The reasoning is more like that he wouldn't have doped with such a trivial method if he had known he would be found in the test.
And you can't honestly believe he hoped for "some luck" to make his test results look normal...

I'm sure they wait until the value falls to a reasonable level =)

Take a look at the 'China Tablets'. They more or less provide what you'd expect of them (and can usually play videos and Angry birds too) while sometimes even featuring HDMI ports for external television sets for a very affordable price.
However you'd have to live with resistive displays (not on all models), low-powered CPU's, low-resolution LCD panels, not-too-great battery life (3-6 hours) and sometimes unusable audio outputs and some devices tend to break down after a few weeks (check forums for issues in advance...)
Oh and there are even copies of the copies =)

I got a Flytouch2 and while not great for most stuff (especially not when compared to an iPad) it works for reading mail, checking the weather forecast, ...

Android nor iOS do not -and could not- prevent you from running any other operating system.
It's the darn bootloaders, closed-source drivers, dreadful reverse-engineering and lack of schemata that's causing the issues with running other OS

All non-Windows x86-tablets (like the Wetab) have official or unofficial methods (e.g. writing 'magic bytes' at the beginning of a USB stick) to get them to boot from it and run any desired OS.

I meant a tool that allows non-geeks to click a single button (or better no button at all...) and it installs + updates the relevant contents in the hosts file

Good thing I live in a country with (more or less) sane laws and where people even use eMule without having IP-lawyers storming their porch =)

It's rather common logic that, if two tablets with strikingly similar hardware sell at a price where one is the double of the other, one of the 2 is not going to make a lot of money off the hardware, at least not compared to the other.
Building such devices is very expensive, only the touchscreen or ARM cpu with it's stacked RAM will cost a lot, let alone the battery.

The analogy would rather be that they installed a V12 in your 80mile-tops van and you found a secret and not vendor-endorsed method for unlocking
all the horse power in the beast.

The vendor, trying to protect his investment and also concerned for the driver's security closes that particular Chip glitch.

In this case simply because Amazon wants you to buy their stuff.
Remember, Amazon makes no profit on the Fire -some even claim it comes at a loss-, they're a company and not your local welfare!

If you expect your tablet to be rootable then you must be prepared to pay somewhat more for a device that the manufacturer makes money on...

You could build a ABC-proof shelter and stock enough food for the next 50 years.
However you'd need an EMP-proof satellite dish for internet uplink, since your resistance would be futile otherwise

Couldn't you just use alternative DNS servers or use a tool which hardcodes it in the 's hosts file or am I missing the point?
Switching browser due to an extension which hackishly has a static hosts file seems kinda odd for a tech site.

To correctly understand the meaning of a question or sentence you'll need something with the horsepower, database and algorithms of IBM's Watson.
And even tough it is quite impressive, it takes a full room just to parse a single question within a second, so if you want 99% accuracy you'll have to wait some more time...

You mean skills like this? http://www.collegehumor.com/video/5807049/a-complaint-to-mario-bros-plumbing

Captchas are made to be unradable. The average human success rate at some Captchas is far lower than that of a OCR-based cracker.

You may need to give the parents a service & repair manual for babies, otherwise how would they know what "dangerous things" means?
Don't blame the child for doing stuff, blame the parent for not protecting against it.