The only reasons allowed for border searches are ensuring that individuals are legally admitted (inapplicable here because citizens are always legally entitled to enter) and preventing contraband from entering.

A wiped phone can't contain contraband, so wiping the phone serves the same purpose as a search. It's not destroying evidence anymore than throwing away a water bottle before going through TSA is destroying evidence.

It's not customary to mail software on disks anymore so it doesn't fulfill the GPL anymore.

I would be willing to bet any amount of money that no Google developer makes modifications using a tarball that's missing commit history. The preferred form for making modifications is a source control repository.

Tax all of them. No one has ever earned a billion dollars.

There are hundreds if not thousands of companies that successfully run streaming services and I doubt that any of them are more worried about the technology than they are about the content.

No matter how powerful your military is, you can't win a war unless you have a political objective that is possible to achieve via the war.

If 8k TVs or VR suddenly take off, they might be able to take advantage of it, but right now it's only a minor advantage (in cost savings primarily). Customers choose based on content, not based on who's better at video streaming.

It's a pretty wild interpretation to claim that the Knicks winning is a commodity.

It is the only mainstream e-reader I'm aware of where you can simply change a single line of configuration and make it sync with your own server instead of Kobo's while keeping all of the stock software exactly the same. There are even server implementations that proxy to Kobo's server if you want to sync some books from your own server and some from Kobo's.

Other options either make it impossible to sync from your own server or require you to install different apps like KOReader, which though powerful is a really janky experience compared to the stock app (and of course you can use KOReader on Kobo if you want to).

The vast majority of applications are better off using one of the many high-performance, battle-tested implementations of b-trees that already exist, which, for users of those implementations, is one of the simplest and most commonly used data structures; we just call them databases and filesystems instead of b-trees.

Every rule has exceptions but you should know the rules before you decide to break them. For anyone other than an experienced expert, writing your own b-tree implementation in a production system is an extremely foolish decision (if it's for fun or learning, do whatever you want).