I've been using the standard version with Ubuntu (Kernel 4.4) and the Broadcom driver is also perfectly stable for me.

I've had 3 hand-me-down computers, all with Broadcom drivers and they all exhibit bizarre behaviour which rendered the computers unusable. For one of them, the solution was to switch to the proprietary drivers and the other two just had to be replaced with equivalent Intel cards.

tl;dr mileage depends, but it's universally accepted that Broadcom cards are shit.

If you can flash these phones then $50 would be great for a GPRS/Bluetooth/Wifi development kit.

A friend of mine has been leaning the basics with this: http://qcplayground.withgoogle.com/#/home

There's https://yithlibrary.herokuapp.com/ for a self hosted LastPass clone but unfortunately there's no Firefox or Chrome addons yet.

I'm hoping for a future with faster refresh E-Ink screens available on low spec, stripped down Android or FirefoxOS powered tablets.

"You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc."

It's more of a personal media store than a media streaming solution like Plex.

I've heard of pinhole cameras being used in card skimming operations where PIN numbers are required.

That doesn't do anything for a chip and pin card. You need the chip too.

Here in the uk they skim your card, create a replica and use a pinhole camera to get your pin.

As far as I know, you can't skim the chip. In the EMV system, the private key is only accessible to the internal "CPU", not the reader.