Because I can run open source software on it, and I can also monitor it's network traffic at any time.

Out of curiosity (I don't live in the US), what tax advantages do you get by being married?

The government get in the way of marriges for plenty of reasons:
  - Who you're married to is who inherits your stuff if you die (unless there's children, etc, of course).
  - If you're in a coma, that'd be the person that can visit you/take decisions for you, etc.
  - You spouse can't be forced to witness against you.

I'm sure I've probably missed a few.

My phone remains in my pocket, so it's camera doesn't point at me all the time.
I also know that my phone's microphone is off.

Plenty of countries (ie: Argentina), have a different zip code per block. That makes zip codes even more delicate (first name+zip, or dob+zip are probably unique in most cases).

So with all this new tech, it would be interesting to see a video-enabled web-based XMPP client sometime soon.
Does anyone have any now on something like this?

Ads? What ads?
Don't most users nowadays use AdBlock?
Don't medium/large networks use adsuck?

If not, why? Who wants to see ads!?

I completely agree. I never have, and never will buy a phone form a carrier.
I think mobile phone carriers and open source are two things that just don't mix. Just like RIAA and open source won't either.

If you care about users, you sell to users. If you don't, you go through a carrier.

The N900 worked fine when it was release. Four years have past, and the smartphone market moves way too fast. That doesn't undo what good the N900 did. It just means it's old.

So this doesn't create a security risk, it could just potentially make security risks bigger for application with flaws we haven't seen yet? I mean, I don't know of any webapp that stores MY sensitve data on my own PC.

And if my own PC has been compromised, then that data was already compromised anyway, so what's the big deal?

I agree completely. My point above was mainly that FreeBSD dev are generally used to not getting changes back, and will most likely let it pass if they don't get anything back. In no way did I mean Sony wouldn't do it (and they seem to have pushed some stuff back in the past, surprisingly).

Personally, I dropped Reader ages ago.
I've moved over to rss2email, a small script that fetches RSS Feeds and mails them to me.
I combined this with cron, sieve and IMAP.

Feeds are checked every 15 minutes, I get them on my email on different mailboxes depending on where they come from.
IMAP makes sure all the stuff get synced across different devices, and I get all the added funcionalities of my email client (archiving, searching, etc).

I've thought numerous times about writing some nice webUI for it and hosting it publicly so people can use it without their own server - but I've never gotten around to it.

If you like hosting your own stuff, it's the way to go.
If you love your email client, it also is! :)

No, but you can use Microsoft Points.

https://duckduckgo.com/

The NSA isn't getting all of this data via inteligence. They're just asking for it and companies send them what they ask for.