I honestly don't see how this would even evade the copyright laws and DMCA (however, IANAL, so I may be missing something). One big problem with this scheme is that it isn't really anonymous. Let's suppose D2 is an MPAA/RIAA agent: he finds a.torrent he wants to download, and server S directs him to D3, which acts as a proxy to download it from D1. Well D1 is probably safe, since D3 is covering for him, and D2 (the agent) can't see D1's IP address. However, D3 is not safe! Sure, he's passing the data in encrypted form so that only D1 and D3 can see what it really is, but does that really matter? He's still aiding and abetting copyright infringement, and he's distributing copyrighted material. I don't see how D3 can get out of that just because he doesn't know exactly what it is.
If someone (who you know has a criminal history) gives you some goods in an envelope, and asks you to go visit someone at a particular place and get $50 from them, and give them the envelope in exchange for the money, and bring the money back to him, I'm pretty sure you're liable for "aiding and abetting" in that crime, even though you didn't open the sealed envelope to see that it had some marijuana in it.
Hmm.. Last time I installed Linux on my laptop I got to spend several hours hunting down solutions to both sound and wifi problems
That's funny, I haven't had much trouble at all; I just pop in the Linux Mint install disc and it works.
How well does Windows install on a random laptop anyway? Last I heard, you had to hunt down a bunch of driver discs or download them from mfgr websites. How many people ever install Windows anyway? Why is it the Windows fans always gloss over this fact?
Also, LibreOffice is crap, absolutely. Sure, its high principles, and it gets the job done, but it still doesn't play nicely with Office.
It works fine for us. It only has problems with Office files if you have to exchange files with MS Office users a lot. We don't; this is for home use. People at home writing up their own documents and such don't exchange files with other people. I'm not addressing business use here, as you seem to be.
and I really don't know how well my parents with deal with having to add repos, typing in yet more arcane gobbledygook, and hoping it doesn't break anything else
Again, WTF are you talking about? You don't have to add repos in any normal install. You just use the ones that are there. It's all automatic.
Do I have to mention ALSA? Pulse Audio?
What about them? They work fine. I've never had a problem.
Forcing people to use Unity, where, in supporting my parents, the difference between DE and kernel would pop up.
More red herring bullshit. No one is "forced" to use Unity, unless they insist on using Ubuntu. What about Metro, which your parents would be forced to use if they get a Win8 machine? How is that somehow OK, but Unity isn't?
At least to the point where I'm happy having my parents use it. I have better things to do with my life than help people with computers for free. Your WIFE, this means you probably live with her, and you probably are the guy doing all the support.
That's funny, I haven't had to do any support on her machine since installing it. Everything "just works". Unlike Windows where I see Geek Squad cars pulling up to my neighbors houses from time to time.
Honestly, by now you seem like a MS shill claiming to be a Linux fan, but inventing bullshit problems that don't really exist, and which normal users do not encounter in normal use.
This isn't everyone's cup of tea though, and you have to admit it is a bit overwhelming to some. My parents would be hopeless, for example. I can't imaging having to explain the difference between a shell and a kernel to them, when they still haven't figured out the difference between a webpage and a web browser.
Oh please. They don't need to know any of this stuff, any more than they need to know it to use Windows. You don't need to use a shell to use Linux; my (non-technical) wife has been using Linux Mint KDE (and previously Kubuntu) for probably 2 years now, and she doesn't even know how to bring up a terminal window, much less actually do anything with it. As long as she can run Firefox and LibreOffice Writer, she's fine; that's pretty much all she does with it. People like this aren't going to know anything about different DEs, they're going to see them as different OSes altogether; they're also going to be using the easy-to-use distros and variants, more of which would certainly pop up if MS and Windows were to somehow suddenly disappear.
Linux also has the problem (in some eyes, not mine, and perhaps not yours) where you have to spend a lot of time working with the OS itself. You have to think about Linux, and not the task at hand. This has gotten much better, but I still view it as an issue. I still have to spend a bit too much time mucking around in command lines, and figuring out how specific bits of hardware might work.
Huh? WTF are you talking about? As I said before, my wife's been using Mint KDE for a couple years now, and has never needed to touch a command line. The whole thing is dead-easy: you install it, and that's it. Even the install is usually pretty easy (and it's not like non-technical users ever actually install Windows themselves either). After that, there's nothing to do. Most hardware is even plug-and-play; sometimes there's some which has a problem, but again, on the Windows side, nothing is 100% either, with various hardware losing support when people upgrade to newer versions. "Regular" people have to call the Geek Squad to make a personal visit to their homes all the time for various computer problems; if anything, this would be much less in a Windows-free world.
Also, there is no interface guidlines (or ones that anyone follows, at least), so much of the software is a bit of a mess.
