You could probably reduce the cost by having them shipped in bulk from Peru or wherever.

Your math is right and that does seem pretty dammed high.

Nope. Read the comments on that article. It was most likely not the USB cable providing the voltage, but a nearby lamp. 5v@500ma through the mouth are nothing, while a nearby lamp could have easily have hot or neutral shorted to the lamp body, where the USB cable would only provide a ground path.

I think the point was Columbus brought European diseases over, and through mechanisms of natural selection, increased total human immunity to those.

That means that everything from libc to the init scripts to the coreutils and the rest of the OS can be under whatever license they choose, as long as drivers are GPL, and even that can be a grey area when we start dealing with binary blobs.

Only modules directly linked into the kernel have to be under GPL. Not the entire system. Syscalls don't count as linking.

Did you forget to take your medicine today?

Where and in what version did you find that nugget? I tried grepping 3.4.6 for 'HV_XENLINUX' but couldn't find it.

Found it: