More than half the price of another raspberry pi.

People with brains buy a system to suit their needs. People with really good brains optimise that system to get maximum performance. Everybody else needlessly spends money on something more powerful than they need.

Well I bought 3 things from Aliexpress:

A 32gb SD card which craps out if you copy more than 2gb on it.
A set of 3w garden lights which draw just over 1.5w at full power and burn out if you even slightly raise the voltage.
A Bluetooth speaker with the beats logo which has approximately 10 min battery life.

So yes you can make anything for any price, but I'd rather buy something which works rather than something unrealistically cheap.

Made in China vs made in UK?

Depends, was the office located in Crimea?

Well since we're arguing semantics the original question is what telescope to buy a kid.
I'm not sure why you dragged the night sky into it at all.

The presence of a static IP address (which I get by signing up to the cheapest ISP in the country, not by paying extra) has nothing to do with not wanting to dedicate effort to manage a home network. It is not at all hard to open ports. You don't need to be some technical whiz, and while I am that whiz I have no interest in managing applications in my home network when a perfectly good system allows me to do it.

As far as I am concerned my network is designed to be leaky. Internal applications should have connectivity. UPnP isn't important to me in a world where I would happily grant some computer access to the internet via a dedicated port. The protection comes from the computer's own firewall, the design of the software, and by keeping them malware free which is actually quite an easy task for most people with basic computer knowledge (ok grandma doesn't use my internet).

So if I have a philosophy of granting any application access to the internet when it comes up on my firewall, why should I additionally then go through the pains of having to manually configure a port, and also setup applications to use static ports when there's a perfectly good system that does it automatically. What next, manually build a hosts file of servers I want to access because DNS is susceptible to MITM?

Education and openness have NOTHING to do with each other unless you're trying to educate people on the very detailed inner workings of the device they are playing with. This is a $35 linux computer. It may as well be powered by actual raspberries for all I care, if it gets people interested in programming and gets people playing with hardware it has done its job. And it HAS done so very well.

If you want to stand on some principle then you're right and we should ditch the Rasperry Pi and go back to .... err go back to tapping on iPad screens which is about the only other device currently gaining any sort of traction in the "education" sector.

That's great from an end user perspective, but then you're advocating applications tied to a specific internet service? I'm surprised you haven't been nodded into oblivion by the trust no corporation crowd on slashdot.

But they definitely have a point. Connectivity between two clients should not depend on a third party server, especially since many of us not only have real IPs but static ones too.

I'd rather have both. This tech has been out since the original half-life days. It is not complex, not programmatically or computationally. The problem is the people driving the design of this system were sued into oblivion by a technically inferior Creative Labs. Realism and immersion are two different things. The ability to be situationally aware with sound is a massive advantage for immersion into a game.

In summary this tech has nothing to do with studios crapping out poor plots or crap AI. The engines should incorporate this and the studios should then focus on making a game fun, but certainly I don't have a preference of AI or plot over sound.

Errr right. Your security theory boils down to wireless has no physical barriers so we need to avoid it at all costs regardless of it's benefits?

No thanks. While I agree with some of your sentiment like WPS being a colossal piece of shit and remote admin just being a bad idea:

- UPnP - I am not going to manually configure every internet facing service every time I want to use a piece of software.
- WPA - While WEP is proven weak and breakable, WPA hasn't been broken without some serious conditions (knowing what most of the packet looks like, MITM attacks etc).
- Guest Network - Quite useful, most routers are able to provide QoS and limits, also it's usually a separate logical network so much better than giving someone your WPA key, and why the hell not share it, internet is effectively a commodity!
- Wireless - erm yeah the 90s were definitely not as fun technology wise.

You are right about one thing, I do treat wireless like my internet connection. Feel free to come over and use it. I won't mind.

Even if large sites ran on your supposed commodity hardware on your cheap-arse hosting provider, you still conveniently ignore that people don't make websites for free. They make them to they can eat and feed their families.

So congrats you still have no idea.

Allow me to introduce to you the concept of a product press release. This is something given to news outlets and then they run stories on it. There are other sites that exist to aggregate the news into a common place for a common interest. I believe one of the most popular ones is called Slashdot and they aggregate articles on the likes of news in the tech industry.

If you would like more information I can continue stating the obvious for a small bitcoin donation.

Wow what a thoughtless statement.

A domain is an irrelevant rounding error. A host is bloody expensive once you get past the pissy little amount of data you get for your $5 / month. A site like Slashdot has made fun of the ability to cripple other hosts just by linking to them, how much do you think the traffic bill is per month? Not to mention technical staff, editorial staff (which we all agree are often some kind of joke).

You really have no idea.

What's a "Programmer"? Also precisely who should we get to write critical software? A maths teacher? The after hours cleaner? Maybe some random MBA from middle management? Programmers most definitely SHOULD be the ones writing critical software. It's when it is written by non-programmers or hobby programmers with full time other careers (physicists, engineers, etc) that you end up with some of the most basic mistakes and unexpected behaviour.

Your big mistake is to assume that all programmers are the same, and that all hardware designers are the same, and that all civil engineers are the same. A civil engineer who's speciality is designing sewers and town water systems is unlikely to be the one you want designing a skyscraper. Just like in my world I have a VERY experienced instrument engineer sitting next to me, but we wouldn't ever let him work on safety shutdown systems.

QA for software is exactly as much of a joke as people make it. At a small software house, it may be almost non-existent. At a company designing safety shutdown systems it is a whole world of hurt. Unfortunately it's management which are the biggest risks. There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it again.

The problem is the end users. I see this a lot as we work in an IE shop, IE7 to be precise because of some sensitive stupid web services that won't run in anything else.

Anyway my point is that they default to Bing, there is an option to change it permanently in pretty much an identical way that you described in Mint, yet 99% of the users don't do this, and of those 99%, 100% of them talk as if they are about to gift me their firstborn after I show them how to change it.

NEVER underestimate the power of "defaults" and the stupidity of users.