Merged NEWNEAR experiment

This commit merges the NEWNEAR experiment such that it
is effectively always on.

The fact that there were changes in the threading code again
highlights the need to strip out such features during the
bitstream development phase as trying to maintain this code
(especially as it is not being tested) slows the development cycle.

Change-Id: I8b34950a1333231ced9928aa11cd6d6459984b65