I suspect that even dressing it up won't help: At least on this side of the pond; the "September 11th Security Fee" item on airline tickets was...less than popular...with fliers; even at the time when '9/11!!!!' was considered a perfectly good argument for setting up a network of torture dungeons.
All but the staunchest law-and-order-authoritarians hate actually paying for state violence almost as much as they enjoy watching it.
I'm honestly not sure how that happened: back when we still had genuine 'communists', we also had genuine 'fascists' who sometimes sincerely stood for oppression first and profit second. Now they all want their giant penal apparatus to somehow turn a profit. Sellouts.
I don't imagine that all of them would be replaced(can't have those robo-CEOs owning themselves, no, can we?); but unless they exhibit atypically strong class solidarity it only takes at least one of them deciding that there will be more for him if he can cut the payroll a little further.
Why would you need a human at the top for negotiations?
Even if the other guys insist on meeting face-to-face; someone who has reasonable charisma, isn't an idiot; and knows how to wear a suit and an unobtrusive earpiece should be a great deal cheaper than a CEO; and an attractive UI for Our Expert System Overlords.
If doing so makes people uncomfortable, there is no need to actually remove the human face from the company; the question is just how much you actually need its input vs. how much it is just a thin layer of tissue designed to facilitate interaction with humans; like the C-level equivalent of the poor bastards who read scripts at you if you try to call a company on the phone.
The environmental devastation is troubling; but looking into the empty, glassy, somewhat hateful, eyes of a cow really always makes me feel better about stealing its amino acids and assimilating them.
There certainly are strong practical reasons for genetically determined morality and 'evil has spikes' creature design; especially if you don't want to bog down a good hack 'n slash with a lot of tedious backstory or morally ambiguous politics. It's just that being so easy, convenient, and attractive is also what seems like it should concern somebody moralizing about violence in RPGs.
I have no problem with using this tactic, in its place(any more than I had a problem with Doom's straightforward "The slightly-futuristic legions of hell have invaded Mars; go frag lots of cyberdemons and things" plot; or with the fact that games don't need to explain that Nazis and Gas-masked Combine Overwatch troopers are not going to sit down for a polite discussion on coexistence). It's kind of lazy compared to more nuanced storytelling; but laziness is a pretty modest sin in an explicitly recreational activity. I've certainly used it myself; when everyone just wanted to throw some fireballs and not come up with a backstory for why the Orks have been displaced from their historical territories and are encroaching on the northern kingdoms and......etc. It's certainly possible to play in other ways(whether it be through villains that actually do evil things for vaguely plausible reasons and need to be taken down; or dangers that aren't moral agents at all; but simply dangerous;giant spiders aren't evil; but they sure are hungry); but the casual acceptance of what are basically theories of racial morality is pretty striking in some of the less nuanced schlock fantasy.
It just seems weird that somebody going to the trouble of writing a whiny moralizing piece would focus on the violence (which is about as scary as kids pointing sticks at one another and shouting 'bang!', and slightly less visceral); and ignore the temptation to easy dehumanization and effectively motiveless slaughter arbitrarily defined as 'good', something that has...had a bit of a checkered history... in human relations. Obviously, killing a few orks also doesn't appear to lead to much genocide; but it's a slightly more interesting, and possibly less tenuous, matter for consideration than 'does casting magic missile lead to school shootings and satanism?'
I'd be inclined to see fretting about either 'problem' as being a bit of an overreaction; I thought we'd stopped freaking out about D&D when 'satanic panic' went out of style in the '80s; but I just wasn't impressed to see somebody walk up to a game where "These people are just subhumans, you can tell because they are ugly; kill them and take their stuff." is an acceptable, if low-grade, plot; and start fretting about the horrifying violence of rolling some dice and imagining a fireball. If you are going to engage in moral fretting; at least hit the right target.
