(ipso facto) why does the location of the antenna matter if you are paying a local for that service? what supersedes your ability to find someone that has better reception? especially that this service is _only_ given to others from the same locale (who may not be able to get good reception)?

You sound like me ten year ago. I know everyone is different, but get out while you can. If you get more friends and family coming to you, you'll find more and more things breaking, more problems coming up, with expectations that your weekends are no longer yours. And more often than not, over time, these same friends and family will begin expecting you to just fix it, and may even get rude or cause you issues if you expect much more than a "Thank You! Till next time I my smoking causes my GPU to fail due to the dust gunk that caked over the heatsink causing it to overheat for the last few months". And somehow, again over time, they'll come to blame you for these problems that you should have been able to warn them about or prevent. I still assist close friends with anything I can help them with, because they aren't assholes, but some "friends" and definitely some family will take advantage of you. If you feel the desire to pursue this line of work, find a way to do it professionally, and only deal with customers.

Yup, and it is already almost there. List of major pools

Indeed. If you are unaware of Chaos Monkey or the Simian Army, look it up. I've nothing but respect how they've effectively eliminated single points of failure in their environment.

I've heard stories of their dev/qa system that is equally awesome, that allows for rapid code development, regression testing, and deployment into live systems, thousands of times a day.

You trade them on an exchange, like vircurex.com or others. You send your coins into the exchange and trade them for bitcoins (or litecoins if the exchange does that).

Now you take your bitcoins to some place like localbitcoins.com and find someone willing to send you $$$ for them. You find a buyer on the site, for me I find someone that'll do cash deposits into my bank, once you post the sell your bitcoins go into escrow. The buyer then confirms they can do the trade, at which point your bitcoin gets locked into escrow until you release it. The buyer then walks into a branch of your bank and deposits cash to your bank acct #. You validate you see the money hitting your account and then release the bitcoin from escrow.

It is amazing that people will walk into your banks branch and give you hundreds of dollars for fractions of a bitcoin.

Incorrect.

The Nexus 5 is $350 for the one with 16GB of space, $400 for the 32GB one, and that is with NO contract.

iPhone 5s is only $200 with a contact, if you want to buy it outright without a contract, it costs $650 for 16GB and $750 for 32 GB.

In other words, about 1/2 the price.

Pretty much false. I remember in the 90s a T1 costing ~$700 for the ISP, and ~$700 for the telco fees, and only giving 1.5 Mbps. Nowadays it is common for households to have 10x that speed down stream and roughly the same speed for upstream, for ~1/20th the cost.