Wireless? I see nothing on Alamo's site indicates that they are a wireless broadband provider. If they are wireless, much of this entire discussion goes out the window. :-)

I can only guess that you are using the word "franchise" to mean something different. The word doesn't mean the same thing in this context as it does with fast food restaurants.

In this context, "franchise" means "license." A local public service commission grants a "franchise license" to a company like Verizon. It's one company: Verizon in Maryland is the same Verizon that is in Ohio and Virginia. That franchise license means that the company receiving it is a monopoly, and is subject to monopoly regulation. That one monopoly company provides both ISP and telecom service. Each "franchise" isn't a separate company like a McDonald's "franchise" where each one is independently owned. And the ISP and the telco aren't separate companies.

If it were that easy, there would be several countries who would have already tested them, but haven't yet.

Not true, not in the slightest. Google has fought hard to minimize the information they have to give to governments, and to be as transparent as the law will allow about what they do give. Remember that Google created the transparency report, and was the company that managed to negotiate permission to share aggregated data about National Security Letters. Many other companies have followed suit, but Google led the way.

No, Google has been shown to comply with legal requirements, and to fight questionable requests in court. Snowden also revealed that the NSA was tapping Google's fiber. Google responded by encrypting the data on that fiber.

Cite? Since Google is a publicly-traded company, it should be easy to point to that line item in their SEC filings.

No, told by the Chinese government to participate in government-mandated censorship or GFTO. Google participated for a while and then decided it wasn't what they ought to be doing, and so chose to GTFO of the biggest market on the planet (albeit one in which they had a small market share.

Even if there is "nothing morally wrong", a copyright infringement lawsuit can still bankrupt you.

Which is difficult if nobody's advertising entry-level positions for recent graduates in your home city, as was my case. Or by "first job [...] paying peanuts" did you actually mean a minimum wage service job such as food service or retail?

For example, you're allowed to leave tablets in your bag (apparently, the dangerous part of a laptop is its keyboard? That's all that distinguishes it from a tablet these days) and the ones with metal cases do a pretty great job of blocking X-ray.

The reason you have to remove your laptop is because the circuitry on the motherboard clutters up the x-ray image, making it harder for the people monitoring it to quickly tell what else is in your bag. A tablet is mostly battery with a small circuit board along the edge. Laptop motherboards have been shrinking, but they still take up about half the interior of the laptop thus cluttering up a lot more of your carry-on than a tablet.

And the metal case does very little to the x-rays. You ever read those signs saying not to stick your arms inside the x-ray machine? They're there for a good reason. The x-rays they use are much more powerful than what're used in a medical x-ray, and can produce a clear image through a fair amount of metal.

That's the worst attempt to interpret data I've seen all month. Nice try bro.

It wasn't entirely clear that source code could be copyrighted until 1980 (see history), shortly before the creation of the GPL. So that is probably why.

It is not a security breach at all, and I'm not sure you could even recognize a buffer overflow if you saw one (bro, do you even asm?).

Once security is breached through another method, this can be used for two already compromised computers to communicate. As a threat, it's less dangerous than a cat5 cable.

Work on this, the goal will give you focus. Try to find something you can work towards. For example, I was kind of running every once in a while, making vague attempts to get better, faster. Then I decided, "my goal is to be able to run to the gym instead of drive there." Suddenly it was like turbo-charging my desire to go run....because I actually had a reason to do it. Progress went so much faster.

btw it sounds like you've already done amazing things, getting rid of your sciatic nerve pain and learning kung fu.