(As an aside, just in fairness to Tolkien, if memory serves he was aware, and somewhat troubled by, the 'eh, they are just evil like that; what do you expect from a race uglier than elves?' since, as a Catholic, the notion of intrinsically fallen people wasn't terribly foreign; but that of intrinsically evil and irredeemable, even if that were worth trying didn't set comfortably.)
Well, the nominal capital of spookville is over in McLean, VA; so 20-25 miles, depending on how close the various actual facilities are to the nominal 'locations' of the two places.
Probably a kind of unpleasant commute with the airport right in the middle; but that's not an issue if you are just shuttling data.
Arguably, the most 'deviant' thing about generic D&D, as played by those who have never bothered to go beyond the Tolkien Convention on Hackneyed Absolutist Morality, isn't the relatively unexciting amount of destruction that happens; it's the game's moral framework:
You've got 'Good' and 'Evil' and those just are. Most NPCs will have little or no development that explains why they fall into a given category; but that's just how Orks are(PCs, especially clerics and paladins, will typically be called upon to adhere to a few more rules). Want to kill some people and take their stuff? Are they evil? What more reason do you need? Smite the bastards.
Obviously, this excessively hackneyed version has been improved, modified, actively subverted, etc. numerous times; but it's still a pretty common lazy default. Who needs guilt or innocence, 'motivation' or 'diplomacy' when there are Just Evil things to massacre? There's a fun spoof RPG ruleset that does a pretty good job of skewering this sort of D&D play style "Violence: The Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed". Not actually very playable; but a good read. Plus, what other RPGs have rules that specifically address how to roll to see whether your attempt to interrogate someone with a belt sander is successful or not?
The best we can hope for is that this is just some snake-oil fad that the ad guys sold the networks on.
If it actually works, it's just another step in the systematic exploitation of human cognitive limitations and bounded rationality. Exactly what wouldn't improve this situation. I hope the researchers are...suitably proud...of the good work they are doing there.
I realize that it is considered dreadfully impolite to use it against any crime organized enough to be an LLC or equivalent; but I think that problems with this sort of 'deniable management' structure are why we have RICO.
The DMCA won't save it from black-box testing, which it can't pass; but it does prevent you from directly inspecting it, rather than deducing its operation by throwing tests at the car. Had it been a mechanical device it could also have been inspected directly.
This is, indeed, true. In this case, though, the firm being smacked down wasn't operating a licensed service; just a bunch of part 15 wifi APs that had a handy 'illegally interfere with other part 15 devices' button that they decided to press.
Had they actually been licensed, local wifi users can go cry about it; but these guys seem to have confused 'owning the building' with 'having some special say in local spectrum allocation', which is nonsense, no matter how hard you refer to other users as 'rogue APs'.
I'm a trifle surprised that vendors haven't gotten jumpier about making that feature prominently available. Yeah, it's no secret that wifi is vulnerable to deauth attacks; so nobody is going to eliminate software that takes advantage of that; but if I were a large, deeply sue-able company, I'd be a little nervous about openly providing jamming features, rather than just hardware that could conceivably be configured for jamming; but I don't know anything about that and explicitly don't recommend it.
I don't understand why they are even trying the 'oh, just a few lowly rogue engineers' excuse.
If it were true, that might absolve them on the defeat-device issue; but it'd be pretty horrifying on the 'software validation processes for a life-critical component going into millions of vehicles' front. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in, near, or on the same road as, a car whose ECU firmware was built under such a sloppy process that some engineering peon could secretly slip easter eggs into it.
Aside from that, there's also the minor issue that the affected engine doesn't exist in isolation: VW has been making diesel engines for decades, has multiple product lines for various purposes, has ongoing R&D efforts, and so on. Are we supposed to believe that nobody raised an eyebrow when the revision N+1 engines suddenly started turning in far better NOx numbers than the revision N ones; and none of the mechanical engineers had touched anything and the software guys would only look away and mumble something about 'optimized the firmware'? Are we supposed to believe that the R&D people working on refining existing designs or creating new ones aren't wondering why their advanced prototypes are getting worse NOx numbers than years-old production models?
