I have two Pi's and they are flaky as hell, in all the arenas you mention. It's such a shame. Is there any indication that they're going to revise future models to fix any of these problems?

C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!

it reminds me of this gem

And they owe it all to the low entropy generated at the moment of the big bang. Well, that shortcut a lot of unneccessary development of that line of thought.

It's proton torpedoes. Photon torpedoes are from Star Trek.

What bad reaction? What likelyhood? Which vaccine? Don't assume this dichotomy because as far as I'm aware, in 99% of the cases it simply doesn't exist. What little side effects there are are nothing you would concern yourself with, certainly not compared the consequences of getting the disease in question.

A viewpoint established by misinformation and mass hysteria. That's not meant as an insult - these people are being misled by pernicious echo chamber of plausible sounding myths.

More drama == more eyeballs == more revenue

when you can't make a substantiated or specific argument, just accuse someone of spreading FUD!

We're all liars.

If you base your assessment of what TED's appeal is on youtube comments then you're going to get a skewed impression of how people respond to the videos. Being anonymous unsolicited pronouncements, youtube comments are all about ego. You aren't getting any information about the people that don't leave a comment.

Which is obviously much more beneficial for them, because that way they get less ad impressions and less word of mouth.

No they don't, they give advertisers potential sales in exchange for money. You are the product being sold to advertisers. There is no burden of responsibility on the user's part to purchase anything from the advertisers, or to look at the ads. It's the burden of responsibility of the site to give you a compelling reason to be their product. Bombarding the user with easily circumvented malware riddled spam every time they try to use their site is not a brilliant plan, yet it still seems to pay off even with the moderate number of people that sidestep this disincentive.

There are other ways to associate a brand with your content in exchange for money. The kind of ads that are blocked by adblock are only blocked so trivially because they a delivered in such a disassociated, spamlike fashion.

Seems to me like the people you should be annoyed with are the people that were bullying your nephew. The word gimp has many meanings.

could the power be transmitted to it wirelessly?

By the logical implication of your passive aggressive snarking, nuclear bombs don't kill civilisations either.

As in Jeff Bridges in TRON? That's what this laser beam thing reminds me of. (but you probably mean the bifrost from Thor)