I see what you did there.

My 2001 MiniDisc* walkman respectfully disagrees. The 3.5mm jack doubles as a mini-TOSLINK jack.

*Yes, I bought one. Sue me

Do what HTC does on their phones. Have your fancy weird connector, but design it to where a standard Micro-USB can plug in and do it's thing as well.

Yes, it will break 90% of the accessories out there, but since when has Apple given two shits about backwards compatibility?

We do. It's called SyncML. Google now supports it as well (though calendar sync isn't 100% together yet)

It is possible to set your location by hand, and tell Maps to never update automatically. I'm not sure if it allows you to set separate locations for different people, but there's nothing stopping you from making a "safe" account and a "real" account

No, if you're really paranoid you DON'T CARRY A CELL PHONE IN THE FIRST PLACE. Think about it: if you don't have a phone, you can't be tracked through it, period.

They're working on it (J2ME and Blackberry programming isn't too far apart), but most J2ME phones can't run apps in the background anyway

3G (in context of GSM) == UMTS, the successor to GSM. In nearly all cases*, a UMTS phone also contains GSM, as most UMTS network providers have yet to match the full coverage of their GSM networks.
3G (in context of CDMA) == EV-DO, an upgrade to the CDMA2000 standard (much like GPRS-EDGE for GSM, but from 2.5G to 3G)

*The edge cases being mostly Asian countries like Japan (PDC) and South Korea (CDMA)

And vi is the one text editor that will be found on all UNIX systems.

Bleh.

Yeah, but things like editing, saving, copying, and sending can be a bitch.

The MS Word option is to catch the posers.

Um, Ubuntu does sign their packages.

Which limits your (in the US) carrier choice to T-Mobile, and your handset choice to a handful of mid-end feature phones and all but three of their BlackBerrys.

...and now what happens when you try to make a cell call?

I actually tried that once with DD-WRT, as our phones kept colliding with the wifi. Trouble was, some of our gear (oddly enough, our Wii and DS) couldn't see the signal.