If you just have a single product; no predecessors, no successors, maybe you can rig the demo without alerting anyone not involved in the rigging; but if your rigged product is an adaptation of a prior version? Then you have to explain an impressive discontinuity in performance between the current design and the prior model; and somehow explain away why the research guys can't do as well as you can(or find research guys so dense that they only use EPA tests and don't wonder why none of their tweaks appear to change the results). That is a great deal harder and less plausible.
I realize that, in practice, this would probably be a 'watch the world burn' option; but it would be a glorious thing if people who can't obey the rules of operating a Part15 device on the ISM band lost the right to do so, at least for a time sufficient to induce agonized penitence.
This is shared spectrum, guys, with certain rules to help keep it usable for everyone. If you don't like that; perhaps you'll enjoy only being able to use such dedicated spectrum as you are able to buy or lease for a while. If you want to treat it like you own it; you can. For a price.
Given that the (deliberately configured, 'as designed') behavior for stagefright was to silently restart every 5 seconds if it crashed, I can only assume that there was some internal pessimism about the robustness of the library.
I don't doubt that dealing with all the various ghastly corner cases in codecs and container formats was deeply unpleasant; but it is worrisome that priority was apparently given to avoiding the appearance of failure, rather than really clamping down on what such a dangerously unpredictable part of the system was allowed to do; and when it could silently retry, rather than rejecting input.
I, for one, definitely can't imagine how a plan by one of the world's more prominent advertising and 'consumer analytics' outfits to gather personal information about a heavily stigmatized class of disorders through a channel that will allow them to avoid any restrictions that might have applied to 'protected health information' could possibly go wrong. Seems like a great idea.
The only BMG you can trust is the M2. On the plus side, Sony has largely stagnated to the point where their formerly-inferior Korean rivals are markedly cheaper and at least as good, so hopefully we won't have to worry about them too much longer.
There must be a documented protocol for handling the situation written up somewhere in the bowels of NASA HQ. Just because dying in space mostly implies automatic cremation doesn't mean that there isn't the possibility of somebody just having an aneurysm and keeling over in an otherwise functional spacecraft.
I doubt it; but there is a slight possibility that this is actually a delightfully nerdy reference to Paranoia's color-based 'classification' system that some techie deep within the bowels of Oracle managed to sneak past the armies of lawyers, salesmen, and licensing enforcement thugs.
Antenna size also makes a difference. High end fighter radars are packed to the gills with clever RF tricks; but you can only do so much to overcome the limitations of not having the antenna you want.
Just in case it proves to be unfeasible to build a bomber that can survive modern air defense systems; we always have the option(additional charges may apply) of retrofitting the bomber to deliver short or medium range air to ground missiles instead of just dropping things from above the target. Sure, that adds a factor of ten to the cost of every warhead delivered over the life of the aircraft; but it does allow you to stay away from fixed AA.
We already do that with air-launched cruise missiles and B-52s, in situations where we aren't just hammering some poor bastard with basically no AA, in which case gravity bombs still offer more warhead per unit weight and lower cost.
They padded it out with a bunch of paperwork just so everyone could save face; but I'm told that the actual bidding process was "We need a new bomber. Which one of our military aircraft oligopolies isn't responsible for the F-35? Ok, them then."
The usefulness of this obviously varies markedly depending on how much GPIO you need, whether 'headless' is a virtue or something you were going to buy a monitor to solve, and so forth; but if you are looking for a Samsung Exynos on the cheap; the Chromebooks that they released based on their Exynos CPUs show up used or refurb for a pittance from time to time. HP also built one model around the chip.
I picked one up(model xe303c12, specifically) a while back to play with Debian-on-not-x86 with; and it has USB3. Definitely not a little dev board tucked in there, the motherboard, unsurprisingly, looks like it was pulled from a tablet design, because it probably was; but the Exynos-based units are now the older models(Intel apparently made some...very...aggressive offers on high-end Atom/low-end-Core parts); so you might find either a used/refurb that is quite competitive with an Odroid + peripherals, or a broken screen/other damage-as-a-laptop that is just plain competitive with anything else that has an Exynos in it. Coreboot and Chromium.org have info on doing the warranty voiding.