Much of the software is a mess on Windows too. Proprietary vendors just do whatever they want, and some of them stray pretty far from the UI styles used in Windows. And now with Win8, it's a total mess with two totally different UI styles coexisting on the same machine. Besides, if, for instance, a KDE user sticks with mostly KDE applications, they're not going to see any serious irregularities.
This isn't true. There's stylii for capacitive touchscreens that have the same dimensions as a regular ball-point pen, with a 2mm-diameter ball in the point. You have to turn the gain way up when you're using one of these stylii on your system, as compared to the giant-crayon-sized stylii you're thinking of (which have a 5mm-diameter ball in the tip), but it's quite doable; I developed the drivers for a credit-card terminal using one of these stylii a couple years ago.
So we're forced to get Linux desktops, and live with all its issues.
What issues? The fact that there's no single standard desktop environment? Why is that a problem? No one ever says that Microsoft and Apple should have the exact same desktop environment/widget set/ABI or that any other part of their OSes should be standardized by some neutral organization. So why is it a problem that Linux has variety?
Maybe it'll help you if you think about Linux not as a single OS, but rather a bunch of different OSes, which all happen to share some components and mostly be software-compatible (esp. for statically-linked commercial software).
If MS died and disappeared (which would be a great thing IMO, though there'd be some pain at the beginning), other vendors would be able to offer Linux versions, without MS's monopolistic powers preventing them from gaining marketshare. Apple wouldn't be that much of a factor here, because Apple refuses to work with other hardware makers like Lenovo, Acer, Dell, HP, etc.; and they're certainly not going to want to just close up shop. Linux would be the obvious alternative here, since it runs just fine on all this disparate hardware. Different OS vendors would pop up, offering their own versions, using most of the same components, being compatible with commercial software (again, it'd have to be statically-linked), while each customizing the system for their own preferences, some using KDE, some using XFCE, etc. We'd probably see some new UIs pop up too from different sources, to satisfy consumer demand (unlike our present situation, where MS makes a UI no one wants, and tries to force it on everyone). In the end, everyone would have the ability to choose the OS they want to use to a much better extent than they do today, which is exactly what you said you want.
Of course, this isn't likely to happen since so many applications are Windows-dependent, but you never know. Just look at Valve's big push lately to make Linux its best-supported platform for gaming. And with the rise of iOS and Android, MS seems to be becoming less and less relevant all the time. People might be ready for a change before too long.
Ballmer's been running MS into the ground, slowly, for a rather long time. I don't see how this would be the end of Ballmer, because as I understand it, he and his cronies (BillG namely) have far too much control over the company. If it were possible to get rid of him, the other shareholders probably would have done it by now.
Depends on what you're doing. With normal laptop applications and OSes and their widgets, the icons and such are too small to be accurately manipulated with a fingertip. For instance, how do you differentiate between clicking in a window, near the border, and clicking in the ~10-15px border zone that allows you to horizontally resize the window? In a touch OS like Android, that's not a problem: all apps are fullscreen, so you never need to do anything like that. On a desktop OS, this isn't the case: things are more complicated. You could take away this complexity of course, and just make all apps run fullscreen on your desktop or laptop too, but now you've just turned your work machine into a glorified cellphone/tablet, good only for "content consumption" and not doing any real work. The whole reason mobile touchscreen devices work so well with touch input is because they've simplified everything so much, by removing most functionality; this isn't a problem on these devices because you'd have to be a masochist to want to do any real work on a cellphone.
Um, no. My calculations are going under the premise that LED-LCD displays use less energy than plasma displays, which is absolutely true. I'm not addressing e-ink at all.
If you read my post further, I did note that even when you adjust the numbers for the amount of usage they'd get in this application, it's still not that much money. I was just pointing out that the difference is much more than $8. Of course, if you add in the fact that you'll need to toss out that plasma in 6 months because it'll have burn-in, that adds up to more money, but still not enough to buy some super-expensive product instead of using a cheap off-the-shelf product.
Still, however, this whole post does point out how large e-ink displays could be really useful for certain markets. It's not just his company with their "dashboard"; there's many other posts here pointing out similar applications, from displays outside of university classrooms showing class schedules, to airport displays showing flight statuses. Of course, the fact that e-ink requires sufficient ambient light to be easily readable may be a problem that could limit its use.
The Jewish thing is just silly. So now every mindlessly greedy character is supposed to be something for the anti-defamation league to get upset about?
IIRC, the objection isn't that the blue character was greedy, it was that he was so greedy, and he had a very prominent hooked nose, which is something Jews have been caricatured about a lot in the past.
Well to be fair, the middle east is full of oil, which is pretty important to Western economies, especially America's.
