IP address spoofing to take over satellites! It's easy! Windows 95! *facepalm*

Most people will be. On BlackBerry physical keyboards, a dozen people in my office could beat the touchscreen typing world record within a few tries.

I mean they offer cloud installs of RHEL, but few will be clicking that button.

Not true. See https://youtu.be/DU-HruI7Q30 as posted by someone else. If the machine was really busy doing other stuff, you'd have trouble, but if the machine is MOSTLY idle, apart from running GPG on your chosen cyphertexts, then occasional network interrupts and short-lived cronjobs and stuff won't be too much of a distraction. He even demonstrates that his machine is running something really short every second, doesn't matter, you can trick GPG into making your machine emit the tell-tale squeals for a decent fraction of a second, telling you about ONE bit of key. Repeat with carefully selected cyphertexts and you can extract 1 bit per second until you're done with a 4096-bit key in about a hour. The example in the video had GPG in Enigmail in Thunderbird decrypting your email on receipt. If you know enough about SSL you could fairly easily do this as a series of negotiations on any TLS port.

I'm assuming you already have access to some sort of laptop/desktop to post to slashdot? I'd say skip the shields, get a cheap arduino clone, probably one with the USB port NOT the separate TTL programmer if this is your first Arduino experience. Don't forget a USB CABLE for it. Small breadboard, some suitable jumper wires, (or perhaps you can recycle some old cat5?) and a few cheap servos ($5 ea). No real need for a "shield", you can directly connect most servos. It's also quite easy to convert the servos to "continuous rotation" if you want a speed-controllable (propulsion) motor rather than a position-controllable (steering) one (assuming you also have access to some tiny screwdrivers, knife/clippers, etc). Recycle bits of spare wood/plastic/card for body, wheels, arms, whatever. You can make really simple sensors by just having INPUT_PULLUP wires touch GND wires when bumped. Servos can steer/push/pull/propel/twist things. You can LATER look at more reliable switches/buttons, light/IR/temperature/distance/other sensors, RGB LEDs, displays, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc once you've had a bit of fun and have a better idea what you want to build. Remember most Arduinos already have 1 status LED, and Serial.print() for debugging/control whilst still connected to USB.

Used to love AMOS, years ago. AMOS was pretty much "BASIC with nice looping, functions/procedures, and easy access to some cool Amiga graphics $#!+ like sprites, scrolling, and blitter".
These days, probably JavaScript, and honestly I wish Canvas/SVG/WebGL/SOMETHING was even half as easy as AMOS for quick-yet-pretty graphical stuff :-/

The way they handled HTML? You mean beating EVERY other mobile browser, and almost every desktop browser (including the big 4) in all the HTML5 compatibility tests, and most of the HTML5 speed tests?

A US startup called "Bytemark" started trading in the UK (my hosting company has been around since 2002). Like an idiot I asked them to please change their name because it could cause some confusion. Until then I'd not considered trademark issues, and we finally filed for a trademark of our own. Of course they filed 2 weeks before us, after I'd sent my polite request. So 2 years and about £20,000 later (only finished just last month) we defeated their objection to our trademark at a hearing, and the trademark office gave us full rights over the name. If it hadn't gone that way we could have been harassed into changing our 10-year old brand name, especially if we'd gone into any new areas of business.

My takeaway from that is that if I start another business I'll take on registration of the UK, EU & possibly US trademark as a given before launching. But when you're just starting out, it is (at best) thousands of pounds that could really be put to better use.

So here are two experiences that made me think "screw this, I wish I'd shopped at Amazon". This may just be a UK-specfic experience, but...

1) Samsung Series 9 laptop from PC World, bought from their store in April, came with Windows 8 drivers (I think) that just never worked. Mouse pointer jerking around, it blue-screened within 5 minutes on one boot out of every two. I updated its drivers through Windows, through the Samsung driver update utility ... just hopeless. I tried to use it for about a month, trying to avoid reboots, but eventually gave up and took it back to the shop. Their nice assistant agreed it looked screwed, took it back, and after two phone calls their support people said that because I hadn't made a restore disc, they couldn't / wouldn't do anything with it, and it must have been my negligence that broke it. I am taking them to court for the £900 purchase price to get a refund, after I'd bought a different model ... at Amazon.

2) Bought a £150 model helicopter for a member of staff as a leaving present from Maplin (big electronics component & gadget store), to be delivered to his house. They make a picking error and deliver a completely different, much cheaper product. I call them and say, hey, you've made a mistake would you mind delivering the correct item. No. I must go over to the recipient's house, pick the item up, drive it to the store before they will acknowledge their mistake and get me what I ordered. They generously offer a freepost address for me to send the item back, but I must be sure to go to the post office and get a certificate of dispatch! [if you've never been to England this generally involves driving into town, queuing, finding it closed for lunch etc.]

I know from for 1) Amazon would take the item back without question, and I'd be confident enough ordering a replacement on the same day, giving me what I want sooner. And for 2) again, I know they would send the right item out without question and tell me to keep the mistake, it's nor worth the restocking fees.

So whenever I hear "Amazon driving retailers out of business" what I really hear is "Amazon showing how it's done by treating customers as honest & impatient, competitors continue to fuck it up". Amazon aren't even the cheapest, or even the easiest web site to find what you want, but I do know that they care about customers getting what they want quickly, and often that's why I'll pay a bit more.

Is this unfair to ALL OTHER retailers? Am I forgetting some intangible Amazon magic here?

By defining computation to be X and not Y, I have proved that X is computation and Y is not.

Yes, terribly helpful, that.

Actually, it was 90% at 24Mbps, and 100% at 2Mbps.

Skype/Facetime over wifi? Having a mobile phone conversation?

Agreed latency can suck. Does it *have* to suck? Seems like that's an implementation issue.

The promise that they will struggle to cover is 2Mbps to 100% of the population (since the 95% of the population promise is largely a 'sort out urban areas' thing and can be done by wiring and/or better modems). Bandwidth may not be their issue.