Another aspect in which this would "help" the Americans is in limiting the number of American youth would would be at risk of exposure to foreign ideals through studies abroad.
Most sov^H^H^Hex-USSR countries don't have accessible (price/availability) broadband to make video streaming common.
If You mean ex-communits countries I can tell You that here in Bulgaria You can get 7Mbit/sec for as much as $20 which is pretty affordable. And some ISPs include an extra Bulgarian peering in the offer which goes up to 30Mbit/sec for about $50 (whole packet) and about 12Mbit/sec for $20. Adding to all this 10-100Mbit/sec access to a local multi-terabyte (HDD are damn cheap now) file servers full of movies, music and games (gues how legal is this:))... I'm sorry to say this but "western" home internet feels like a joke:).
I can't agree more with You.
You are wrong, I'm a programmer and I think exactly the oposite of what You said :)
It is nearly trivial to crack a Linux computer and considerably harder to crack an windoze. Believe it or not ....
Too much EVE-Online I guess ? :P