There is only so much space on the utility polls and under the streets. The number of companies who are allowed to run network cable has to be limited. It's the same with electric, gas, and phone line. I don't see why people don't understand this. It's government enforced monopoly because it's the only practical way to do it.

With common carrier regulation the companies that have the right to use PUBLIC lands for profit must lease their lines to other companies at a fair market value.

The real solution to all of this is the government should build the infrastructure using tax dollars and then lease it to private companies. If I was Bush/Obama in 2008 during the economic crisis I would have used the bail out money to build a nationwide Internet service. Would have hired a lot of people for quite a few years and we'd be better off as a nation for it.

The Dell 2015 XPS 13 uses machined aluminum and carbon fiber. How is this different in terms of build quality than a Macbook?

Umm Minecraft seems playable on a Intel HD 5500 to me.

Remember, Google isn't out to make profit directly through providing Internet service. They are an advertisement company, and just want to make sure as many people as possible have unfettered access to their ads.

Large corporations are risk adverse. They aren't going to hold onto BTC for the reason you said. It's a different story for individuals and small business owners.

I would personally take BTC for my services (software development), and I'm not alone.

BTC started as a grassroots concept, and will continue to grow that way. No matter what happens to the exchanges.

BTC is real money.

If I can't find someone to exchange my USD to EUR, does that make either one worthless? No, because I can still buy goods and services directly with either.

Just like BTC.

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.