Nor should they. The government should be protecting citizen's rights, not invading them. But that is what you get when you keep voting for Republicrats.

Then if said company is selling to western banks, these should be avoided.

After struggling with VirtualBox for a while, I broke down and bought VMWare. I use it for running Linux and running other versions of MacOS X on my Mac. I have found it to be well worth the money. In general, I like free software and I don't mind something that is a little harder to use if the non-free alternative is expensive, but at $79 VM Ware has saved me so much time its well worth it.

I'd be inclined to say 'amazing' for the price. I understand the use case for rPi, beaglebone black, cubieboard, etc. when you need video and actually good GPIO(even more so if you need proper PWM, i2c/SPI, etc. BBblack, especially, has some pretty powerful specialty I/O options); but routers are so aggressively priced that they are often a pretty good deal for adding network capabilities to assorted projects on the fast and cheap.

I'm always up for other suggestions, of course; but I'm currently a big fan of the little 'travel/portable' routers that the RT5350 seems to have spawned a bunch of. Ethernet, USB, 802.11B/G/N, typically a serial port(I got lucky with the ones I purchased, the pads were even labelled and everything), and a few GPIOs, all for $15 or less. Kind of weak (usually 32MB RAM and ~400MHz MIPS core); but feel the price.

I am also a Mathematician and none of this adds up.

I am a Noetic Scientist, and I think you're all crazy.

There are reasons beyond the "4 GNU freedoms" to oppose these devices being installed into all new computers.

I'll bet your not so sanguine about having a device installed in your car that allows for remote shutoff, location reporting and monitoring of your driving habits.

Because the real question is not "what is so controversial?" but rather "how secure are these systems?" It's not about what a sysadmin can do with the power to remotely turn on your computer, but what some miscreant can do with that power when he inevitably gets his hands on it. And the computer in question is not the one on your desktop at work or your business laptop (that your company paid for anyway), but the one you have at home for your taxes/banking/personal communications.

At some point, you have to start trusting people/organizations/companies.

What you're really saying is, "You don't have a choice, so just suck it up, princess. Privacy is so 20th century."

No, you don't have to trust people/organizations/companies who have not earned your trust. You are the one paying. Use the power you have as a consumer. Weaponize your purchasing power.

And always, always reserve the right to just say "Nope, I don't need it, I don't want it, and I'll find another way."

A mixture of both. The AMT system includes a dedicated ARC cpu, which runs its own OS and functions independently of the host to a large degree; but also can see into, and sometimes make use of, some of the hardware visible to the host system(details depend on version). For communication, for instance, the AMT system has access to the wired NIC below the OS's view(wireless NICs are more complex, I think AMT can do a direct connection to a trusted AP if configured to do so; but can't do VPN without piggybacking on the host OS), and it also has enough hooks into the various peripherals that it can do remote KVM in hardware, by emulating HID devices and snooping the framebuffer, mount an .iso as though it were a connected SATA device, and access some storage and memory locations that are also accessible to the host OS or programs, in order to gather data on system health, software versions, etc.

I'm not exactly sure how the BIOS/UEFI flash and the flash that stores the AMT firmware are related to one another. On computers with AMT, a 'bios update' will often flash both; but I don't know if that's because they are just different areas of the same SPI flash chip, or whether it's just a convenience bundling of two nearly unrelated updaters.

They all tend to be fairly miserable(though thermal issues are often more a product of the desire to have more space for ugly branding and fewer vents, which can be fixed with a bit of applied violence); but I do have to give the hardware credit for often being rather amazing for the price. The firmware is shit more or less across the board; but it is astounding how much actual computer they can cram into a $20 router.

Any remote management tool would be a 'backdoor', except that it is put in place by the owner for their convenience and with their consent.

AMT is a particularly powerful, and somewhat opaque, management tool. Anyone who suspects the possibility that(deliberately, or by mistake) those very, very, useful capabilities might be available to others under some circumstances would naturally be suspicious of it.

And, for the FSF and those who share their concerns, the fact that it is a wholly proprietary(and tricky to remove or replace) blob embedded in the brainstem of their computer is not something that would make them happy.

That may differ between laptops and desktops, or between AMT versions. On the desktops I've seen the AMT stuff is active if the PC is plugged in, regardless of its power state. Some of the capabilities of the AMT system cannot be used if the host PC is off; but the system itself runs on a separate processor and only turns off if the PSU is unpowered. Laptops may need to be more conservative, for the sake of retaining battery life while inactive.

Because (D) wants expansion in area 1, but not area 2. They get expansion in area 1.

Next election, (R) wins and wants to expand in area 2, and they expand in area 2.

Wash, rinse, repeat. And if anyone proposes to cut Area 1 or 2, they are accused of "Tossing grandma off a cliff" or "Not caring about security" or "hating children" or "killing kittens and puppies"

The result is the same.

As for ISP, the problem is limited last mile options. Nothing more, nothing less. By removing the last mile from the equation, from "Comcast Franchise agreement" to Municipally owned infrastructure, we'd be pushing competition away from last mile to a CO-LO, and actually be able to increase competition, without increasing regulations.

Google Fiber is still Google Fiber. I'm talking about municipality owned infrastructure. City of ______ Fiber, owned, operated and maintained by the municipality, with the fiber being terminated in a CO-LO facility, where you could get Google, Time-Warner, Comcast, DirectTV, or whatever other options were available.

The issue is removing last mile ownership by a commercial enterprise.

Speaking of Dell, failure, and lawyers, back during the 'capacitor plague' era the law firm that Dell retained to fight capacitor-plague related lawsuits was itself stuck with capacitor-plagued Dells. I can only imagine that their IT people saw the humor in the situation. True story.