When The Bell System split up in the 1980s, AT&T got to keep Unix and most of the Labs, and the 7 Baby Bells owned most of the Bell telcos. When AT&T split up into AT&T, Lucent, and NCR back in the 1990s, Lucent got most of Bell Labs, including ownership of Unix.
SBC (aka Southwestern Bell, the Texas Baby Bell branch) in the late 2000s and early 2010s bought Pacific Bell, Southern Bell, Ameritech, old-AT&T, and renamed itself AT&T because that had more brand value than SBC. The wireless businesses that were variously named Cingular and Cellular One and AT&T Wireless had their own complicated sets of ownership changes, but effectively SBC bought them. (Pacific Bell sometimes owned half of them, sometimes old-AT&T did, sometimes both, sometimes you really needed to know whether you had an "orange" or "blue" wireless service from the same company, etc.)
(Disclaimer: This is my own interpretation, not the official position of AT&T, many pieces of which I've worked for over the last few decades.)
The convenience of bitcoin vs. fiat currencies really was special, because it was a way to eliminate the risks of physically transferring money or transmitting it through heavily-tracked systems like banks and credit card companies. There's still some risk in shipment (much more for bulky smelly products than for small odorless ones), and of course it shifts much of the risk of defaulting on transactions to the buyer, but escrow services and markets like Silk Road reduced that risk to an acceptable level for many people.
Liquid detergent seemed like a really silly commodity to use for buying drugs, and I've always been skeptical about whether either the news articles about it were hoaxes or whether the reporters themselves got hoaxed. It's much harder to hide a transaction where you're handing somebody a case of detergent than one where you're shaking hands or giving somebody a cigarette and hiding some cash and dope in the process, and the transaction of trading the detergent for actual cash has got to be inconvenient, obvious, and hard to hide unless you've got an Amway distributorship or a friendly convenience store clerk who'll buy back the bottles to sell to the next customer. About the only advantage I can see to it is that cops really have no desire to rob dealers or customers by stealing detergent.
Bitcoin is useful for black markets because there's enough transaction volume to obscure the details of individual transactions, and buyers and sellers are willing to hold bitcoins long enough to aggregate or disaggregate them or at least hide them in the rest of the market, and there's enough volume that bitcoin buyers can get coins when they want them to buy commodities and commodity sellers can sell the coins they receive. If bitcoin's too chaotic to maintain a white/grey market, the black market can't piggyback on it.
If Bitcoin values change a few percent a day, that's ok for a recreational pharmaceutical market where the profit margin's high and the extra convenience drives more sales and the buyer and seller aren't nickel-and-diming tightly enough to have the bitcoin purchase followed by a bitcoin sale of the same amount a second later. If you're trying to use Bitcoin to replace Visa and Western Union by having lower transaction costs, that may not be good enough. If you're an online black-market merchant, you might want to aggregate bitcoins from a bunch of different transactions before selling them (or swapping them for different bitcoins.) If the market's not moving too fast, the financial risk of waiting is lower than the getting-caught risk of not waiting, and it reduces the visible patterns of always selling a bitcoin just after somebody bought one.
(Bitcoin, of course, is less anonymous than many people would like, and has other problems for a black market, because the coins are too big for many transactions; it's much more convenient to use integral-sized coins if you can, so wow, much dope, many Dogecoin!)
A year or two ago I was interested in finding out how these crypto-coin things worked, so I used one of my lab machines to mine Dogecoins. Mining real Bitcoins not only didn't make sense (ASICs had already taken over, and the machine I was using didn't have even a GPU that was good enough for mining), but also might have been considered to be a financial conflict of interest. Dogecoin didn't have that risk - I forget if I mined $.02 or $.20 worth in six months. It also meant that when I had to rebuild the machine and the Dogecoin wallet didn't restore successfully, I didn't feel too bad about losing all that money (though some Redditors didn't get tips in their tip jars after that.)
