Here are some random things I find useful, related to user interaction (mostly becuase it notifies the user):

Oven timer:
sleep $((20*60)); xmessage "Dinner is done"

Quick macro for automating some repetitive task in a program:
xdotool type "something"; xdotool key Return; xdotool mousemove $x $y; xdotool click 1; (and so on)

Copying a file to/from the clipboard (can also copy from /topipe, so the output of any command). Faster than opening a text editor:
xclip -in file

Notifying me when some specific thing changed on a website:
CHECKLINE="$(curl -s http://somewebsite.org/somepage.html | grep "currently undergoing maintenence")"
while true; do
    sleep 120
    [ -z "$CHECKLINE" ] && xmessage "somewebsite is open again" && exit
done

Or just checking for changes in general (I use this for notifying me when something changed when tracking something I ordered, so I know the minute the package is ready to get picked up at the post office):
while true; do
    OLD_MD5=${MD5}
    CONTENT=$(elinks -dump 1 -dump-charset iso-8859-1 "http://someurl.com/track?id=someid")
    MD5=$(echo -n $CONTENT | md5sum -)

    [ "${MD5}" != "${OLD_MD5}" ] && {
        xmessage "$(printf "New action: :\n\n${CONTENT}")"
    }
    sleep 120
done

If you don't want to interrupt what you're doing with a pop-up you can pipe it to osd_cat instead to have the text appear over whatever program you're currently working with. Adding a few beep; beep; beep; beep; is also a good way to get your attention if you're not paying 100% attention to your computer all the time.

Thats not entirely accurate since it can be charged and discharged multiple times. Apperantly thousands of times according to a comment earlier. So the price in your example goes down by a few factors.

Even if we can't use it for practical purposes we can still use it to learn a lot about how the universe works.

Would be nice if they could make things like character names clickable like in a wiki and it would bring up a reference with a quick summary of what the char has done. With detecting which page you clicked from and only described events that happened before that.

Where in my post did I say SAAB? If you look at the parent to my post you'll see that we were discussing brands GM have bought in Europe in general, not SAAB in particular.

Thats really the fault of GM. They were profitable when GM bought them. GM has introduced an insane amount of restrictions and bad design choices that they forced the european brands to use. SAAB employees has been complaining about this for many years.

The swedish goverment has guaranteed the loan already, it was announced in swedish media about 12 hours ago.

1 and 4: Its clear that we don't live in the same part of the world. 2: Who said anything about following instructions blindly? You don't have to turn into an idiot just because you have a GPS. And instructions could be made simple. They could say "follow the road that leads towards X" and you look at the signs and take that turn, or continue forwards, or switch lanes or whatever the signs indicate. 3: There is an easy way to see the streets around you. Its called looking out the window. Disclaimer: I don't have a driverce licence, and not much experience driving.

Yes, and thats not a problem, as you can just add or remove padding as needed. The problem would be if its significantly bigger. Or if it was so small that it would fit inside the part that has a transparent plastic film, rather than being stopped by the hard plastic, because I'm not sure that the film would last that long with the pressure of the device directly on it.

I don't think the screen matters that much. Most people who drive with a GPS probably relies a lot more on the voice instructions than on what the screen displays.

Maemo has Ovi Maps already. At least the N800 does, I assume they didn't remove it in the maemo 5 version of the OS.

You probably don't have to pay to use the hardware. Freeware GPS apps can probably access the GPS fine.

There are good free maps too. What you have to pay for is probably maps that has built in navigation metadata so it can calculate how you should drive. Those costs a bit more to produce, and those are what nokia are now giving away for free, which is what this story is all about. Which is no different than buying software for a computer, even if you already bought the computer.

I have this waterproof casing for my N800: http://www.otterbox.com/handheld-pda-cases/2600-series/2600-series-pda-case/

Waterproof up to one meter, and it floats so no worries about loosing it in the water. Also shock resistant and crush resistant. I bought it many years ago for the palm I've used then, and I was happy to see that the N800 was also usable in it. I hope the N900 is as well since I plan on getting one at some point, but it should be, since its about the same size.

I use my N800 as a GPS outside sometimes, and use this so I don't have to worry about dropping it in a moist terrain or if it starts raining. I also use it for reading ebooks when taking a bath.

So a smartphone/pda doesn't have to be unusable in conditions like the ones you describe. Altough I'm not sure if you could make phonecalls while its inside the shield, it might block the sound waves too much. Touchscreen devices work great on it, since one side has a soft transparent plastic film over where the screen is. Buttons on the front work well trough it too. Buttons on the side or top are not reachable however.

I did some tests with mine, among other things leaving it at the bottom of my bathtub for 24 hours with something heavy on it to make it stay at the bottom. No moisture got in.

So pdas/smartphones aren't necceserily useless in the conditions you describe, you just have to have the right gear for it.

That makes sense to me. Denoising can be done much better when you have the data from the raw image than when you have already converted. Sharpening is the same either way, so you could just as well do it in gimp or something, so a raw program doesn't need to include it. Also sharpening should always be the last thing you do, because it doesn't turn out nearly as well if you do it earlier in your workflow (And I mean the last, after doing all modifications, and resizing. The only thing left to do when you've sharpened the image should be to hit the save button and close the program.) And since most people probably do some final touch-ups in an image editor after having the image converted from raw, it makes sense to do the sharpening in the image program, rather than doing it prematurely. For myself I made a small shell script that uses ufraw-batch to convert raw files to images using settings that usually produce good results for my camera. Then it uses imagemagick to do some other things, including applying a small unsharp mask. Works pretty well. I only open ufraw and go trough the whole process manually for images that turned out exceptionally well.

If you read some of the other comments you'll see that linux has had multiple free software raw-processing programs for many years. There are at least two plugins for gimp, one for dcraw and one for ufraw. And there are professional photographers that use them.