Exactly, I've listened to some terrible 30-year-old cassette tapes of live shows, etc. The audio quality is atrocious and sometimes you can barely make out what's going on, but it's amazing how quickly you stop noticing that once you become engrossed in the music itself.

On the other hand, a nice CD-quality version of a terrible song will still make me want to turn the speakers off. :)

I have a "good" gmail address (my full name@gmail.com) and I constantly get e-mail from other people signing up for things who apparently don't know their own e-mail address. I've received passwords and various other sensitive data. Sprint was sending me receipts for someone's very large corporate purchases, I kept replying and forwarding them to sprint's customer care and they basically told me they can't do anything about it and to just delete them and not worry about it.

It's also amazing how many sites will not let you unsubscribe without providing some kind of personal info. Seriously? They let you sign up with the wrong address without confirming it, but I can't unsubscribe unless I know the last 4 digits of the guy's SSN?

students are avoiding computing classes because they teach nothing but the boring basics

In fact, when I was forced to go to school I tried to avoid all classes because they all taught nothing but the boring basics.

There is a port of Chromium to N900. Download here: http://jacekowski.org/

Considering Opera Mini is a J2ME app and the N900 has no J2ME runtime, and the only way to run it is with MicroEmulator, I'm not surprised that it looked bad. I'm surprised you managed to get it running at all after 1 day of owning the N900. There is, however, Opera Mobile for N900: http://labs.opera.com/news/2010/05/11/

It has Flash, it's just disabled by default.

The plugin-container is only launched when a plugin is actually loaded.

And if you read the Adobe page linked to by that article, it says: "We are fully committed to bringing native 64-bit Flash Player for the desktop by providing native support for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux 64-bit platforms in an upcoming major release of Flash Player."

You are correct, I untarred the source on my Nokia N900, built and installed and it works fine.

Dunno about the other phones, but if they have a CLI, python interpreter & can use puthon-gdata then you should be good.

My Toyota Camry Hybrid has exactly that

Where I live (midwest USA) the electricity actually gets cheaper the more you use... It's like they encourage you to use as much as possible for greater "savings".

EA Sports has already been doing this for roster updates, for example NBA Live 2009 contained a card which entitles you to one season of roster updates. If you rent the game, buy used, etc, you would need to purchase the roster updates subscription instead (for $10 or so). If they are also charging for roster updates, renters or purchasers could potentially be hit with even more fees than just the $10 online play fee (not to mention if you have an Xbox 360, Microsoft already charges a monthly fee to play games online in the first place).

Current-year used EA Sports games in stores are typically just $1 to $5 cheaper than new ones (previous year's sports games are virtually worthless used, prices drop to $1.99 after a couple seasons have passed), so the extra fees can make buying used current-year titles much more expensive than buying the game new. EA wins.

Color palette animation FTW

And I'm still saying Fantavision is better than Flash for vector animation...

I bought one of the Unicomp keyboards on eBay. Despite the seller's description, the thing was nasty. There was so much hair, skin, and general "other person's ickyness" on it, I was really bummed. So, I popped off all the keys, threw them into a bowl and soaked them in warm soapy water for a couple hours. I took some Q-Tips and rubbing alcohol and cleaned out the sludge that was underneath the keys. Put it all back together and the thing was clean and good as new. I love it and a few people who have used my computer to check e-mail or whatever have commented on how nice the keyboard feels. I ended up buying another one for my other PC.

The Iranian version would probably be PC LOAD A4

(only the USA and Canada use "Letter")