Bitcoins weren't designed to protect you from other people mishandling coins you've handed to them. They're a bearer instrument, not an ownership certificate, so if you're trusting somebody else to store more than transactional quantities of them for you, quasi-anonymously, well, good luck with that. The Federal Reserve and the banks that interact with it can decide to rip you off, but there's a lot of regulation designed to make that really hard (except at the public policy level, e.g. inflation ripping you off a bit, but that's different from your bank deciding to transfer all your money to themselves, or your gold/silver certificates suddenly becoming redeemable only for paper, or other things that lead to mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, etc.)
Unregulated banks like Mt. Gox and its competition only had reputation to go on, so it was totally shocking to find that many of them got "robbed by hackers, oh, noes!" or otherwise absconded with the money. That's an ok risk to take if you're only trusting them with enough bitcoins to be the dollar-to-BTC changer or escrow on a small Silk-Road drug purchase; you were already taking a risk that your dope would never arrive anyway. But a transaction-handling business, if it's successful, is making enough money on fees that it's worth more to the proprietors to keep running it than to run away with the money; a money-storage business has a much higher potential for moral hazard.
Decentralization has always been a critical feature for Bitcoin, and it's really hard to do. The primary purpose for it is to create trust and eliminate control, though there's a secondary purpose which is that the math is designed in a way that if a cabal can control a large enough fraction of the mining capacity, they can rip off everybody else, which appears to have happened.
Class 1 also includes sending frozen people, etc., but the article doesn't put any more detail into it. It also doesn't include the fact that we don't have a clue how to build a long-term stable ecology that a generation ship or even a Mars colony would need.
He also doesn't include Class 4 - Robots/AIs instead of canned meat humans. That's the most likely option, and building a drive that will ever get to another star is still in the "sufficiently advanced technology" category, not actually conventional technology.
I worked on a bid for State Department embassy communication back in the 80s. State had a lot of "help" from the NSA*, because the real users of classified embassy email systems aren't the trade negotiators or agriculture department reps. The bid eventually collapsed after about three years, because of turf wars between State's IT department and the various other users who'd prefer to be running their own systems.
(*This was back in the X.25 days, and they wanted commercial off-the-shelf equipment using all kinds of options that nobody in the commercial world bothered supporting, and I was never sure how much of their help needed to be attributed to malice as opposed to bureaucratic incompetence.)
It's great that the State department is starting to publish some of the things it did in our name, but I've got more respect for Chelsea Manning publishing a lot more of them.
It's one thing for Hillary to be using her own mail server; Bush and Cheney made sure that their White House emails were destroyed so the public couldn't get access to them (so all of you Hillary-hating Republican partisans should shut up now, please!:-)
But why was anybody running a classified email server at State or Pentagon setting it up to send mail to an uncleared server like Hillary's?
This is the newer Raspberry Pi 2, not the original A/B/A+/B+ flavors of the Raspberry Pi or the new $5 Pi0, which use an earlier ARM version than the Pi2.
Your ISP isn't going to do anything about it. The sender's ISP might, if you bug them enough (try contacting their security people, because you're presumably not the only address that sender is port-scanning. Also, it's possible that the address is being spoofed by some third party to DDoS the "sender".) But if the packets are really coming from the sender, and you've contacted their Whois and abuse contacts without success, go for the "Contact Us" on their web page and contact everybody, CEO, sales, marketing, HR, webmaster, and any other @ you can find there. And if that doesn't work, start with phone calls. (I thought about suggesting that you send their IP people a copy of each scan packet, but you need to be really really really sure it's from them, because if they're being spoofed or otherwise attacked, you're helping do a serious DoS/DDoS on them.)
