Almost no custom roms these days ship with Gapps. http://opengapps.org/ has made that unnecessary and often undesirable (as many custom rom users opt to go Googleless.)

It's not illegal to host or download the Gapps suite. It only becomes trouble if you attempt to use the apps on a non OHA certified device. At which point you have violated the license of the software, but the legality of that matter would depend on your jurisdiction (though this is probably illegal for anyone in the states.)

I don't know if ZTE can remain OHA certified under these new limitations, but I don't think the OHA is a strictly American concern. Assuming that ZTE can maintain their OHA certification, they should have no problem shipping devices sans-Gapps and just providing instructions on how to visit http://opengapps.org/ to acquire your own copies of the software. It's pretty easy to do.

I wish I had points to mod you up. The first amendment protects an intrinsic attribute of being a person, while the second regulates a very external piece of optional property that arguably exists only to destroy. It's as false a dichotomy as has ever been drawn, obviously people are willing to take very different stances on these things, one is fundamental humanism while the other is a right to own a very specific type of property.

I mean, the president can issue an order for the sun to immediately fuse all of its hydrogen into helium and become a Red Giant, but the laws of physics are not beholden to that order. What people are wanting to know is if this order has any teeth or if it's just willing the universe to bend to his will so he can in a few billion years claim credit for the Sun doing what it was always going to do anyway.

I can hit a Speedtest.net server even when my general internet is dead with Comcast. They've obviously got an OOB route for Speedtest.net that allows that traffic to flow regardless of the actual status of the network. It also somehow always manages to get my full allotment of bandwidth even when I have several streaming video services running with Steam downloads which should be taking a chunk out of what can be used to hit Speedtest.net.

I had to sign in to see if I had any mod points for you. Sadly I did not and it's a damned shame since yours is the boring sort of mundane truthful reality that never gets the attention it deserves.

Luckily the iPhone 7 is rumored to have a hotfix for that issue: "Removed headphone jack to prevent issues with phones that reboot every time a headset is plugged in."

Once you've paid the publisher for the privilege of owning your used copy by way of a large secondary fee.

I question if you actually did own a U-Force, as I did and while it could sometimes be said that there was a function being preformed there, "working" would hardly be the word that I would have used to describe that function over 90% of the time.

As you've noted the iPhone4 loses in the ballpark of 20dB with the deathgrip applied, which is nuts compared to the competition, but it's also worth noting that dB are a logarithmic expression which means that the more dB you've lost, the steeper your actual decline in signal strength is. -10dB is not even close to half as bad as a 20dB loss.

The project was both lead and edited by one Mandeep Khera, Chief Marketing Officer, Cenzic, Inc.
Put together more or less entirely by marketing people at a company that is trying to sell you web security.
I don't know about you guys but I've never known people in marketing to be anything less than the most fine and upstanding sort of the disgusting vile unmitigated cock sucking pustules that ever formed on the unwashed asses of pond scum.

The guys at XDA seem pretty convinced that 2.0 will run on these devices no sweat. I'm pretty confident that if no OTA update happens, XDA will have my back.

Interestingly, you say that we can't just say that it should be free and have it be that way, and you're right. WE didn't say that, and that is not what is happening.
What is happening is much the same thing as what would happen to Gold if it were suddenly as abundant as Hydrogen, the only value that Gold has is tied to it's scarcity, if the market is flooded with Gold, there is no value.
This is what is happening to Copyright, it used to be that distribution and production made things of a Copyrightable nature scarce (Maybe not scarce per se, but certainly limited.) The internet has made it so that this is not the case, nearly anyone can produce for next to nothing and distribution CAN be had for so ridiculously close to nothing that it's practically indistinguishable. The value has evaporated, the people that are willing to pay for such things will get fewer and fewer as the obstacles become smaller and smaller, and the value gets less and less.
The day may soon be upon us that the hypothetical artist you refer to as only making albums, will have so little general value as to be only capable of generating income from devoted fans that bestow value on the works and know he can only produce if they are willing to pay. To go back to your point about composers working on commission "back in the day", this will once again become the model, only the people commissioning the works will be the patrons themselves through their donations/purchases rather than a rich aristocrat.
Finally a point that you haven't touched on, if we suddenly came upon a replication technology that allowed us to cheaply and easily reproduce anything and everything (Much like the internet has done with media) should we start making laws to control what people can and can't make with their own replicators? In the name of GM making a buck should it be against the law to replicate a '69 Camaro Z28, even when it costs them nothing for me to do so, conversely I had to expend my own energies, time and presumably money making the duplicate? If so, why?

I work for a web hosting company with a host of your typical slashdot reading types for co-workers and I only know of two people among the whole lot that have embraced Blu-Ray.

Meanwhile my circles outside of work are composed equally of techies and Luddites and still only two Blu-Ray owners among them. These people ALL owned DVD players by 1999-2000. That means it took 2-3 years for everyone I know to own a DVD player, whereas here we are almost exactly at year 3 of Blu-Ray and I know 4 people in my since expanded circle that own a Blu-Ray player (and all of those are PS3s.) If you exclude Playstation 3 sales from the figures on Blu-Ray penetration I imagine that it looks a whole lot worse than DVD ever did.

Blu-Ray isn't losing to HD-DVD, (duh) it's losing to the established tech and the internet.

Sorry LainTouko, still breaking the DMCA with that one so you might as well have an exception to the DMCA. (Much like they are trying to do.)
Command line mplayer is probably beyond your average 7th period drama teacher as well.