If I remember the history right, (aside from the fact that the project lead works for Broadcomm, so they were the obvious first-choice as cooperative corporate partner), the original rPi mostly predated(at least during design, not necessarily by the time it started shipping in volume) the really intense knife-fighting that has broken out on ARM application processor pricing. They were available, but with tray prices approaching the target retail price of the rPi; so the rPi ended up being built around what is basically a set-top-box SoC(at least one of the Roku devices uses the same chip).
It will be interesting to see how(or if), they adapt in subsequent models. It's not as though Broadcomm has never implemented a NIC before; but the fact that the bottom appears to be falling out of the low end application processor market probably doesn't make entering it a very attractive proposal. Will team rPi eventually go elsewhere, to whichever of the cheapie Android-focused players is most helpful? Stay the course as the best-known option; and if they end up undercut by somebody else; be pleased that they set out to make computers cheap and accessible and did so successfully enough that they don't even need to nudge the process anymore?
I assume that, if only for the sake of their employees and general sense-of-identification-and-ownership-of-your-project, they aren't looking to rush to the exit; but the stated mission of the project was about making low-cost computers for education broadly accessible, so they don't necessarily have to remain in the market indefinitely so long as other outfits are meeting their objectives for them.
I suspect that, aside from issues with any materials that aren't improved by UV exposure, it would be quite tricky to get line-of-sight from any feasible number of emitters to all the various nooks and crannies. From all the pictures I've seen, the ISS is pretty cluttered; and a lot of the wall surface is actually access panels for equipment(with lots of assorted hiding places) behind them.
Since they already have an air filtration system, adding a UV pass to help ensure that anything the filters don't scrub is at least dead might well be viable; but I suspect that attempting to sterilize rooms built like those ones would be effectively hopeless.
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I suspect that even dressing it up won't help: At least on this side of the pond; the "September 11th Security Fee" item on airline tickets was...less than popular...with fliers; even at the time when '9/11!!!!' was considered a perfectly good argument for setting up a network of torture dungeons.
All but the staunchest law-and-order-authoritarians hate actually paying for state violence almost as much as they enjoy watching it.
I'm honestly not sure how that happened: back when we still had genuine 'communists', we also had genuine 'fascists' who sometimes sincerely stood for oppression first and profit second. Now they all want their giant penal apparatus to somehow turn a profit. Sellouts.
I don't imagine that all of them would be replaced(can't have those robo-CEOs owning themselves, no, can we?); but unless they exhibit atypically strong class solidarity it only takes at least one of them deciding that there will be more for him if he can cut the payroll a little further.
Why would you need a human at the top for negotiations?
Even if the other guys insist on meeting face-to-face; someone who has reasonable charisma, isn't an idiot; and knows how to wear a suit and an unobtrusive earpiece should be a great deal cheaper than a CEO; and an attractive UI for Our Expert System Overlords.
If doing so makes people uncomfortable, there is no need to actually remove the human face from the company; the question is just how much you actually need its input vs. how much it is just a thin layer of tissue designed to facilitate interaction with humans; like the C-level equivalent of the poor bastards who read scripts at you if you try to call a company on the phone.
The environmental devastation is troubling; but looking into the empty, glassy, somewhat hateful, eyes of a cow really always makes me feel better about stealing its amino acids and assimilating them.
There certainly are strong practical reasons for genetically determined morality and 'evil has spikes' creature design; especially if you don't want to bog down a good hack 'n slash with a lot of tedious backstory or morally ambiguous politics. It's just that being so easy, convenient, and attractive is also what seems like it should concern somebody moralizing about violence in RPGs.
