I'd say you are underestimating the cows. I'm pretty sure you can train at least some of them... "Potty training" was done with horses before. It is not commonly done, but possible. They usually do their think when entering water, before scary actions, and when entering clean stables...

Well... see http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages . not nearly all of n900 userland is opensource :-(. Nokia seems to make packages closed by default, and only opensources when they see benefit _for them_...

Actually, tethering works really well once you get root on your phone, both over bluetooth and wifi. There's project dedicated to it somewhere on code.google.com ... see http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/ .

I guess most people simply fear all animals that are not cat or dog. Like... fearing horse is probably rational thing to do, so "fear of horses" does not make news the way "fear of mice" does...