What I would like to have with thunderbolt is fancy magic breaker box, which would for example include:
- 4 firewire 800 ports
- 8 USB2 / USB3 ports
- 2 ESATA ports for disks
- maybe connector for external display as well

Connecting such box to your laptop might sound silly for most users, but my use would be to hook this to my music hardware rack, having all of the audio hardware connected to your gig laptop with one cable. Like, all various MIDI controllers (usually USB), audio recording interfaces (usually firewire), instruments (my line6 guitar amp has USB) and external disks for recording.

Usually you only use one or two of these devices at a time, but the cables can be really a PITA: having one magic box bolted to your audio rack, connecting everything there permanently makes things so much simpler. Of course, I would like the magic box to come in 1U form factor, or with rack mounting kit.

If such box is made available, I seriously might be tempted to get a new MBP, just to be able to use it.

This is not going to make thunderbolt a must for all users, but it's wonderful technology to replace firewire (which is certainly not dead yet in pro audio market!). Everything doesn't have to be The Big Thing for everyone. I'm not sure about USB3, but I though it still has latency issues like USB2 for multichannel audio (like 32 channels, not your average gaming rig...), which are not solved by higher transfer rates. Might be wrong of course regarding USB3...

While not a perfect solution, this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6415" for firefox helps a little bit: it stores the certificates to a sqlite database in your profile and warns if the certificate changes.

If you get mitm on the first connection, you still have a problem, but the extension can at least detect if someone is trying to do it in future...

You need to also remember that for most old school classic music masters, copying themes and ideas from your own works or from some other composer's work was considered very cool and a clever trick, as long as you used them in some new interesting way. If the other composers were still living, they were very happy about this because it proved you had created something worth copying!

The idea that you are expected to make "completely original music" is quite new, and whole idea of plagiarism is new as well in music circles. For example, I skip the whole Coldplay's Viva la Vida vs. Joe Satriani's If I Could Fly issue just with "cool reuse of a theme, go on boys", certainly not "oh crap now I can't support Coldplay because they are copycats".

BTW, it's kind of interesting that modern pop music is more OK with direct sampling of songs than copying ideas. I'm fine with both, just saying the ideas should be free to use as well.

Yes, at least in linux this would be quite trivial. Since 2.6.1x (was it 14 or 15), the hdaps driver is part of standard kernel and will generate normal joystick events from the sensor (google for 'neverball hdaps' - you can play with the sensor).

Actually, I think macbook uses exactly same hdaps driver, this should work in linux on macbook as well. Not sure if it's so.

IMO this would be much more useful when combined with your mobile phone - i.e. when the bluetooth ID of your mobile is not in range, set the alarm on, and switch it off again when the ID is back. Of course, security aware persons do not actually keep bluetooth enabled all the time...