Are you, AC, implying that America has stooped so low as to resort to mass imports of cheap south american guns, and guns banged together from over-the-counter ingredients and household chemicals in clandestine workshops, to satisfy our craving for firepower?

You filthy communist. We do sometimes dabble in exotic european guns, just as we do with club drugs; but that's different.

I, for one, would raise my most skeptical of eyebrows at the 'since Obama was elected' part.

The feds have had something of a mutually acrimonious relationship with some of the more enthusiastic personalities you find at gun shows since at least the very early 90's, probably earlier. If, say, Timothy McVeigh wasn't enough to inspire a few zillion man-hours in stakeouts, I'm not entirely sure what would.

The claims of surveillance I find fairly credible; but for it to have started in 2008 would have required that our hysteria over scary terrorist muslims completely blind the various relevant agencies to their ongoing togetherness problems with domestic militia movements and the like. Those certainly took on a lower priority; but there must have been some feds whose pallor and utter lack of arabic language proficiency made them a poor fit for higher profile work.

If there is such a thing as 'the sound of the NRA deciding that maybe the can agree with the American Communist Lawyers Union on something', I suspect this is what it sounds like.

Anyone else get the sickening sense that 'lengthen your telomeres!!' pitches would be a nearly perfect successor to the historical deluge of penis-pill spam?

Sometimes differently-abled learners cope best in classrooms with a less demanding curriculum adapted to their needs...

They've tried; but all the enlistment paperwork just disappears when he walks out. Weirdest thing.

Birds heap shame upon their ancestors merely by existing. (Except maybe shrikes; their willingness to keep up a proud tradition of bloodthirsty carnivorous murder despite now being about the size of a sparrow is pretty honorable).

Those pesky disgruntled employees and contractors tend to be on a slightly shorter leash(or less abused, if HQ decides that it's easier to make them less disgruntled than it is to watch them all the time) if their activity relates to something the company cares about.

Obviously, comcast isn't directly in favor of random insulting name changes(no real payoff for them, which puts them even below "billing errors"); but their customer service is as glorious as it is because any aspect of customer interaction that isn't billing or upselling is treated like a cost center and abused accordingly.

Well, I'd say that fossil fuels, which are mostly composed of dinosaurs who were unable to adapt(along with plants who were unable to adapt, and various other organisms who were unable to adapt) revolutionized the hell out of our entire civilization...

Maybe if IBM were buried and subjected to a few million years of heat and pressure they too would become a highly coveted resource?

I'd be inclined to say 'amazing' for the price. I understand the use case for rPi, beaglebone black, cubieboard, etc. when you need video and actually good GPIO(even more so if you need proper PWM, i2c/SPI, etc. BBblack, especially, has some pretty powerful specialty I/O options); but routers are so aggressively priced that they are often a pretty good deal for adding network capabilities to assorted projects on the fast and cheap.

I'm always up for other suggestions, of course; but I'm currently a big fan of the little 'travel/portable' routers that the RT5350 seems to have spawned a bunch of. Ethernet, USB, 802.11B/G/N, typically a serial port(I got lucky with the ones I purchased, the pads were even labelled and everything), and a few GPIOs, all for $15 or less. Kind of weak (usually 32MB RAM and ~400MHz MIPS core); but feel the price.

A mixture of both. The AMT system includes a dedicated ARC cpu, which runs its own OS and functions independently of the host to a large degree; but also can see into, and sometimes make use of, some of the hardware visible to the host system(details depend on version). For communication, for instance, the AMT system has access to the wired NIC below the OS's view(wireless NICs are more complex, I think AMT can do a direct connection to a trusted AP if configured to do so; but can't do VPN without piggybacking on the host OS), and it also has enough hooks into the various peripherals that it can do remote KVM in hardware, by emulating HID devices and snooping the framebuffer, mount an .iso as though it were a connected SATA device, and access some storage and memory locations that are also accessible to the host OS or programs, in order to gather data on system health, software versions, etc.

I'm not exactly sure how the BIOS/UEFI flash and the flash that stores the AMT firmware are related to one another. On computers with AMT, a 'bios update' will often flash both; but I don't know if that's because they are just different areas of the same SPI flash chip, or whether it's just a convenience bundling of two nearly unrelated updaters.

They all tend to be fairly miserable(though thermal issues are often more a product of the desire to have more space for ugly branding and fewer vents, which can be fixed with a bit of applied violence); but I do have to give the hardware credit for often being rather amazing for the price. The firmware is shit more or less across the board; but it is astounding how much actual computer they can cram into a $20 router.

Any remote management tool would be a 'backdoor', except that it is put in place by the owner for their convenience and with their consent.

AMT is a particularly powerful, and somewhat opaque, management tool. Anyone who suspects the possibility that(deliberately, or by mistake) those very, very, useful capabilities might be available to others under some circumstances would naturally be suspicious of it.

And, for the FSF and those who share their concerns, the fact that it is a wholly proprietary(and tricky to remove or replace) blob embedded in the brainstem of their computer is not something that would make them happy.

That may differ between laptops and desktops, or between AMT versions. On the desktops I've seen the AMT stuff is active if the PC is plugged in, regardless of its power state. Some of the capabilities of the AMT system cannot be used if the host PC is off; but the system itself runs on a separate processor and only turns off if the PSU is unpowered. Laptops may need to be more conservative, for the sake of retaining battery life while inactive.

Speaking of Dell, failure, and lawyers, back during the 'capacitor plague' era the law firm that Dell retained to fight capacitor-plague related lawsuits was itself stuck with capacitor-plagued Dells. I can only imagine that their IT people saw the humor in the situation. True story.