As far as I know, the hardware is no different than a standard platter drive

You don't know very far then, do you? But yes, a secure rewrite of the full device should wipe the flash to the point where some serious lab equipment is needed to recover anything from the device.

I can understand the benefit of higher resolution capture capability to microscopic applications, but displays? Do you look at your display through a microscope?

An SNR of 124dB is 89.1 times as good as approximately 105dB. When your speakers are around 80-90 dB and CD quality input around 100dB (less for most heavily compressed input and MP3s), that 105dB SNR for your internal audio is already the least important component in the chain for sound quality. I suspect though that that is for digital output. The analogue stages in onboard audio do leave a lot to be desired.

When was the last time the average person created something original?

People create random original things all the time. It's the hardware fluke bar they'd have trouble passing.

The vendor supplied tools may be Windows only, but chances are there is a gcc backend available for the target architecture these days. I wouldn't like to be using an ARM board for my cross compiling though, getting QEMU set up for any compilation steps that need to run on the target architecture is enough of a nightmare on Intel, let alone other architectures that noone has used that way before.

One decade maybe. But the primary development environment for kernel and driver work today still looks very different than in 1980.

I said vim, not vi. I'm well aware that vi goes back further, but nobody in their right mind would consider using the original vi as their primary development tool these days. And Emacs goes back to 1985, not 1972. Sure, it can trace its roots back to ed, from 1972, but it is even less like ed than vim is like vi.

In 1980, Xenix did not exist yet.

In 1980, a kernel or driver developer was entering data into a mainframe using punchcards in binary (or if they were lucky, an assembler was available for the architecture they were targeting). Version control consisted of a row of 7 cabinets, one for each day of the week, where you stored your most recent stacks of punchcards. They most certainly weren't using vim/emacs, gcc and git and debugging in a VM.

US probably has an agreement with Maldives.

It's called the Kyoto protocol. US keeps promising to sign (leaving government-less Somalia as the final non-signatory) if Maldives grants them one last favor.

On the flip side, taxi drivers have many more hours behind the wheel [aka sleep deprivation]. I thinks it's fair to say that there are many factors which contribute to both raise and lower a taxi's risk of getting into an accident.

So far we've only come up with factors that raise the risk. What are the factors that lower it?

Yeah, really. So is that Boston Red Line car length or Boston Blue Line car length. London Underground Circle Line car length perhaps? BART car length?

Quit being so pedantic. It's obvious that they meant one of these.

Easy solution in this case is to remove all Qualcomm code from the Linux kernel. In the short term this will cause a lot of pain for end users and companies that use Qualcomm hardware in their products, but in the long run this will effectively shut Qualcomm out of a very large portion of their market and serve as an excellent example to others why the DMCA should be used with great care.

I'd think that any company selling Android based mobile phone, tablet or other Linux based device built from GPL code they received directly from Qualcomm would have good standing to take this to court. End users not so much.

Maybe Qualcomm really have made the decision that they only want their chips used in Windows Phone devices from now on, because this is the signal they are sending to manufacturers that rely on their hardware support for Linux and Android with this move.

I though driving by an open hotspot on the highway was enough time to use it.

Only with 802.11p which allows data transfer without associating to the access point, and maybe the still under development 802.11ai, which aims to speed up the time required for association to under 100ms.