I can think have 5 ways you could have accomplished the goal of network configuration without a keyboard and mouse off the top of my head.

1. The Pi A's USB port can be configured for slave mode. The B doesn't support this but not sure if you needed a B.
2. You can fake a USB device over the GPIO ports on both the A and B through various bitbang techniques.
3. You can use the UART pins and a USB to UART chip which wouldn't be a very expensive add on.
4. Add a DHCP server to the Pi, so when connected directly to a PC with ethernet, the PC gets an IP from the Pi. Your PC program can then connect to the Pi for final network config.
5. Add a cheap two line LCD and some push buttons to your device. Create a simple text driven menu for configuring the network through that.

This is the reason I prefer Android devices. You can install a firmware that is compiled from the open source you trust. There is still the possibility of hardware level backdoors, but there are a 100 different manufactures of Android devices, many of them have little to no presence in the USA. Google doesn't have to be involved with your device at all.

Versus Apple, Microsoft, etc who are easy targets for US courts orders.

My understanding is the relative velocities between macro sized objects in the universe are rather small. Small enough where relativistic effects are minute. The article mentions 3% the speed of light being the high end. You would be hard pressed to find anything larger then a particle moving 99% the speed of light relative to our sun. Even these hyper-velocity stars are only 33-50% the speed of light.

Launches from US are more expensive, but launches from Russia are less expensive. Given the Russians have done many more launches to the ISS then the US, this seems like an intelligent decision. Not politically motivated.

I'd love to see a breakdown of what those co-location costs are vs what the ISPs have to pay to stream Netflix content from outside of their networks.

I bet co-locating the Netflix servers for free would still cost ISPs less.

The title also gives me a new hope ...

Even if caught, the prepubescent boys trolling her aren't going to end up in jail over this.

Now if she could somehow bait one of them into posting a random, nonspecific remark about potentially shooting up a school on Facebook.. that might work...

While the general concepts of those tools are free and open, there are patents on specific implementations of all of them. People are always inventing better wrenches. If you made a copy of Craftman's new wrench of the week and started selling them, I'm sure you'd be hearing from their lawyers.

We live in a world, wrong or right, were people innovate for profit, not the betterment of society. I don't see why people feel computing devices should be any different.

If you don't require a high resolution you can use the SPI pins on the Pi's GPIO headers to directly interface with a TFT panel.

He means without having to have a reaction mass the size of a star ...

I would still pick C, and use it to write a higher level language compiler / interpreter.

This is also in TFA:

My guess is the FBI is covering up that they somehow got VPN access into the Silk Road's internal server network. The same VPN access Ulbricht used to administer the servers from his local coffee shop.

They had already been tipped off about Ulbricht when he tried to order fake IDs from Canada. Then they figured out he was spending a good amount of time using the local coffee shop's wifi. They then sniffed his wifi traffic directly or just ordered the coffee shop / ISP to allow them to do the same. They couldn't decrypt his VPN session but they could see the destination IP which either lead to his server host provider or a 3rd party VPN service. Either way they just pressured the company that runs the service to give them the keys. Now that they have access to the server network they could collect what ever information they needed to build a case.

The key to my theory is the PDF of the PHPMyAdmin access. Notice it's an internal IP address. No way they were accessing that from anywhere but the server network.

Plain text is great when you're just transferring text. The problem is HTTP has been used for transferring a lot more then just text for a long time. Images, file downloads, video, etc. With HTTP/1.1 browsers have different parsing code paths depending on if it's a binary file or plaintext html. There are also special cases for handling white space and stuff like that. It makes developing and testing a browser more complex then is should be.

This won't effect AJAX. HTTP is abstracted away from the javascript engine by the browser. I imagine there might be some additional HTTP header parameters to play with while making AJAX calls, but that's about it. All the benefits from HTTP/2 will happen behind scene as far as AJAX is concerned.