And sometimes it's not the apparent sender, and sometimes it's weirder than that. Many years ago, one of my lab machines was virused and sending a ping every second to a bot-controller address at MIT. MIT's web page didn't have useful help desk contacts that you could access if you weren't a student, but I knew the security director so I emailed him. Turns out the bot-controller was on a Sun machine in Japan, whose IP address was a byte-swapped version of an MIT address. (Yes, my machine was running Linux, one of the very early Red Hat versions, and it would get attacked every week or so. Nobody ever bothered the Win95 machine next to it, because what use would that have been to an attacker?)
I finally bit the bullet and switched from Eudora to Thunderbird this year, because everybody's post-Snowden improvements to their crypto meant that Eudora no longer could make an SSL connection to my main ISPs' mail servers. Thunderbird had the advantage that it could read Eudora's mailboxes, which were in basically traditional Unix mail format for most things, as well as the various address books and such. Now I've got to find something else.
(My mom's still using Eudora 1.4 on her Mac - with dialup modem, it's still good enough:-)
Mine came out much less unique than previous versions, because I had NoScript blocking much of it (even after I temporarily allowed evil-tracker.com and do-not-track.com or whatever their domains were called. User agent string was fairly unique. In the past, fonts have been the big surprise information leaker - my work machines all have a font loaded on them that's used to get $COMPANY_LOGO to render correctly, aside from any other fonts I've randomly added over the years.
Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-complete, so not only is this machine not going to solve it exactly, neither is Shor's model, even though that one does solve factoring, trashing most of the public-key crypto systems.
But there are lots of heuristics for approximate solutions to TSP, and many of them are "create some complete tour of the network, then randomly perturb it a bunch of times to see if you can get any better results", i.e., simulated annealing, so a quantum annealing machine might turn out to be quite helpful. Until about 5 years ago, Christofides's algorithm, which guarantees a solution that's no worse than 50% longer than the optimum (and usually does better than that) was about the best polynomial-time heuristic there was, so you'd start with that and anneal the results until you were bored.
Somewhere on the Internet(tm) I recently read an article comparing SD memory card speeds with the RPi. They varied by as much as 10x. For the most part, brand-name cards did better, and IIRC, medium-sized cards tended to be faster (small ones are usually cheap, large ones are trading speed for size), but it varied a lot - as long as the card's write speed was fast enough for a typical video-camera to record in real time, that's all the manufacturer cared about, and read speeds have bigger numbers so those are the ones they splash on to the packaging.
No, "Quantum Computer" isn't a really well-defined term - it's basically "Sufficiently Advanced Technology Using Handwavium". It's usually used to mean "Quantum Computer that can execute Shor's Algorithm", which can solve a few problems like factoring which would make it extremely disruptive to cryptography. D-Wave has been upfront for a long time about how their computer doesn't do that - it does something much more specialized and handwavy, and this is the first article I've seen that indicates that there's a problem it can actually solve that is significantly faster than conventional computer technology.
And no, a single-core process isn't the fastest way to solve something that's reasonably parallelizable - you can pile up lots of cores and get a proportional speedup (if you don't have dependencies or too much communication overhead.) But if this is 10**8 times as fast as a single core, and the biggest computers out there are around 10**4-10**5 cores and frightfully expensive, that says there's a problem space for which it might be worth some organization's money to actually buy one to use, instead of buying for speculative research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeSync. FreeSync is AMD's answer to nVidia's G-Sync. They're both something about doing dynamic refresh rates, so you can use most of your speed updating things that change quickly instead of updating whole screens including the pixels that aren't changing very fast. It works over DisplayPort, but if you want to use HDMI you'll probably need to buy a new monitor (almost certainly your TV doesn't support it yet.) It's apparently marketed toward gamers.
What Hillary's really looking for (besides speeches that sound good) is approaches like censorship, identifying politically incorrect users without the need for warrants, that sort of thing.
(I'm one of those annoying Libertarians, so I can pretend to be neutral between the two big-money parties, which I'll get around to after the Republicans clean up the corruption of the Bush/Cheney/Koch/Norquist/NeoCons/GlobalWarmingDenialism/etc years. But I live in California, where right-wing bigotry against our largest ethnic groups pretty much guarantees a Democratic win, so rather than voting for Kodos\\\\\Hillary, I'll presumably vote for whoever my party comes up with, or if they choke or pick somebody unacceptable, I'll fall back to voting for the Greens or Peace&Freedom.)