I have no problem with using this tactic, in its place(any more than I had a problem with Doom's straightforward "The slightly-futuristic legions of hell have invaded Mars; go frag lots of cyberdemons and things" plot; or with the fact that games don't need to explain that Nazis and Gas-masked Combine Overwatch troopers are not going to sit down for a polite discussion on coexistence). It's kind of lazy compared to more nuanced storytelling; but laziness is a pretty modest sin in an explicitly recreational activity. I've certainly used it myself; when everyone just wanted to throw some fireballs and not come up with a backstory for why the Orks have been displaced from their historical territories and are encroaching on the northern kingdoms and......etc. It's certainly possible to play in other ways(whether it be through villains that actually do evil things for vaguely plausible reasons and need to be taken down; or dangers that aren't moral agents at all; but simply dangerous;giant spiders aren't evil; but they sure are hungry); but the casual acceptance of what are basically theories of racial morality is pretty striking in some of the less nuanced schlock fantasy.
It just seems weird that somebody going to the trouble of writing a whiny moralizing piece would focus on the violence (which is about as scary as kids pointing sticks at one another and shouting 'bang!', and slightly less visceral); and ignore the temptation to easy dehumanization and effectively motiveless slaughter arbitrarily defined as 'good', something that has...had a bit of a checkered history... in human relations. Obviously, killing a few orks also doesn't appear to lead to much genocide; but it's a slightly more interesting, and possibly less tenuous, matter for consideration than 'does casting magic missile lead to school shootings and satanism?'
I'd be inclined to see fretting about either 'problem' as being a bit of an overreaction; I thought we'd stopped freaking out about D&D when 'satanic panic' went out of style in the '80s; but I just wasn't impressed to see somebody walk up to a game where "These people are just subhumans, you can tell because they are ugly; kill them and take their stuff." is an acceptable, if low-grade, plot; and start fretting about the horrifying violence of rolling some dice and imagining a fireball. If you are going to engage in moral fretting; at least hit the right target. (As an aside, just in fairness to Tolkien, if memory serves he was aware, and somewhat troubled by, the 'eh, they are just evil like that; what do you expect from a race uglier than elves?' since, as a Catholic, the notion of intrinsically fallen people wasn't terribly foreign; but that of intrinsically evil and irredeemable, even if that were worth trying didn't set comfortably.)
Well, the nominal capital of spookville is over in McLean, VA; so 20-25 miles, depending on how close the various actual facilities are to the nominal 'locations' of the two places.
Probably a kind of unpleasant commute with the airport right in the middle; but that's not an issue if you are just shuttling data.
Arguably, the most 'deviant' thing about generic D&D, as played by those who have never bothered to go beyond the Tolkien Convention on Hackneyed Absolutist Morality, isn't the relatively unexciting amount of destruction that happens; it's the game's moral framework:
You've got 'Good' and 'Evil' and those just are. Most NPCs will have little or no development that explains why they fall into a given category; but that's just how Orks are(PCs, especially clerics and paladins, will typically be called upon to adhere to a few more rules). Want to kill some people and take their stuff? Are they evil? What more reason do you need? Smite the bastards.
Obviously, this excessively hackneyed version has been improved, modified, actively subverted, etc. numerous times; but it's still a pretty common lazy default. Who needs guilt or innocence, 'motivation' or 'diplomacy' when there are Just Evil things to massacre? There's a fun spoof RPG ruleset that does a pretty good job of skewering this sort of D&D play style "Violence: The Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed". Not actually very playable; but a good read. Plus, what other RPGs have rules that specifically address how to roll to see whether your attempt to interrogate someone with a belt sander is successful or not?
The best we can hope for is that this is just some snake-oil fad that the ad guys sold the networks on.
If it actually works, it's just another step in the systematic exploitation of human cognitive limitations and bounded rationality. Exactly what wouldn't improve this situation. I hope the researchers are...suitably proud...of the good work they are doing there.
I realize that it is considered dreadfully impolite to use it against any crime organized enough to be an LLC or equivalent; but I think that problems with this sort of 'deniable management' structure are why we have RICO.
The DMCA won't save it from black-box testing, which it can't pass; but it does prevent you from directly inspecting it, rather than deducing its operation by throwing tests at the car. Had it been a mechanical device it could also have been inspected directly.
