This sounds expensive. Who is going to pay for it? The ISPs? The government?

Not necessarily. There are many use cases where there is no disadvantage to a fast hashing algorithm. For example, secure hashes are commonly used to guarantee that data has not been modified. (I believe that PHP uses a hash for this purpose, as it is much faster than running rsa on the entire message.) What this REALLY tells us is something that we have known for a long time: fast hash functions are suboptimal for password "storage"/verification. We need to use something slower for dealing with passwords, such as bcrypt, which can be made arbitrarily expensive.

It is trivial to re-encode a high resolution video at a lower resolution one. The reverse is not true. (Well technically it is just as easy, but it's pretty pointless.)

`ssh -X` doesn't usually work "correctly and transparently out of the box," at least for most people's definition. You might want to look at `ssh -Y`.

Now if only TFA had actually said anything specific about the hardware... Here's hoping for Cortex-A9, perhaps OMAP4? ChromeOS isn't very interesting to me, but I would almost certainly buy one to use with a real distro.