Blame California's anti-car lobby attacking everything they can. They can't get regular gasoline cars off the roads, because those are too common, so they attack niches, including diesel.

And it affects those of us that live thousands of miles away from California, because whatever they do, the EPA does 5 years later. And, because California is the biggest car market in the world, and 13 other states have signed up to California's emissions standards (which are both misguided and set to California's unique geography,) carmakers either have to meet the ridiculous California emissions standards, or not sell to some of their biggest markets.

The emissions controls on the TDI, required to meet California (and now EPA, actually) standards cost $3-5k on top of the cost of everything else. (Yes, the TDI is optioned like a high-spec gas model. Options cost automakers almost nothing, and are a good way to hide things like expensive emissions controls. VW makes a LOT more on a high-spec 2.5 or 2.0T gas Jetta than they do on a TDI.)

Oh, and everything that has to be done to meet emissions... means that the thing gets about 20 MPG less than it would without the emissions controls - 60 instead of 40 MPG, on the highway.

That's my experience in testing active/active.

You may be interesting in this though.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2009-October/001279.html

There are several American political parties that identified as "far left". For example, Communist Party of the United States of America, or Party for Socialism and Liberation, or Socialist Workers Party. However, all those parties are highly hostile towards U.S. Democratic Party, and that attitude is mutual. As such, referring to any wing of the Dems as "far left" is pure flamebait, as correctly reflected by the moderation of your post.

By the way, Obama isn't a "far leftist" either. He's a centrist.

If I can run ssh, VNC and NX on it that is. And Firefox, Thunderbird and evince. And Cisco VPN. That's my basic set of tools. If it's a full featured phone too I'd spend maybe $500 on it.

Maybe you should keep an eye out for Nokia N900.

Ssh, Vnc and firefox work pretty nicely already.

Evince and vpnc (if that is ok for cisco VPN) were ported for N810 so I think those will also be available soon. Don't know what is the probability for NX or Thunderbird though.

Apple came to the phone market doing what they do best, interface & usability. Sure others have some catching up to do in this segment.

However Apple is standing on the shoulders of giants with iPhone. If you look at GSM standards for example, Nokia owns 67 of the 158 patents considered "essential" for GSM. Apple owns 0. And that is just a tiny part of the tech that goes into a modern phone.

People give Apple way too much credit for the shiny package. When it comes to actual tech, Apple is simply using the inventions of other manufacturers and I highly doubt that will change.

This really needs to be illegal. The possibilities of blackmailing software providers and harming users is pretty much endless when the carrier gets to decide the firewall settings.

That said, luckily they can't pull this shit with my N900. Anyone could make a new copy of the software repository, use proxy or simply go through WiFi if the 3g is blocked.

From my personal opinion Android simply doesn't stand a chance. While Android does run Linux kernel it doesn't have X Window etc. It's glorified java platform that doesn't even support full java spec. You can do anything with it, but things will take a lot of work.

Maemo on the other hand is what I see as a 'real' Linux platform running software stack which makes it pretty trivial to port existing apps to it.

Stuff I currently run on my N810:
-Real browser looking firefox with flash support
-MPlayer for playing nearly any format I can throw at it...
-Gnumeric for spreadsheets
-Battle for Wesnoth, Beneath the steel sky, Duke Nukem 3D when I feel like playing something
-Vnc server & client
-Gjiten for translating stuff to Japanese. Japanese symbols display nicely etc.

Only thing I'm really missing is the phone functionality. Even if the only improvement to N900 would be adding that, I would be happy. Adding processing power etc. makes it a must buy for me.