” directory

First and foremost, this is going to depend solely on your architecture, and customs.

I for instance mount things like this under /mnt. I know people that create top level directories, and people who put this stuff in /home. It all depends on what you're comfortable with. There is no distinct standard on this anymore, the architecture of the system has changed, and you have varying views now, on things that used to be 'gospel'. Things like /usr/local or /opt/share, rpm or source...you get the drift.

Secondly, if you re-read through your link at pathname.com, you'll notice the paragraph under /media that states

Rationale

Historically there have been a number of other different places used to mount removeable media such as /cdrom, /mnt or /mnt/cdrom. Placing the mount points for all removeable media directly in the root directory would potentially result in a large number of extra directories in /. Although the use of subdirectories in /mnt as a mount point has recently been common, it conflicts with a much older tradition of using /mnt directly as a temporary mount point.

So personally, I advocate /mnt/windows or some iteration of that. It keeps the top level dir free, and is simple and intuitive. When I'm looking through or auditing a system, that's where I look for mounts right off the bat.

Linux distributions use the FHS: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html

You can also try man hier.

I'll try to sum up answers your questions off the top of my head, but I strongly suggest that you read through the FHS:

• /bin is for non-superuser system binaries
• /sbin is for superuser (root) system binaries
• /usr/bin & /usr/sbin are for non-critical shared non-superuser or superuser binaries, respectively
• /mnt is for temporarily mounting a partition
• /media is for mounting many removable media at once
• /dev contains your system device files; it's a long story :)
• The /usr folder, and its subfolders, can be shared with other systems, so that they will have access to the same programs/files installed in one place. Since /usr is typically on a separate filesystem, it doesn't contain binaries that are necessary to bring the system online.
• /root is separate because it may be necessary to bring the system online without mounting other directories which may be on separate partitions/hard drives/servers
• Yes, /etc stands for "et cetera". Configuration files for the local system are stored there.
• /opt is a place where you can install programs that you download/compile. That way you can keep them separate from the rest of the system, with all of the files in one place.
• /proc contains information about the kernel and running processes
• /var contains variable size files like logs, mail, webpages, etc.

To access a system, you generally don't need /var, /opt, /usr, /home; some of potentially largest directories on a system.

One of my favorites, which some people don't use, is /srv. It's for data that is being hosted via services like http/ftp/samba. I've see /var used for this a lot, which isn't really its purpose.