A bunch of good people from the electronic privacy community have been at the FTC (and seem to keep recommending their friends as successors:-) Besides Lorrie and Ashkan, Ed Felten and Steve Bellovin (one of the authors of the original Usenet and the Firewall book), and probably other people we know have been there. Occasionally we also get people into the FCC (like Dave Farber some years ago.)
I have lots of non-powered USB hubs and USB power supplies lying around, but the Pi and Pi0 really want a powered hub. Do I really need to go out and buy one, or can I do something like plug a USB power supply into one of the slave ports on a hub (with the Pi plugged into the master port), or plug the master port into a USB power supply and plug the Pi into a slave port (with or without OTG cable)? Thanks!
I ended up spending about $100 to get all the parts I needed for my first Raspberry Pi, not counting the computer monitor which I wanted anyway. Adafruit has a Pi0 starter kit for about $30 that has most of what you'd want (which they're out of, because everybody's out of their Pi0 already), but you'd probably end up spending a few bucks more for cables, and $10-20 more for a powered USB hub anyway.)
Once you sort out the "mini HDMI to full-sized HDMI" cable connector issue, you can connect the Pi0 to your HDMI TV or computer monitor. (That's one difference between the Pi and the $9 C.H.I.P. computer, which has a composite connector but needs an extra $13 board to do HDMI.)
If you're trying to connect to an LCD display, you'll need to solder on the 2x20 headers and do something appropriate with them. (I assume the Pi0 supports that? The full-sized Pi and the C.H.I.P. have boards that interface with their connectors.)
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When The Bell System split up in the 1980s, AT&T got to keep Unix and most of the Labs, and the 7 Baby Bells owned most of the Bell telcos.
When AT&T split up into AT&T, Lucent, and NCR back in the 1990s, Lucent got most of Bell Labs, including ownership of Unix.
SBC (aka Southwestern Bell, the Texas Baby Bell branch) in the late 2000s and early 2010s bought Pacific Bell, Southern Bell, Ameritech, old-AT&T, and renamed itself AT&T because that had more brand value than SBC. The wireless businesses that were variously named Cingular and Cellular One and AT&T Wireless had their own complicated sets of ownership changes, but effectively SBC bought them. (Pacific Bell sometimes owned half of them, sometimes old-AT&T did, sometimes both, sometimes you really needed to know whether you had an "orange" or "blue" wireless service from the same company, etc.)
(Disclaimer: This is my own interpretation, not the official position of AT&T, many pieces of which I've worked for over the last few decades.)
The convenience of bitcoin vs. fiat currencies really was special, because it was a way to eliminate the risks of physically transferring money or transmitting it through heavily-tracked systems like banks and credit card companies. There's still some risk in shipment (much more for bulky smelly products than for small odorless ones), and of course it shifts much of the risk of defaulting on transactions to the buyer, but escrow services and markets like Silk Road reduced that risk to an acceptable level for many people.
Liquid detergent seemed like a really silly commodity to use for buying drugs, and I've always been skeptical about whether either the news articles about it were hoaxes or whether the reporters themselves got hoaxed. It's much harder to hide a transaction where you're handing somebody a case of detergent than one where you're shaking hands or giving somebody a cigarette and hiding some cash and dope in the process, and the transaction of trading the detergent for actual cash has got to be inconvenient, obvious, and hard to hide unless you've got an Amway distributorship or a friendly convenience store clerk who'll buy back the bottles to sell to the next customer. About the only advantage I can see to it is that cops really have no desire to rob dealers or customers by stealing detergent.
