F-Droid does not require root. It requires "Unknown sources", a checkbox that appears in the "Security" or "Apps" settings of virtually all Android-powered phones and tablets except about the first year of AT&T phones. And in what way is Amazon Appstore useless?

I have an ASUS Nexus 7 (2012) tablet computer with Wi-Fi. My aunt has an iPad 2, also with Wi-Fi. Both get updates straight from the manufacturer. What "carrier" are you talking about? Do you mean an ISP?

True, visibility of priced apps outside the United States was a significant problem in the Android 1.x and possibly early 2.x days. But I thought Google had expanded the set of countries in which priced apps are available over the past half decade.

You also have to take into account support costs. The cost of diversity of Android-powered devices (or "fragmentation" as detractors call it) is increased cost of supporting all configurations. Fewer configurations can mean lower costs, which in some cases may outweigh the increased revenue from Android.

Besides, writing app A for iOS and app B for iOS can reach more of these profitable "whales" than writing app A for both iOS and Android.

For one thing, rational numbers greater than one, such as 5/4, are still fractions. For another, app sales revenue doesn't tell the whole story. Due to Google's early failure to expand Google Checkout into all countries where carriers offered Android-powered devices, there is more of a culture of ad-supported software on Android rather than paywalls.

Lawful unlicensed transmissions on ISM bands are limited to a power that won't reach far out of a building, definitely not across a city. And even so, an entity that monopolizes the FM band monopolizes the user experience of people using FM receivers.

True technically. But the laws are written broadly enough to cover both monopolies and cartels.

At a substantial extra monthly fee that's not efficient for low-volume users.

Apparently you've never lived in a city whose FM radio band was dominated by Clear Channel. Or when all four major U.S. cellular carriers raised their SMS pricing from 10 cents to send and 10 cents to receive to 20 cents to send and 20 cents to receive, in near lockstep.

The problem is not that "Right-of-way access is limited" as much as that it has been historically allocated very inefficiently. Bury conduit and let multiple providers lease conduit through which to blow their fiber or copper.

you arent running anything usb on the old machine, you are using usb to connect the hard drive of the old machine to a modern machine.

So if you want to play one PlayStation 4-exclusive game, one Xbox One-exclusive game, and one Wii U-exclusive game, do you buy all three consoles rather than looking for a same-genre game on the PC you have?

Can you game while another member of the household is using the family PC for homework, Facebook, YouTube, or whatever else?

PlayStation 4 doesn't run Linux. It runs Orbis OS, an operating system based on FreeBSD. The point is that if your company ports a game to OS X and PlayStation 4, those count as ports to environments with a POSIX heritage, and GNU/Linux is another OS that aims for POSIX conformance.

You could always buy an iBuyPower SBX PC.

Would this include ability to install and use community-developed mods, or would only the vanilla versions of games be available?

Payphones have, in fact, been disappearing.

So now anybody who is concerned that someone might run off with your expensive phone or use your account for a drug deal is a "total douche". Or what am I missing?

It depends on when AMBE was introduced. Patents on math expire on the twentieth anniversary of filing.