(Potentionally) Not for long...

How about a Jolla with a slide out keyboard...

It's my plan to finally replace my beloved N900. :)

Feel free to contribute then ;)

When they started pulling this crap I switched to something else that apes the older, simpler, cleaner versions: http://www.qbittorrent.org/

I hope you're trying to take the piss...I really do.

You do realise that the international dateline (aka. the anti-meridian) is on the opposite side of the word from Greenwich, aka. the prime meridian? Having the international dateline as the prime meridian would result in the international dateline running through...Greenwich, which would then result in strip running through Europe where countries were a day apart. Route it around the west of the British isles and then you result in everything west of the Atlantic coast being a day apart, so Europe and the Americas would be even further apart, time-wise, as opposed to America and Russia/Asia being a day apart as things stand. Might look like it makes sense given the US-centric maps presumably in use over there (i.e. http://gabelli-us.com/WORLD%20...), but there ones centred on the primary landmass makes far more sense to me as it doesn't have to split any land masses: http://www.mapsofworld.com/ima..., which is also one of the reasons why the prime meridian is exactly where it is.

Yeah it did - my N95 (Symbian OS v9.2, S60 3rd Edition) was unable to play OGGs via the stock media player as the codecs weren't signed. Previous versions were able to fine, apparently.

Pretty crappily, in that case. Difference is only one TOC (train operating company) can provide a given service (say, the 7:45 Brighton to London Victoria), and if that's the service the passenger needs to be on to get to work - that's it. No competition possible, and we all know what happens with a captive market - you get price gouging on the scale of the US cable companies. Most of the parallel routes that did exist were shut in the 1960's Beeching closure programme, so it's not exactly unexpected. The only effective competition is the road, and for a long time it won, largely due to the massive unaccountable investment in the motorway network whilst the railways had to turn a profit or be closed.

The ideal model there is London Overground, itself modelled on the London Bus network. When Maggie T. was privatising everything in the 1980s the London bus network was left until last as it was the most complex. However, when the time came everyone could see what a clusterfuck the privatisation of all the other bus operations had been so it was halted and transformed into the arrangement today: Transport for London takes the revenue risk, defines the services, and manages the branding as a single coherent corporate entity, and subcontracts the routes to private operators at largely fixed costs. The passengers don't give a damn if the number 258 is operated by First, Stagecoach or Arriva, they just care that it turns up on time and gets them where they want to go quickly. This is also how LO operates, and it works brilliantly in my opinion - almost indeed as if it were part of the London Undergound. Personally, I think this is how all the mainline train services should operate - bring back the BR regional branding and subcontract the operations to private firms. Competition transforms away from where it doesn't make sense (between passenger journeys) to between operators for the right to run the routes, away from the public entirely.

Internet access is more akin to electricity or water though - you really don't care whose bits / joules / litres you're getting - they're all essentially the same, and having multiple distribution networks would be very, very wasteful (abet, great for resiliency!) Having a single regulated infrastructure provider and free market operators makes the most sense if you don't want to just regulate the whole thing, which would remove market forces from the equation entirely (for good or bad). It also reduces the barrier to entry for new competitors dramatically - meaning your market doesn't stagnate.

You only have one now, because they currently need their own infrastructure to operate. If you split the merged entity and branded the retail operations as Time Warner and the wholesale as Comcast, then CC would have to provide the infrastructure to TW at the same cost as it would provide it to new operators. Means a level playing field, and competition drives down prices (in a functioning market, anyway). i.e. CC provides service at $30/mo. TW adds value however they can and resells for $50/mo. New ISP sets up shop, and Comcast is forced to provide service at $30/mo. If they want to raise the price to $50/mo to crush the competition, they have to charge their own subsidiary the same, so TW's books would be screwed as well. Effective oversight to make sure they're not colluding is how this works over here - BT is terrified of being split in two for monopoly abuse.

