So what if I haul that old, dusty analog TV out of the attic, switch it on and tune it to one of these new applications? What will I see? Strange, weird pulsating patterns? Or garbled snow and fuzzy sounds?

I would expect it to be similar to the channels that are now carrying digital tv channels. Both an unused channel and a channel that is now broadcasting digitally display a snow pattern, but the digital channel is distinct, still snow, but a different enough pattern that if you see both you can visibly identify the difference. That is unless the analog decoder replaces the snow with a solid color (like blue).

My laptop had been having an overheating problem that wasn't obvious was a heat problem for months. I just started noticing that doing something intensive, yes like compiling the kernel, would cause the CPU MHz listed in /proc/cpuinfo to drop down, sensors listed the temperature going up, but it wasn't obvious what the range or limit was. In the end I went to replace the thermal paste on the CPU, but only got as far as removing the fan and seeing a huge buildup mat of dust and fiber blocking the heat-pipe fins. I removed that and the issue went away. There just isn't any way to see the area what was blocked until the fan was removed, and the rest of the system looked dust free, at least nothing to make me think there was a problem. If you're still reading this Moxie Marlinspike, you might want to check to see if your solution is as easy as mine.

Just because the TV numbers are down does not mean people are not watching the show online, on their phones, in a pub...

That's completely true, they don't count that way of viewing TV content. My household was randomly picked earlier this year to collect TV viewing habits. I was disqualified, because I don't own a TV, never mind that I have two computers each with a tuner card, and one is a digital TV tuner. I talked to one of their install representatives, they install an audio pickup on a speaker and use that to collect what is being watched when, I don't know why they couldn't do that to a computer, although it would be much more likely to pick up VoIP and such. So I've contributed to the decline of households without TVs, even though I can watch it just as well as anyone with a TV. I have effectively stopped watching TV since Star Trek Enterprise was canceled, so at least the viewing hours will be accurate.

up 163 days (desktop)
up 139 days (desktop)
up 27 days (laptop)
up 15 days (cell phone)

That's just the systems within an arms reach of where I'm sitting. Interesting that the ones which I spend the most time on are the ones that stay up the longest.

The laptop was a kernel upgrade to see if I could figure out why the CPU frequency was getting clocked down under load, I decided it was hot and intend to replace the thermal grease. I think the N900 reboot was testing a startup script or something. Shutdown at night? Why? I know people who use more electricity in light bulbs than these computers take, and light bulbs are close to instant on and off.

ogg voribs playback using Alsa 5.7% CPU usage total
use PulseAudio and the PulseAudio daemon takes 36% CPU

That's telling when it's taking less CPU to decode compressed audio than it does to forward the audio to the sound card. Maybe PulseAudio was doing an expensive resampling, but that's it's fault for not letting the sound card do the resampling. This was an older slower system, but who wants to burn extra CPU cycles like that?

Which only helps them if the T-Mobile towers were idle. Unless AT&T expects all the T-Mobile customers will hate AT&T so much they jump over to some other carrier, so maybe they will be buying some unused towers afterall.

I have no doubt the US will be among the last countries to get widespread IPv6 adoptation.

What do you mean? I can already get IPv6 directly from T-Mobile, o-wait, darn it AT&T.

I had a few reasons

• I have an unsubsitized cell phone (N900), T-Mobile $10 off per month and no contract, AT&T ?
• N900 supports 3G with WCDMA 900/1700/2100 MHz AT&T 850MHz and or 1900 MHz, ie no 3G with AT&T for me
• T-Mobile voice plan then add data and or SMS text if you want it, AT&T You have a smart phone right? You HAVE to have a data plan. What if I don't want it? Don't get a smart phone duh.
• T-Mobile IPv6 beta test, AT&T IPv What?

I bought the N900 and have the Even More Plus plan, and it was $10 less per month for the voice only plan at the time. Unfortunately T-Mobile no longer lists the Even More Plus plan price on their web site, you have to go to one of their stores to find out. I think that's pretty clear that they are no longer promoting it.

Speaking of UI quirks/misfeatures, is there a way to get to the end of a list of files other than using the "inertial scrolling" repeatedly? I've got waaaaaay too many pictures to be scrolling through ALL of them when attaching more than one to an email.

You can start typing out the filename and it will narrow down the selection list. Or the date such as 02/17 is good enough for all pictures that day. But yes, it would have been nice in the picture attachment example to reverse sort by date, that's the most likely picture to be attached.

If you want a change like that here's the place to do it. http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU/ That they've already fixed the terminal enter problem was all it took for me to install it. Changelog here

Unlikely, just look at displayport. Displayport can cannel both USB and audio despite the fact both signals do not originate from the graphics card. It would be safe to assume that Light Peak can do something similar.

Dig a little deeper. My latest graphics card has a DisplayPort connector and a built in sound card, so the only connection between the graphics card and the motherboard is PCIe. It's probably not on the GPU, but it is on the graphics card so they can combine the audio with the video as it goes out. It was also telling when PulseAudio decided it wanted to play audio to the graphics card even though that audio doesn't go anywhere, so I was less than pleased trying to figure out what happened to my sound.
Note the .0 vs .1
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
05:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series]

I've been concluding that the Nokia N900 has poor antenna performance. At least this is based on my brother and his wife sending blackberry text messages back and forth while in the same car while the N900 didn't even show a cell connection, and all three are T-Mobile. That and being at a friend's house who said some phones work, some don't there, they currently have cell phones that work, mine frequently said no cell tower there. So, I'm curious what any one else's experience with the N900 antenna performace is.

From the settlement website,

These lawsuits claim that Comcast promised and advertised specific speeds and unlimited Internet access but impaired use of some P2P file-sharing traffic on its High-Speed Internet network. Comcast denies these claims, but has revised its management of P2P and is settling to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation.

Comcast is getting off easy because the attorney's bringing the suit were bribed with $3 million dollars and decided they would take the money and let Comcast continue to deny that they interfered with their customer's traffic. That also makes the summary inaccurate, not only did they at first deny they were blocking traffic, but the class action suit legal papers still deny that they were blocking traffic.

While tethering over Bluetooth DUN doesn't come out of the box on N900, it's only a few button presses away to install. Enable the maemo.org catalog and install, no root, jailbreaking, or bricking required.

I really hate to defend flash, but then again most of what he brought up isn't even flash specific, it applies just as well to javascript, take Google maps for example. It does mouse hover, left click, drag, and right click to name a few. Saying you can't do flash on a tablet touchscreen because it's missing the hover etc, will also eliminate some very useful non-flash sites as well.

The N900 microbe browser address most of those. By default in the N900 press and drag will scroll the page up, down, left, or right, it doesn't pass that on to javascript as a mouse drag. The N900 has a mouse over/hover mode, swipe from the left at nearly the bottom and a pointer appears where your finger/styless is. That works as long as you keep dragging your finger around without letting up. To click, or click and drag press or hold the shift key (or space). That's enough to get around in google maps, but in agreeing with the author it's slow and awkward, I mean just trying to hold the device with your left hand and sometimes press shift while pressing and moving with your right. It's almost enough to want to find a hard surface to set the device on.

As far as I know there isn't a right or middle click, if it's there I haven't discovered it. Though, they could easily assign another two keys for them. That makes some of the google map functions unreachable. So yes, a good part of what he mentioned is supported, it's just slow to do, but so is doing about anything on such a small device. If you are wanting to play a fast action game that needs three buttons and keyboard chording, use a full sized computer, but most of it is there if a N900 is all you have at the time.