I always thought iOS devices were powered by the immortal soul of Steve Jobs and cutting-edge round corners. They are worse off than I thought.

Also, %s/nokia/microsoft/g

The Dilemma of complaining that everybody is complaining... You have to complain yourself.

Are you allowed to share exactly _how much_ your regional ISP had to pay for one TB of traffic? Because I'd really like to know.

That's a common misconception.
In fact, pulling an object upwards the elevator will enact a specific impulse of about 5km/s, westwards, onto the elevator, felt as coriolis force.
However, that impulse can simply be transferred to the earth by anchoring it (think some kind of swimming oil rig in the ocean.
You just need to put the elevator's center of gravity slightly above geostationary altitude and the constant pull will keep the cable tense.
Pulling stuff up and down the elevator will then put the cable into oscillations, which can even be controlled to avoid space debris.

Unfortunately, my source is only a german-language podcast by ESA (http://raumzeit-podcast.de/2013/07/05/rz054-space-elevator/); however, all my following statements are backed by it.
You can spin a rope of carbon-nanotubes; once you manage to create single molecules that are a few centimeters long, the rope's strength will be in the same order of a single molecule.
Centimeter-long nanotubes can very well be created with current technology; however, no reasearch team has real interest in it, because they are rather focused on the electronics applications (imagine an even flatter iphone as opposed to a lousy space elevator!)
However, with such a spun carbon-nanotube rope, the required diameter-at-geostationary-altitude-to-diameter-at-end ratio would be 4:1.
With this rope, a 1-ton payload elevator rope would weigh only 30 tons, well within the launch capacity of the Falcon Heavy.
From then on, the elevator could be used to construct itself, until capable of thousands of tons of payload.

Definitely. Even with today's technology, it's possible to shoot down a satellite. There are few things more vulnerable than spacecraft. You don't even need orbital velocity; hell, with more modern electronics/software, even a german 1942 V2 rocket could destroy the International Space Station (or any spacecrat in low orbit for that matter).
Due to radiation constraints, elysium would most certainly be built in low orbit.

Using a space elevator, enormous structures in space would not only be a lot cheaper to launch (in the range of a few dollars per kg), but also a lot easier to build - no longer would spacecraft need to instantly work when launched, nor would they need to absorb the launch vehicle's g-forces.
All fundamental issues are solved (carbon nanotubes of the required length have been created, the orbital mechanics math works out etc.). If we had the will, like we had when we landed on the mun, we could probably finish an 100-ton-per-day elevator by the end of the decade, for maybe $1 trillion.

Self-replicating technology is incredibly hard to build. Self-replicating technology needs to be at least able to build computers, for which it requires a semi-conductor factory, requiring extremely precise optics, all kinds of lasers, etc, which in turn require dozens of different elements, some of them rare-earth, which in turn need to be chemically extracted from the asteroid or even bred in nuclear reactors if too scarce.

Take a look at this paper http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/ReproJBISJuly1980.htm for a 440-ton machine (or rather swarm of machines) capable of reproducing once every 500 years under the conditions of a gas giant moon such as Ganymede, under the assumption that He3-Deuterium fusion technology is available for power.

PWM frequencies are usually chosen as a trade-off: Too low frequencies mean flickering, audible noises, and, depending on the application, larger caps/coils. Too high frequencies mean higher CMOS switching losses, and RF signals emissions which may violate regulations.
The WLAN frequency was chosen as the resonance frequency of water because due to absorption that frequency is basically useless, so nobody really wanted it.

I can only recommend you to read this: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

For this reason, building instructions are usally provided, e.g. in the form of a Makefile.
Furthermore, almost every distribution provides you with all dependencies and the full packaging script which was used to create the distribution's binary in the first place.
Source-based distributions such as Gentoo even go as far as to do the actual creation of the binary on your local machine.
On Windows, however, this is admittedly a problem, since _everybody_ simply downloads an exe file from somewhere, without even checking the md5 hash that is usually provided (however, in most cases, in vain because the website is not even SSL secured). Most software probably can't even be compiled on Windows.

I still refuse to believe that piracy makes as much as a dent in sales.

As far as I understood, publishers would select games they found supportworthy, and provide funding, thus making the game possible at all, or at least take a huge amount of risk away from the devs. Unfortunately for them, this is nowdays done by kickstarter.

0.
The windows command-line is a bad joke. It is, in fat, so bad that I think they in fact made it this bad deliberately to make people afraid of command lines and thus UNIX.
I do most of my work and computer usage on the command line, because I find stuff involving any kind of GUIs just incredibly inconvenient, just in the way of doing what I want, exactly the way I want.

1.
I've not found a tiling window manager for windows that is as powerful as i3. In fact, I have not found a single window manager for Windows, probably due to the lack of an API.

2.
Installing software is just so much harder on Windows. You have to google for some shiny, advertisement-filled homepage and download some binary, for which you have no guarantee at all that it might not contain a virus. On Linux I just have a repository, from which I can install anything I need, having to trust only the distributor, and it just works. There was a short glimmer of hope when Microsoft announced the Windows 8 appstore, but oh well...

3.
I find that the whole spirit of the software on Windows is poisoned; this is not Microsoft's fault (at least not directly).
There is expensive professional software, which is usually pirated (at least for private use); the software creators try (fruitlessly) to fight this piracy with evil DRM schemes which just burden the people who actually bought the stuff. Then there is a shitload of shareware crap (example: WinRAR), which likes to annoy the user with message boxes, overly colorful graphics themes, websites opening out of nothing and such. And then, there is the even bigger amount of completely useless crap, which somehow ends up on most computers anyway - even with 'trusted' software such as the Java Updater: Scareware, Antivirus software, Toolbars, 'Motherboard driver and overclocking GUIs'. A combination of all this results in an incredibly slow, unreliable and insecure system which spams the user with a dozen error messages at boot time. This trans the user to simply press 'OK', 'Cancel' or whatever they found out will make the message go away. This again will cause them to ignore real warning messages... no thanks. Luckily, Open Source has at least partially begun to replace the shareware stuff on Windows.

4.
All the windows-only applications I need (mostly games anyway) have by now been ported to Linux in the current Steam-for-Linux/Humble Indie Bundle efforts, or work way better in wine than they did on Windows (Age of Empires 2, Crysis, ...)

5.
I like to understand my system and be fully in control of it. This is quite hard to achieve with closed-source stuff.

6.
Finally, there is also the whole ideological stuff: Microsoft is evil, Closed source is evil, blah blah. While certainly not the main argument, this point should not be completely neglected.