The "chance" to make a difference has long since past. The general election is just a formality. If you want to have a true impact on who gets elected and what kind of platform they run on, you need to vote in the PRIMARIES. Since so few people do, we end up with these mostly-unelectable assholes who manage to get elected anyway. What we need (in addition to stronger 3rd parties) are more participation in the primaries.

Probably. When can we expect this free market you speak of? I only see a duopoly where I live for wired service, and a 4 player oligopoly for wireless.

Bay Trail uses Intel's own HD graphics. Bay Trail is good stuff. It's the Pine Trail that you want to avoid.

You mean like inflation?

I bought one of these boards with the PowerVR crap, but I knew what I was getting into when I did. It makes a handy headless server, but aside from that it's a paperweight. I'm a bit disappointed that the Nexus Player has an Atom with a PowerVR graphics core; otherwise it would have made not only a compelling purchase on its own merits, but an awesome device that could easily be extended with different media capabilities. With the PowerVR chip it's pretty much Android or nothing.

I suspect it's the Z3560. If I were you I'd be less worried about the bitedness and more worried about the graphics drivers if you wanted to run Linux on this thing. Intel chips with PowerVR graphics have had a terrible track record (compared to Intel chips with in-house graphics).

I would argue that thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know a lot of things we thought were unlikely aren't.

Cloud backups?

For best performance they need to be on the same breaker switch and not share the breaker with any electric motors or fluorescent lights. If they have noisy devices on their circuit, or are on a different breaker they'll run slower. If they have noisy devices and are on a different phase they may not work at all.

A lot of the newer ones should be able to handle a gigabit connection. The problem is (unfortunately) is that it relies on hardware based NAT acceleration which sadly doesn't work with most 3rd party firmwares. I grabbed a Asus RT-AC68U which should get close enough to a gigabit to be okay for my needs; the advantage is it is one of the very few routers that has a 3rd party firmware (AsusWRT Merlin) that maintains NAT acceleration while adding to the factory firmware.

In my experience each stream of 802.11ac in the real world has the same bandwidth of a 100Mb network link. If you go triple stream, you'll be getting about 300Mbps (despite the 1.2Gbps "rating"). There really is no substitute for wired. I just bought a house a few months ago and one of the first things I did was drop CAT6A in as many rooms as I could. It's a pain in the ass since it's an existing 2 story home, but again, there is no substitute for wired.

Population density is a problem of backbone infrastructure, not last mile infrastructure. The US is on par or better than most nations in the world when it comes to our backbone infrastructure; it's our last mile that equates to a 3rd world internet (at above first world prices). You have only 1 or 2 companies to blame which vary depending upon your market, and that is exactly the problem.

So which telecom company do you work for? Multiple Verizon references makes me think you work for them...

You have 3 more choices than I do then, living in one of the largest markets in the US (Dallas-Fort Worth). Additionally, the Swedish model is simultaneously a monopoly and not a monopoly. The infrastructure is provided by the government, but the service is provided by any of a multitude of companies. Personally I think this model is ideal and wish it would be adopted more here in the US. I don't care if the network is owned by a government or highly regulated monopoly, I just think separating service and infrastructure makes sense. It's exactly how we handle our power today where I live. Oncor runs all of the infrastructure, and I get to pick whichever power company I choose. I want that, but for Internet.

They're not bitching about fairness. They're trying to delegitimize the 3.7 million comments of which a cursory sampling shows about 99% in favor of greater net neutrality protections. They can't even fake the kind of groundswell support net neutrality got, so they're trying to make it look like an orchestrated movement instead.