In the EU, 240V outlets are the standard not anything special. Generally appliances (at least in the UK) have up to a 13A fuse in them, and you may have a higher capacity hard wired circuit for the stove (the dryer is almost always just plugged into a standard wall outlet).

Or they could just turn off the tower? That gives them the added benefit of deniability, they could claim the tower suffered a power outage or other technical fault.

Why would the NSA or the police want to brick someone's phone? All that would achieve is a minor annoyance for the target, who would promptly go out and buy another cheap burner phone. The needs of NSA/police are much better served by keeping the phone online and monitoring it.

Vendors on the other hand, have a vested interest in shutting down old phones to make you buy a new one.

So ARM is in the same boat x86 was in compared to high end RISC all those years ago...
You could have your cheap, slow and unscalable x86 - or you could have a fast Alpha at 10x the price. Look what happened there?

The Apple touchpads are actually quite good, but everyone else's attempts to rip them off have been terrible and unusable...
I always used to use the nipple on thinkpads, and with other laptops i would always connect up an external mouse. When i got a macbook i actually started using the touchpad.

Apple's employee profile should match the population of people qualified to carry out the roles Apple has available... If there is a lack of diversity among qualified individuals then the issue is with the education system, not Apple. Apple can only hire from the pool of available talent thats qualified to do the job.

Quotas won't "fix" anything...
It's the culture among kids that needs to change. If kids are in an environment where their peers shun specific subjects, then they will go along with it due to peer pressure irrespective of what they might individually be interested in.

Some of them ship with dd-wrt preinstalled, if you go for those models then you can be sure of compatibility.

A small cheap UPS could keep something as low power as this running for a long time, brief power outages shouldn't pose a problem. And if you build it correctly, you shouldn't really need to reset it.

You can get the Mirabox, or one of its predecessors like the OpenRD or Dreamplug, all of which have dual GigE and some have a pcie slot and/or wifi too. They are only single core, but for a router that's more than adequate. I have 100mbit connectivity, the openrd can saturate the link just fine and the mirabox has a somewhat faster cpu.
Combined with a decent managed switch, you can use VLANs to get more interfaces. I have 2 WAN links which are vlanned and connected to the same physical nic, and several internal VLANs for different purposes.

I always prefer to have separate devices, i would be in a similar boat to you because the line enters the house in an awkward place. I have cat6 throughout the house, and an AP located about as centrally as it can be, but that still results in spotty service in one of the bedrooms and its unusable in the garage or the garden.

How are you supposed to go online to configure your router?
Surely you need to configure your router *before* you can get online?

Thats what happens if you buy proprietary junk... I have some much older hardware phones which support SIP, and they all still work.

So find a service provider who offers the same service, but does so using standard protocols like SIP or IAX, they won't care what client you use and you have a choice of hundreds. There are plenty of such providers out there.

Another question to ask is, why was someone at google looking at someone's personal email account?