It's good stuff, but it's not as uncommon or regional as you might think. Several local places offer it here...just outside of St. Paul, Minnesota.

It depends on the bike lanes in question. Often, they're pretty good, and help greatly with traffic. Though in some areas, the "bike lanes" are far more dangerous to ride in than the side of the road, since they're generally retrofitted to roadways and intersections that weren't designed with them in mind. Some cities will construct a system of death-trap "bike lanes" and claim they're now cycle-friendly, even though no sane cyclist would ever try riding in them.

And by "four moons of Jupiter," read "four most visible (Galilean) moons of Jupiter."

I've had about the opposite experience just south of you in Dakota county. On Saturday morning, I had my converter box do a channel re-scan. Most every channel was about 20% higher on the box's signal meter, with TPT coming in at near 100%. However, KMSP (channel 9) completely vanished. I entered tried entering the channel manually, but still nothing. Oh well.

If it snowed here in the winter and everything froze over until March or April, that would be another matter.

Up here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, things are pretty frozen until mid-to-late March. And there are plenty of cyclists on the streets all winter.

A PuTTy ssh session just doesn't need all that much speed.

True, but it does benefit from low latency.

The typical dial-up connection would have enough latency to make an interactive shell a bit annoying (I've done plenty of SSH-over-dialup). You can work around it by writing little scripts and then uploading them (or pasting them into the console window) instead of typing everything into the console manually, but it's still annoying.

Similarly, but on the other hand, if we do move the date to June, people who don't have converter boxes will find out that their TV reception has been cut out in the midst tornado season.

From what I have heard from various sources, this was to discourage people from all waiting until the last second before redeeming their coupons, resulting in the sudden demand for converter boxes to exceed the supply available in stores. How effective that was is another issue, of course.

Digital television is terrestrially broadcasted in the US, currently alongside analog television. Soon, though, the analog broadcasts will cease. The topic here is about the external tuners ("converter boxes") that will allow televisions without digital tuners (most televisions sold in US that were not made in the last decade or so) to display digital broadcast television after the analog broadcasts stop.

So yes, digital TV is available over-the-air in the US today. And pretty soon, it will be the only TV available over-the-air.

But will analogue cable still be around for a long time? (for a TV tuner card)

It will be around, for at least local channels over cable, until at least 2012 per FCC mandate. That might be a "long" time for certain definitions of "long."

Why just use the fancy new technology called an odometer? Check it every time you renew your registration and collect the fees at that time.

Odometers don't track in-state mileage versus out-of-state mileage. The article isn't clear on if that matters to the plan here (it might only tax in-state driving, for example), but there's this little snippet about the test run:

A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.