... or stolen?

Before the leaks, they could say "it stops the turrurists", but after the leaks we know that it's stopped none (Boston is a prime example). Any half serious terrorist knows that the internet is heavily monitored and communicates covertly; now that it's public knowledge, the "but the turrurists will know our abilities" defense no longer carries weight. They can't justify using their overreaching surveillance apparatus against the general population of the world anymore. It's their defense to continue Orwellian surveillance that is infinitely weaker, nothing else has changed.

If you block updates, windows particularly, then you'll have higher chances of infected systems that may be used for DDoS etc.

This particular laptop is outdated but the "it can be done" milestone is passed. Now it's just a matter of expanding the hardware compatibility list and software.

Don't like incremental progress eh, you want it all at once?

Well that's a little different, a registered user trolling an AC! What's next, cats chasing dogs?

Where did you get that idea? You can get the source via svn: http://www.dd-wrt.ca/wiki/index.php/Development#Subversion

Creating free replacements for all non-free software is a monumental task that started many years ago, one that may never be complete. However, this is a milestone; the list of laptop models that are "truly free" can only expand from here, as can the includeable software. Have you seen the DD-WRT compatibility list recently? It was quite short a when that project was getting started.

They have absolutely no way of knowing if any sensitive information was stolen from a PC that has been owned by crypto ransomware.

The debt/exports thing sort of makes sense, if you assume they have no aspirations of becoming the next superpower. But in reality, they would gladly step into that role if they could easily pull the rug out from under the americans.

Also no backdoors. This alone would justify switching.

10 years is a long time to switch, I can see that being an impediment to other cities following suit. Are they sharing details of the changeover experience? It would be quite valuable to have a list of the major problems that made this take a decade rather than a year.

They can do it with 6 but it requires the help of 294 friends

Yeah sure. How many tenured profs who notice misconduct are going to walk away from their post?

Verifying each line is not really a goal worth pursuing. A robust (real) simulation result will be reproducible across various numerical methods. Computers are commonplace, anybody with a computer (or a cluster) can redo your numerical experiment provided that you described what you did. Lab work is much more specialised, there aren't millions of similarly equipped labs kicking around, so the pool of people who can check your result is much smaller. In my opinion, this makes it less likely for one to report fabricated or garbage results because one can be called out pretty easily.