This is, indeed, true. In this case, though, the firm being smacked down wasn't operating a licensed service; just a bunch of part 15 wifi APs that had a handy 'illegally interfere with other part 15 devices' button that they decided to press.
Had they actually been licensed, local wifi users can go cry about it; but these guys seem to have confused 'owning the building' with 'having some special say in local spectrum allocation', which is nonsense, no matter how hard you refer to other users as 'rogue APs'.
I'm a trifle surprised that vendors haven't gotten jumpier about making that feature prominently available. Yeah, it's no secret that wifi is vulnerable to deauth attacks; so nobody is going to eliminate software that takes advantage of that; but if I were a large, deeply sue-able company, I'd be a little nervous about openly providing jamming features, rather than just hardware that could conceivably be configured for jamming; but I don't know anything about that and explicitly don't recommend it.
I don't understand why they are even trying the 'oh, just a few lowly rogue engineers' excuse.
If it were true, that might absolve them on the defeat-device issue; but it'd be pretty horrifying on the 'software validation processes for a life-critical component going into millions of vehicles' front. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in, near, or on the same road as, a car whose ECU firmware was built under such a sloppy process that some engineering peon could secretly slip easter eggs into it.
Aside from that, there's also the minor issue that the affected engine doesn't exist in isolation: VW has been making diesel engines for decades, has multiple product lines for various purposes, has ongoing R&D efforts, and so on. Are we supposed to believe that nobody raised an eyebrow when the revision N+1 engines suddenly started turning in far better NOx numbers than the revision N ones; and none of the mechanical engineers had touched anything and the software guys would only look away and mumble something about 'optimized the firmware'? Are we supposed to believe that the R&D people working on refining existing designs or creating new ones aren't wondering why their advanced prototypes are getting worse NOx numbers than years-old production models?
If you just have a single product; no predecessors, no successors, maybe you can rig the demo without alerting anyone not involved in the rigging; but if your rigged product is an adaptation of a prior version? Then you have to explain an impressive discontinuity in performance between the current design and the prior model; and somehow explain away why the research guys can't do as well as you can(or find research guys so dense that they only use EPA tests and don't wonder why none of their tweaks appear to change the results). That is a great deal harder and less plausible.
Plus, the DMCA can be swung at any uppity asshole who dares poke at your software; which makes it a safer place to hide regulatory...irregularities.
I realize that, in practice, this would probably be a 'watch the world burn' option; but it would be a glorious thing if people who can't obey the rules of operating a Part15 device on the ISM band lost the right to do so, at least for a time sufficient to induce agonized penitence.
This is shared spectrum, guys, with certain rules to help keep it usable for everyone. If you don't like that; perhaps you'll enjoy only being able to use such dedicated spectrum as you are able to buy or lease for a while. If you want to treat it like you own it; you can. For a price.
Given that the (deliberately configured, 'as designed') behavior for stagefright was to silently restart every 5 seconds if it crashed, I can only assume that there was some internal pessimism about the robustness of the library.
I don't doubt that dealing with all the various ghastly corner cases in codecs and container formats was deeply unpleasant; but it is worrisome that priority was apparently given to avoiding the appearance of failure, rather than really clamping down on what such a dangerously unpredictable part of the system was allowed to do; and when it could silently retry, rather than rejecting input.
I, for one, definitely can't imagine how a plan by one of the world's more prominent advertising and 'consumer analytics' outfits to gather personal information about a heavily stigmatized class of disorders through a channel that will allow them to avoid any restrictions that might have applied to 'protected health information' could possibly go wrong. Seems like a great idea.
The only BMG you can trust is the M2. On the plus side, Sony has largely stagnated to the point where their formerly-inferior Korean rivals are markedly cheaper and at least as good, so hopefully we won't have to worry about them too much longer.
