No, it's not plain and simple cruelty. It can be later used to fix people with tetraplegia. Or a lot of neurological diseases.

They are not making it for the sake of having "remote controlled bugs".

The Amish are not thinking on the billions, they are thinking on their land. They rarely rely on money anyway, so the billions would not be that compelling to them. But frackle their soil and wreck their land, and they will be deeply concerned.

HSDPA connection in Brazil, 22 hops away.

--- slashdot.org ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 11 received, 0% packet loss, time 10000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 254.265/322.541/485.641/68.609 ms

You should reconsider staying online on next April 1st...

Is very easy to create a perfect, 100% accurate progress bar that works on all situations:
1 - During the first part of the job, show the words "Estimating time. Please wait."
2 - Do all the job, maintaining the "estimating" thing...
3 - After the job is complete, make up some numbers (e.g. "45 seconds left").
4 - Keep decrementing the time as accurately as possible. The user can't know that the job is already complete and you are wasting his time.
5 - The user will be pleased to see that your 45 seconds took exactly 45 seconds.

As Cypher said once, "Ignorance is bliss."

On Brazil it takes 2 weeks average to a package come all the way from China to Brazil, and a whole month or so to get it delivered home...

First, define "a few"...

And it's not lame. They are doing an amazing piece of hardware, and even if it's pricey today, it is a start. I am pretty sure the price will go down in the following years, and more and more people will be able to use it.
As the time of writing, they have already passed $34k, and I am sure they will hit the $100k mark soon. I don't have that much money to invest on them, otherwise I would already been waiting for my unit to come.
And I am not a researcher nor a dedicated hobbist...

I started with Conectiva, a Brazilian distro. The installation killed my entire disk, and my Windows partition was killed along with my backups. And it was a good thing, because I was forced to use Linux. And without internet connectivity, restarting my Windows life would take a lot of time and floppy disks.
From there, a Mandrake. It was the first distro with drivers for my alien extraterrestrial ultra powerful soundcard. Even on Windows I had never ever heard anything from it. Until that rainy day, 3am, alone home, in the dark, and after booting Mandrake for the first time. I had two big speakers on a nice setup, plugged to the computer, and mute. But when the KDE login sound blasted through them, I almost fell of the chair.
Things changed, I migrated to RedHat. And I was happy. Until the day the them-CIO of RH told everybody that end users should use Windows, Linux was intended for servers. And I found RH9 clumsy and crippled. And I migrated to Ubuntu Warthog.
I was happy with Ubuntu, until I saw the speed of a Gentoo box. And I tried Gentoo. And for some time I was happy. Until a friend asked me "why Gentoo?" and I realized I was shaving milliseconds of time to run the programs, and spending hours to download and build them. Back to Ubuntu.
Then a friend shows me SuSE. It was full of whistles and bells, a very nice setup, and I tried. For a month... And back to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu forever! Ubuntu is the best! Ubuntu will rule the entire world! What the heck is Unity? Is a joke? Time to change again...
My totally non-technical inclined wife asked me to replace that crappy OS running on her computer, and asked me for a Linux. And I installed Mint for her. And she was very pleased. I was too. And I installed Mint. And liked.
Mint forever! Mint is the best! Mint will rule the entire world!

But I maintain servers too, not only my desktop.
My servers started with Conectiva, migrated to RedHat, migrated to OpenBSD for a long time, and some stays OpenBSD.
My clients today uses RedHat Enterprise, SuSE Enterprise, and Debian.

Or use a mainframe running lots of Linuxes... Can cut the power to 10% while delivering the same computing power. Mainframes have a very good power management this days.

There's a special kind of brain that can play pianos. Another kind can do math by thinking. Another transforms recipes into delicious cookies. Give me the best cookie recipe and I can tranform it into smoking charcoal in no time. Give a map to my wife go North of home, and she will end up lost. I can drive almost anywhere even without a map. So, there's a special kind of brain that can code. Ask around if people can imagine an 5-dimensional array. I can. It is easy for me. My wife can't. My brother can't. But my wife is very good at a lot of things where I suck.

I liked the script, but I think sha256 is way too much overkill. CRC32 will suffice.

The appeal is that with almost the same price as an Arduino you can have a Linux PC. Or the same price you pay for a Ethernet shield for that arduino, you have ethernet and USB connectivity. And it's hacker friendly, but depends on what kind of hacker you are thinking. I am the kind of hacker that will get one RasPi, put a Linux on it, install OpenVPN, Transmission, ssh, plug a usb-wifi dongle, a external disk, and forget it on some corner of my house. And I will be happy. If you are the kind of 'network security' hacker, you got covered too. With a USB dongle, a cellphone battery and a small circuit to drive the power to the RasPI, you will have a very small pentesting device, and you can conceal it as about anything: a book, a Starbucks cup, a Mc Donalds fries box, a toy. And you will have enough CPU power to crack any WEP connection. Add a 3G dongle, and you will have remote connectivity. Tape it under any desk, and you are done. High altitude photography hacker? Good too. Put a pack of batteries on it, a decent sized SD-Card, a UD USB webcam, your favorite Helium balloon, a 3G dongle and a GPS dongle, and you will have beautiful pictures of the Earth from near space. And as soon as it lands, the coordinates can be sent to you by SMS. But if you are a kernel hacker, or want to change the memory, or access the GPU for some crazy-fast simulation, you are out of luck. For that cases, buy a TI OMAP. Useless? No, I don't think so... It's indeed very very useful for a price you pay for your dinner...