Bitcoin is useful for black markets because there's enough transaction volume to obscure the details of individual transactions, and buyers and sellers are willing to hold bitcoins long enough to aggregate or disaggregate them or at least hide them in the rest of the market, and there's enough volume that bitcoin buyers can get coins when they want them to buy commodities and commodity sellers can sell the coins they receive. If bitcoin's too chaotic to maintain a white/grey market, the black market can't piggyback on it.
If Bitcoin values change a few percent a day, that's ok for a recreational pharmaceutical market where the profit margin's high and the extra convenience drives more sales and the buyer and seller aren't nickel-and-diming tightly enough to have the bitcoin purchase followed by a bitcoin sale of the same amount a second later. If you're trying to use Bitcoin to replace Visa and Western Union by having lower transaction costs, that may not be good enough. If you're an online black-market merchant, you might want to aggregate bitcoins from a bunch of different transactions before selling them (or swapping them for different bitcoins.) If the market's not moving too fast, the financial risk of waiting is lower than the getting-caught risk of not waiting, and it reduces the visible patterns of always selling a bitcoin just after somebody bought one.
(Bitcoin, of course, is less anonymous than many people would like, and has other problems for a black market, because the coins are too big for many transactions; it's much more convenient to use integral-sized coins if you can, so wow, much dope, many Dogecoin!)
A year or two ago I was interested in finding out how these crypto-coin things worked, so I used one of my lab machines to mine Dogecoins. Mining real Bitcoins not only didn't make sense (ASICs had already taken over, and the machine I was using didn't have even a GPU that was good enough for mining), but also might have been considered to be a financial conflict of interest. Dogecoin didn't have that risk - I forget if I mined $.02 or $.20 worth in six months. It also meant that when I had to rebuild the machine and the Dogecoin wallet didn't restore successfully, I didn't feel too bad about losing all that money (though some Redditors didn't get tips in their tip jars after that.)
Bitcoins weren't designed to protect you from other people mishandling coins you've handed to them. They're a bearer instrument, not an ownership certificate, so if you're trusting somebody else to store more than transactional quantities of them for you, quasi-anonymously, well, good luck with that. The Federal Reserve and the banks that interact with it can decide to rip you off, but there's a lot of regulation designed to make that really hard (except at the public policy level, e.g. inflation ripping you off a bit, but that's different from your bank deciding to transfer all your money to themselves, or your gold/silver certificates suddenly becoming redeemable only for paper, or other things that lead to mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, etc.)
Unregulated banks like Mt. Gox and its competition only had reputation to go on, so it was totally shocking to find that many of them got "robbed by hackers, oh, noes!" or otherwise absconded with the money. That's an ok risk to take if you're only trusting them with enough bitcoins to be the dollar-to-BTC changer or escrow on a small Silk-Road drug purchase; you were already taking a risk that your dope would never arrive anyway. But a transaction-handling business, if it's successful, is making enough money on fees that it's worth more to the proprietors to keep running it than to run away with the money; a money-storage business has a much higher potential for moral hazard.
Decentralization has always been a critical feature for Bitcoin, and it's really hard to do. The primary purpose for it is to create trust and eliminate control, though there's a secondary purpose which is that the math is designed in a way that if a cabal can control a large enough fraction of the mining capacity, they can rip off everybody else, which appears to have happened.
Class 1 also includes sending frozen people, etc., but the article doesn't put any more detail into it. It also doesn't include the fact that we don't have a clue how to build a long-term stable ecology that a generation ship or even a Mars colony would need.
He also doesn't include Class 4 - Robots/AIs instead of canned meat humans. That's the most likely option, and building a drive that will ever get to another star is still in the "sufficiently advanced technology" category, not actually conventional technology.
I worked on a bid for State Department embassy communication back in the 80s. State had a lot of "help" from the NSA*, because the real users of classified embassy email systems aren't the trade negotiators or agriculture department reps. The bid eventually collapsed after about three years, because of turf wars between State's IT department and the various other users who'd prefer to be running their own systems.
