You are right. No sane foreign government would, but there are lots of the other kind.

OK, I get that, I'm not sure that's more prevalent, and I was just providing a counter example. In Uruguay, spending on technology for education is a lot wiser at the government level, than it is at the private level.

I think that the market and the private interests are overrated. There are lots of cases where markets just don't work, and private interests add up against the common good. In those cases, people spending other people's money can end up with a better result, even accounting for corruption or lack of accountability.

And about our education system...
In Uruguay, it's not really better than the US system. It's more egalitarian, but not that good.
Public Universities are free, but poor kids can't really use them. If you are poor, chances are you will drop out of uni after one or two years, because you are unprepared in the first place.
There are some student aids, but they don't meet demand. Also, high school results are worse in poor neighborhoods. Private schools are popular because of this, but they don't achieve better results, if you compare within the same economic bracket of population.

The OLPC is getting old, but it's WAY cooler than an IPAD.
It has a keyboard, and is suitable for kids holding them for hours.
Kids use them on the doorstep of someone with wifi, or even the school on weekends.
They don't really get stolen, because there's no market for them, and they "die" if stolen.
You can use them in the sun, because they have suitable screens.
There's a dedicated network of local content, curricular and otherwise, even textbooks, tailored for it.

No way you can replicate all this, just by buying a crapload of consumer products. You need to create a tailored solution, thinking about the kids you are trying to reach. For instance, if they were doing this from scratch, it would look closer to a Lenovo Yoga or something like that, but with padding for kids, dedicated LTE or something close, and all textbooks included, something for teachers, something in that line.

Here in Uruguay, they got the OLPC. There is no market, and it works great.
All kids in public school have their own, you see them using them on the streets, public squares. It has its application in classes, and most importantly, it was instrumental in connecting all schools with quality internet service, allowing for remote classes, that kind of thing. It was a success in many regards.

Private schools, on the other hand, are subject to market forces and stuff, but are usually pretty poor in their decision making. For example, my kids goes to a private kinder, and their usage of computers is pretty dumb, they still have a computer lab kind of thing, mainly because they weren't wise enough to get a complete solution. Public spending was a lot better around here.

I was just answering _your_ alternative proposal.
I did look at the story, and I think it's a cool idea, that might even end up having some kind of application. This is research, not engineering.

Power over ethernet implies cables.
Expected capture rate is not always 30/60fps.

Just think about it.
This is not an economic problem. It's a problem with regulation, strategy, or whatever.
Wherever you live, you have roads to get there. Roads are thousands of times more expensive than fiber, and they need constant maintenance, investment, and rebuilding. You also have electricity virtually everywhere, or you wouldn't care so much about internet access. Internet access is chump change compared to the rest of infrastructure that you keep building and maintaining.

The problem must be somewhere else, not in the level of difficulty, or the cost. Maybe the strategy, the regulation isn't working, but it's not because it's hard.

ipads are most useful if you want to consume content. Not much to experiment with them, at least not with the Ipad itself.

3D printers are tools, awesome tools. They have nothing in common with Ipads, you can do stuff with 3D printers. Think of them as the logo turtles of today. They show kids a tangible application of programming, physics, math.

Teachers have the opportunity to choose to use that for teaching, or just let them tinker with cool stuff.
  And I mean single teachers, they can just print a mechanical assembly, or an atom model, or a dna model, a geometric shape . With already existing, easy access easy to use, and most importantly, easy to share tools.

Compare that to the authoring you can do with an ipad (or a classroom full of ipads) by itself. You _might_ be able to sketch something, but the tools are just not there, or available.

Lost of people seem to be happy with adblock.
Think of it as as server side adblock, at the very least.

Also, with responsive design and everything, this would be a problem, but not a big one.

Are you sure?
It's hard for me to imagine an awesome CS person who struggles at math. CS is mostly math, or pretty close. Computability, regular expressions, automata, formal proofs, all of those are needed, in my book, to be awesome at CS, and I think you should be at least decent at math to grasp those.

There is a way to expand the model to the internet.

Say you pay a youtube subscription, and you get ad-free youtube, and for the same price, or for an additional, you get ad-free adsense.
That means you won't ever see an adsense ad again. The sites will still have the adsense code, and google will just micro-pay, based on your usage of their site, from your subscription money.

Doesn't look like a bulletproof strategy to me, but something like that might end up happening.

Additionally, those who don't use adsense would be at a disadvantage, because youtube subscribers won't be able to make ads go away.

Of course, the privacy implications of all this are huge, because you would be essentially logged in everywhere, and that's another service that google would be able to provide.

So it's not stealing. It's something else.

And you might want to get your analogy checked, I don't thing it holds. Maybe if it was potato soup + recipe or something like that. In any case, no need for analogies. It's easier to get it without them.

They are not stealing anything from anyone. The users didn't have any source to begin with, for example. They are not entitled to the source. The problem lies in the other end. Ubiquiti is licensing some code, and not complying with the license, by not providing source. This means they are not covered by the license.

This is plain, simple, copyright infringement. Not stealing, something else. And when you do it for profit, most people agree it's a bad thing. At least in the current context.