There must be a documented protocol for handling the situation written up somewhere in the bowels of NASA HQ. Just because dying in space mostly implies automatic cremation doesn't mean that there isn't the possibility of somebody just having an aneurysm and keeling over in an otherwise functional spacecraft.
I doubt it; but there is a slight possibility that this is actually a delightfully nerdy reference to Paranoia's color-based 'classification' system that some techie deep within the bowels of Oracle managed to sneak past the armies of lawyers, salesmen, and licensing enforcement thugs.
Antenna size also makes a difference. High end fighter radars are packed to the gills with clever RF tricks; but you can only do so much to overcome the limitations of not having the antenna you want.
Just in case it proves to be unfeasible to build a bomber that can survive modern air defense systems; we always have the option(additional charges may apply) of retrofitting the bomber to deliver short or medium range air to ground missiles instead of just dropping things from above the target. Sure, that adds a factor of ten to the cost of every warhead delivered over the life of the aircraft; but it does allow you to stay away from fixed AA.
We already do that with air-launched cruise missiles and B-52s, in situations where we aren't just hammering some poor bastard with basically no AA, in which case gravity bombs still offer more warhead per unit weight and lower cost.
They padded it out with a bunch of paperwork just so everyone could save face; but I'm told that the actual bidding process was "We need a new bomber. Which one of our military aircraft oligopolies isn't responsible for the F-35? Ok, them then."
The usefulness of this obviously varies markedly depending on how much GPIO you need, whether 'headless' is a virtue or something you were going to buy a monitor to solve, and so forth; but if you are looking for a Samsung Exynos on the cheap; the Chromebooks that they released based on their Exynos CPUs show up used or refurb for a pittance from time to time. HP also built one model around the chip.
I picked one up(model xe303c12, specifically) a while back to play with Debian-on-not-x86 with; and it has USB3. Definitely not a little dev board tucked in there, the motherboard, unsurprisingly, looks like it was pulled from a tablet design, because it probably was; but the Exynos-based units are now the older models(Intel apparently made some...very...aggressive offers on high-end Atom/low-end-Core parts); so you might find either a used/refurb that is quite competitive with an Odroid + peripherals, or a broken screen/other damage-as-a-laptop that is just plain competitive with anything else that has an Exynos in it. Coreboot and Chromium.org have info on doing the warranty voiding.
If I remember the history right, (aside from the fact that the project lead works for Broadcomm, so they were the obvious first-choice as cooperative corporate partner), the original rPi mostly predated(at least during design, not necessarily by the time it started shipping in volume) the really intense knife-fighting that has broken out on ARM application processor pricing. They were available, but with tray prices approaching the target retail price of the rPi; so the rPi ended up being built around what is basically a set-top-box SoC(at least one of the Roku devices uses the same chip).
It will be interesting to see how(or if), they adapt in subsequent models. It's not as though Broadcomm has never implemented a NIC before; but the fact that the bottom appears to be falling out of the low end application processor market probably doesn't make entering it a very attractive proposal. Will team rPi eventually go elsewhere, to whichever of the cheapie Android-focused players is most helpful? Stay the course as the best-known option; and if they end up undercut by somebody else; be pleased that they set out to make computers cheap and accessible and did so successfully enough that they don't even need to nudge the process anymore?
I assume that, if only for the sake of their employees and general sense-of-identification-and-ownership-of-your-project, they aren't looking to rush to the exit; but the stated mission of the project was about making low-cost computers for education broadly accessible, so they don't necessarily have to remain in the market indefinitely so long as other outfits are meeting their objectives for them.
I suspect that, aside from issues with any materials that aren't improved by UV exposure, it would be quite tricky to get line-of-sight from any feasible number of emitters to all the various nooks and crannies. From all the pictures I've seen, the ISS is pretty cluttered; and a lot of the wall surface is actually access panels for equipment(with lots of assorted hiding places) behind them.
Since they already have an air filtration system, adding a UV pass to help ensure that anything the filters don't scrub is at least dead might well be viable; but I suspect that attempting to sterilize rooms built like those ones would be effectively hopeless.