(*This was back in the X.25 days, and they wanted commercial off-the-shelf equipment using all kinds of options that nobody in the commercial world bothered supporting, and I was never sure how much of their help needed to be attributed to malice as opposed to bureaucratic incompetence.)
It's great that the State department is starting to publish some of the things it did in our name, but I've got more respect for Chelsea Manning publishing a lot more of them.
It's one thing for Hillary to be using her own mail server; Bush and Cheney made sure that their White House emails were destroyed so the public couldn't get access to them (so all of you Hillary-hating Republican partisans should shut up now, please! :-)
But why was anybody running a classified email server at State or Pentagon setting it up to send mail to an uncleared server like Hillary's?
This is the newer Raspberry Pi 2, not the original A/B/A+/B+ flavors of the Raspberry Pi or the new $5 Pi0, which use an earlier ARM version than the Pi2.
Your ISP isn't going to do anything about it. The sender's ISP might, if you bug them enough (try contacting their security people, because you're presumably not the only address that sender is port-scanning. Also, it's possible that the address is being spoofed by some third party to DDoS the "sender".) But if the packets are really coming from the sender, and you've contacted their Whois and abuse contacts without success, go for the "Contact Us" on their web page and contact everybody, CEO, sales, marketing, HR, webmaster, and any other @ you can find there. And if that doesn't work, start with phone calls. (I thought about suggesting that you send their IP people a copy of each scan packet, but you need to be really really really sure it's from them, because if they're being spoofed or otherwise attacked, you're helping do a serious DoS/DDoS on them.)
And sometimes it's not the apparent sender, and sometimes it's weirder than that. Many years ago, one of my lab machines was virused and sending a ping every second to a bot-controller address at MIT. MIT's web page didn't have useful help desk contacts that you could access if you weren't a student, but I knew the security director so I emailed him. Turns out the bot-controller was on a Sun machine in Japan, whose IP address was a byte-swapped version of an MIT address. (Yes, my machine was running Linux, one of the very early Red Hat versions, and it would get attacked every week or so. Nobody ever bothered the Win95 machine next to it, because what use would that have been to an attacker?)
I finally bit the bullet and switched from Eudora to Thunderbird this year, because everybody's post-Snowden improvements to their crypto meant that Eudora no longer could make an SSL connection to my main ISPs' mail servers. Thunderbird had the advantage that it could read Eudora's mailboxes, which were in basically traditional Unix mail format for most things, as well as the various address books and such. Now I've got to find something else.
(My mom's still using Eudora 1.4 on her Mac - with dialup modem, it's still good enough :-)
Mine came out much less unique than previous versions, because I had NoScript blocking much of it (even after I temporarily allowed evil-tracker.com and do-not-track.com or whatever their domains were called. User agent string was fairly unique. In the past, fonts have been the big surprise information leaker - my work machines all have a font loaded on them that's used to get $COMPANY_LOGO to render correctly, aside from any other fonts I've randomly added over the years.
Yup - that's the one. (And of course I read it just after I'd bought a couple of SD cards for my RPi and other devices :-)
Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-complete, so not only is this machine not going to solve it exactly, neither is Shor's model, even though that one does solve factoring, trashing most of the public-key crypto systems.
But there are lots of heuristics for approximate solutions to TSP, and many of them are "create some complete tour of the network, then randomly perturb it a bunch of times to see if you can get any better results", i.e., simulated annealing, so a quantum annealing machine might turn out to be quite helpful. Until about 5 years ago, Christofides's algorithm, which guarantees a solution that's no worse than 50% longer than the optimum (and usually does better than that) was about the best polynomial-time heuristic there was, so you'd start with that and anneal the results until you were bored.