Case in point: I'm currently shopping around for a new ISP as my old one was bought out by a big player (and there's no way in hell I'm paying money to Rupert Murdoch's greasy tentacles), and not only do I have the ability to switch - but most providers that meet my requirements also let me choose which wholesale provider I want (as they all have slightly different properties, like line profiles, etc). LLU unbundling over here was brilliant, I can by service from someone like Xilo using BT wholesale, Cable & Wireless LLU or TalkTalk LLU. Don't like the filtering or traffic shaping on one? Vote with your wallet! :)

What you guys need is something akin to what happened with BT here in the UK - Arms-length separation of the infrastructure and the service. Sure, you may only be able to have one cable provider in the city, but if they have to sell non-discriminatory access to other ISPs at the same rates as their own consumer division, then you get the healthy kind of competition. There's a thriving ISP market in the UK, only downside is the big boys keep hoovering up the smaller ones that do too well, meaning if you want to stay away from the big boys you have to keep finding and migrating to a new small one every few years. :(

BT has these rules because of its ex-monopoly status, but personally I think it'd make perfect sense to apply the same rules universally. BT Retail should be able to provide service over Virgin Media's cable infrastructure in an area if that's the most cost effective way of doing it - don't limit my service options to the infrastructure provider's.

I've been following this very, very, closely. I adore my N900...I just wish it was a little closer to my beloved Debian than it is...not to mention with the closed source UI code replaced with open code. I was tempted to do some of that work myself (and/or join some of the people doing similar things), but it was hard to justify the time cost on what is essentially a dead piece of hardware.

...with the potential for new devices however....things become a lot more interesting.

Personally, I never really bought into the Meego changes...I felt too much of Maemo's "Debian" roots were lost thanks to the merge with the more Redhat-based Moblin, and I'd be much more interested in going back the other way, though the developers working on the continuation of Meego (Nemo et al) have done amazing work, cumulating in Jolla's new phone running Sailfish. I concluded (as, it seems, have many others) the best approach for my aims was to take the working Maemo 5 system and slowly rewrite the closed components one by one whilst simultaneously separately rebuilding the foundations on top of a more standard Debian base, essentially so you can have operational testing of things like communications features much quickly. There's been a lot of good work by the Maemo community to this end.

All in all, very exciting. I'm hoping to order a couple of boards to revitalise a damaged spare N900 I have here, and if it works out well, my main one too :)

I've been following this very, very, closely. I adore my N900...I just wish it was a little closer to my beloved Debian than it is...not to mention with the closed source UI code replaced with open code. I was tempted to do some of that work myself (and/or join some of the people doing similar things), but it was hard to justify the time cost on what is essentially a dead piece of hardware.

...with the potential for new devices however....things become a lot more interesting.

Personally, I never really bought into the Meego changes...I felt too much of Maemo's "Debian" roots were lost thanks to the merge with the more Redhat-based Moblin, and I'd be much more interested in going back the other way, though the developers working on the continuation of Meego (Nemo et al) have done amazing work, cumulating in Jolla's new phone running Sailfish. I concluded (as, it seems, have many others) the best approach for my aims was to take the working Maemo 5 system and slowly rewrite the closed components one by one whilst simultaneously separately rebuilding the foundations on top of a more standard Debian base, essentially so you can have operational testing of things like communications features much quickly. There's been a lot of good work by the Maemo community to this end.

All in all, very exciting. I'm hoping to order a couple of boards to revitalise a damaged spare N900 I have here, and if it works out well, my main one too :)

Someone not very technical wanting to bypass their government's mandated filtering?

As a LibreOffice user, I'm genuinely curious why you think this. I switched as I was sick of Oracle's meddling and Java-related issues, but I've found LO to be a much more pleasant product to use than OpenOffice, so I'd genuinely be appreciate if you'd elaborate why you feel OO is superior.

Kind of. The BBA is a bit of a rarity due to low home networking penetration back then, so no it didn't help it back then, but it might have done had it been a bit more commonplace.