The next WRC cars will be 1.6L Turbo machines based off S2000 cars like this one. Of course they might have paddle shifters and maybe some other freedoms but it's still an S2000 car.

Gnome 2.28 is the latest and I think it will have Gnome 2.30. Gnome 3.0 was delayed until 9/2010 so 10.10 will have for sure. Shuttleworth wants Lucid to be the pinnacle of Gnome 2.0. 10.04 might not be the bleeding edge but it doesn't have to since it's an LTS release. LTS releases are all about long term stability and not the latest of everything. Then again they put a beta version of Firefox 3.0 instead of FF 2.0.

Not possible for an existing tuner to be converted to Cablecard. It has to be cablecard certified and they have to integrate a DRM processor and all that stuff. You'll have to buy a new tuner if you want cablecard support.

Motorola and Samsung cable boxes have BCM chips. Except for the Samsung 3050 which uses a Conexant ARM chip. All Samsung BCM boxes run Linux. BCM equipped STB's usually run Linux but use a mixture of GPL and proprietary code. The STB stuff like cablecard and drivers are closed source while the non STB related stuff is open source.

9.10 uses ALSA version 1.0.20 but it's a customized version with a lot of backports from 1.0.21. It does have native X-fi support thanks to the new driver.

Actually this car will be powered by a 1.6L turbo mill. Loeb says that the 1.6 Turbo will be fast but will have less torque than the current cars. VW is interested in WRC with the Scirocco but they want to continue using Semi automatic transmissions as they want to promote their DSG technology.

This might be the first version of Flash to support 64 bit Snow Leopard and 64 bit Windows.

The new WRcars will be AWD and will use a 1.6T but they'll be based off of Super 2000 cars. Of course they'll have a boy racer wing and other aero mods.

I think you're a little too naive. You need a reverse path for SDV to work. That would require tru2way or some 2 way protocol. SDV is a two way protocol and it would require new tuners to work with it. You can't access SDV with a 1 way protocol. The TA will have to be used until they figure out the 2 way CC PC protocol. It might require tru2way but then you wont need a TA since the reverse path transmitter can help. Even DSG would be nice but it might be a while for this to happen.

The Broadcom 7410 and 7420 can do 1080p60. It can even deinterlace 1080i60 to 1080p60 if your TV can handle it.