Somewhere on the Internet(tm) I recently read an article comparing SD memory card speeds with the RPi. They varied by as much as 10x. For the most part, brand-name cards did better, and IIRC, medium-sized cards tended to be faster (small ones are usually cheap, large ones are trading speed for size), but it varied a lot - as long as the card's write speed was fast enough for a typical video-camera to record in real time, that's all the manufacturer cared about, and read speeds have bigger numbers so those are the ones they splash on to the packaging.
No, "Quantum Computer" isn't a really well-defined term - it's basically "Sufficiently Advanced Technology Using Handwavium". It's usually used to mean "Quantum Computer that can execute Shor's Algorithm", which can solve a few problems like factoring which would make it extremely disruptive to cryptography. D-Wave has been upfront for a long time about how their computer doesn't do that - it does something much more specialized and handwavy, and this is the first article I've seen that indicates that there's a problem it can actually solve that is significantly faster than conventional computer technology.
And no, a single-core process isn't the fastest way to solve something that's reasonably parallelizable - you can pile up lots of cores and get a proportional speedup (if you don't have dependencies or too much communication overhead.) But if this is 10**8 times as fast as a single core, and the biggest computers out there are around 10**4-10**5 cores and frightfully expensive, that says there's a problem space for which it might be worth some organization's money to actually buy one to use, instead of buying for speculative research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeSync. FreeSync is AMD's answer to nVidia's G-Sync. They're both something about doing dynamic refresh rates, so you can use most of your speed updating things that change quickly instead of updating whole screens including the pixels that aren't changing very fast. It works over DisplayPort, but if you want to use HDMI you'll probably need to buy a new monitor (almost certainly your TV doesn't support it yet.) It's apparently marketed toward gamers.
What Hillary's really looking for (besides speeches that sound good) is approaches like censorship, identifying politically incorrect users without the need for warrants, that sort of thing.
(I'm one of those annoying Libertarians, so I can pretend to be neutral between the two big-money parties, which I'll get around to after the Republicans clean up the corruption of the Bush/Cheney/Koch/Norquist/NeoCons/GlobalWarmingDenialism/etc years. But I live in California, where right-wing bigotry against our largest ethnic groups pretty much guarantees a Democratic win, so rather than voting for Kodos\\\\\Hillary, I'll presumably vote for whoever my party comes up with, or if they choke or pick somebody unacceptable, I'll fall back to voting for the Greens or Peace&Freedom.)
A bunch of good people from the electronic privacy community have been at the FTC (and seem to keep recommending their friends as successors :-) Besides Lorrie and Ashkan, Ed Felten and Steve Bellovin (one of the authors of the original Usenet and the Firewall book), and probably other people we know have been there. Occasionally we also get people into the FCC (like Dave Farber some years ago.)
I have lots of non-powered USB hubs and USB power supplies lying around, but the Pi and Pi0 really want a powered hub. Do I really need to go out and buy one, or can I do something like plug a USB power supply into one of the slave ports on a hub (with the Pi plugged into the master port), or plug the master port into a USB power supply and plug the Pi into a slave port (with or without OTG cable)? Thanks!
I ended up spending about $100 to get all the parts I needed for my first Raspberry Pi, not counting the computer monitor which I wanted anyway. Adafruit has a Pi0 starter kit for about $30 that has most of what you'd want (which they're out of, because everybody's out of their Pi0 already), but you'd probably end up spending a few bucks more for cables, and $10-20 more for a powered USB hub anyway.)
Once you sort out the "mini HDMI to full-sized HDMI" cable connector issue, you can connect the Pi0 to your HDMI TV or computer monitor. (That's one difference between the Pi and the $9 C.H.I.P. computer, which has a composite connector but needs an extra $13 board to do HDMI.)
If you're trying to connect to an LCD display, you'll need to solder on the 2x20 headers and do something appropriate with them. (I assume the Pi0 supports that? The full-sized Pi and the C.H.I.P. have boards that interface with their connectors.)
At least at Adafuit and Element14, everything with a Pi0 in it is gone, and I don't see any Pi0 at all at Sparkfun, DigiKey, or Mouser.