I keep the wifi dead on my phone mostly for battery reasons, coupled with the fact that I have unlimited data on my plan, so it makes no real diff to me. :)

Exact same model and rigging here... though the house I live in uses the old plaster-and-lath walls (it's an old beast).

Dude - I live in a 105-year-old house, in a small town just outside Portland (OR), and I still do well even with a big front/back yard.

The trick? Easy:
1) the wifi router is upstairs, away from the chimney but with a clear shot downstairs (and to each bedroom).
2) It's an ASUS router (screw that cheapie one that the ISP gives you; disable that and hard-line to a decent wifi router with a good reputation made for gaming.)
3) Scan the frig out of your neighborhood, and pick a channel no one else is using.

Result? In spite of my laptop, the TV, Dish DVR, my wife's iPad, and two Android phones (albeit I keep wifi off on mine)... http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3771041924 (taken off my MacBook Pro just now.)

You can restore that from iCloud (or wherever you stashed the backup if it ain't an iPhone) one would think, then punch in the passcode once that's done. Pretty sure a court would allow it if the defense claims the data was already thrashed.

Not much different from a proprietary project, except that instead of "sexy/ugly", the factor is "profitable/unprofitable".

This, right here. Even if it goes stagnant for years? If you can get (or already have) the source, you can resurrect it.

By contrast, if you wanted to resurrect, say, WinCE? Well, good luck with that.

Ye Gods... really?

If you're quarantined and you see neighbors dying of Ebola, for fuck sakes - do your rights demand that you escape by any means, carry it with you, and spread it to other areas?

I get individual rights over statism, and would be among the first to take up arms against a tyranny, but damn... think of your fellow human beings for once.

I see you're still stuck in that Party vs. Party trap. ...need help getting out of that, or do you wish to continue laboring under the delusion that either of the big two political parties actually give a damn about anything beyond the continued acquisition of money and power?

In fairness, I suspect that GP was assuming that aid and care would still be shipped in (volunteer basis of course), which does not preclude or invalidate a quarantine.

Guns? Yeah, we got 'em in spades. Good luck using one to stop an M1 Abrams, a Hellfire missile, an AC-130, or suchlike.

Yes, we also have rights, but... an extreme and obvious case such as an Ebola outbreak in the US will obviously trump those rights (hell, past presidents have suspended habeas corpus before in the name of extremes...)

Completely? You'd be right. On the other hand, blockading air and maritime travel, and deploying military forces on the borders of these countries would go a hell of a long way towards containing the disease.

The rest, while yes I agree would suck hard, is probably and sadly the only way to be certain that no one outside those areas get infected.

...eventually, and only after the requisite pork has been spread across a multitude of states and subcontractors to keep the requisite congress-critters happy. :(

Not to knock Boeing's technical prowess, but damn - they do know how to play the game (which explains why they're getting a piece of the contract most likely...)

As a very apt comparison, go back to the days when the F-16 first came out: relatively cheap, by some upstart company (General Dynamics), a revolutionary design, the first 9-G capable fighter, and was an all-around workhorse that could do (within reason) damned near anything you demanded of it. It's still in production today (albeit as a division of Lockheed-Martin), with a design that stands to be around for decades to come. Compare and contrast this with, oh, the F-35/6/whatever that's been nothing but a massive money-sink to date.

Thinking the same thing. Ostensibly, a government agency would stay the hell out of the way save for basic health/safety concerns... but in the age of bureaucrats who want to puff up their service records, I can see such a commission going straight to hell in an awful hurry.

(OTOH, seeing how ineffectual the FCC is at doing its job viz. the Internet and Network Neutrality, who knows?)

One small problem with your statement:

A very significant portion of the public does use iPhones (here in PDX it's roughly half and half). The only two human beings I've seen who use and *like* Windows Phones were as follows: a gent who wanted something cheap and worked in .NET for a living, and a visiting Microsoft TAM.

To be fair, the lives lost weren't due to the sinking, but due to the trek they were forced to make over the ice. IIRC, recovered tin cans from the first campsite, and testing tissue from the excavated remains of three buried crew members showed that lead poisoning was likely a huge factor in the decisions that led to most of their deaths.

Not sure if the ship itself will yield any further clues as to the conditions that lead to the tragedy (aside from knowing precisely where it was stuck in the ice, anyway).