Instead of oil, Serbia has.... what? They gave us a wonderful inventor about 120 years ago (Nikola Tesla), but other than that, and conducting genocide against their Kosovo neighbors, they're not really known for anything over here.
It's exactly the same here in the USA with Mexican immigrants. The ones who have immigrated here are uneducated rural people (or their descendants) who came here as a cheap labor force; they're even different racially from the upper-class Mexicans, who look completely "white" (as they're fully descended from European ancestors), while the poor ones who've immigrated here are brown-skinned.
It's not just bad guys; he obviously looked at far-East mysticism for inspiration for good guys (Yoda) and some other concepts in the series (The Force). The whole Star Wars saga borrowed heavily from various cultures and religions around the world. It was pretty brilliant really, except for Lucas's horrible screenwriting.
The US is a European colony; especially before WWII, most of its inhabitants (and virtually all of the ones in the controlling socioeconomic classes) were of European origin, frequently not far removed from their European ancestors, or even freshly-immigrated. It's becoming less so in recent history, with more and more immigration from non-European countries, but the culture of the US is definitely descended from Europe.
It's not just the US: all of the Americas are European colonies. Canada was colonized by the British and French (in Quebec). Most places south of the US were colonized by Spain and Portugal. Most of the people (and definitely all of the people in the higher socioeconomic classes) in Latin American countries are descended from European settlers, with little or no "native" blood in them, just like in the USA. There's a reason most people in the Americas speak Spanish and English, rather than Inca, Aztec, and Navajo.
We American (and westerners in general) have no real concept of extended family clans any more.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Why should I care more about someone just because they happen to be my cousin, rather than someone I"m not related to yet I share a lot in common with? I don't have anything in common with my extended family.
Valuing familial relations over real relationships with other people leads to nepotism, and dysfunctional family behavior where family members act extremely unethically so they can defend and enable one person in their family who's a slacker or worse a sociopath or criminal. Every time I meet a family where they have a strong "clan" mentality like that, they're always rife with dysfunction and codependence.
You're absolutely right: plasma would suffer from burn-in pretty quickly in that application. But what makes you think the OP is wrong? Companies make bone-headed purchasing decisions all the time. You think the average manager knows about plasma burn-in?
The problem, however, is that there's no 30-foot LED/LCD screens (then again, neither are there any Plasma screens that large). This guy needs one of those outdoor displays like they use in Times Square or on highway billboards.
It's not $8. Those numbers came from probably very conservative assumptions about how much the average TV buyer actually uses his TV, which probably isn't 24 hours/day (or even 8-16 hours, as you might expect for a TV being used as an in-office "dashboard"). I'm guessing their assumption might be 2 hours/day.
I just did some very rough calculations: if the TV is going to be on 2 hours/day on average, that's 730.5 hours/year. If the TV uses 100W when operating, that's about 73kWh over the whole year. If your power costs $0.20/kWh, then the TV will cost $14.61 to operate for one year.
I'd assume that these "dashboard" TVs will be operated 10-12 hours a day, which is 5-6 times those previous numbers. Plus, commercial electricity costs more than residential, IIRC (I could be wrong about that). So it's probably much closer to $100/year to run these TVs, or maybe more. Still not an astronomical amount of money, though.
What I want to know is: what kind of TVs is the submitter using anyway? He's apparently interested in an e-Ink screen that's 30 FEET diagonally.
the lack of a subway to LGA initially is not due to lack of "common sense" by 1900 era urban bosses.
So you're telling me that it's impossible to build new subway lines in NYC, even though other cities in America have absolutely no trouble securing right-of-way through eminent domain and building light rails in already built-up areas?
It's generally as easy as installing a newer-version mfgr firmware on the router. But instead of loading "linksys-model-ver1.2.3.bin", you load "ddwrt-model-ver1.2.3.bin" or similar.
I'm not a DC resident, so I wasn't sure how much Dulles was used by locals versus Reagan; Dulles is a major international airport, though, so wouldn't a lot of tourists to the DC area come in through there? If so, it would make a lot of sense to put it on the subway, though I guess the bus works OK too as long as your bus fare lets you transfer to the subway.
The last time I was in ATL was in 2000; however you're right, now that I think about it, MARTA has a terminus right at the airport that I totally forgot about before.
Ok, so we can chalk up two US cities that were smart enough (and uncorrupted enough) to manage to put a subway station at the airport: DC and Atlanta. Apparently, all the rest are either too stupid or too corrupt (by taxicab company "campaign contributions") to get this right. Considering that DC is the city that was stupid enough to re-elect Marion Barry, that's a really sad testament about America.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand your question, and I think I'm missing something. It seems like you're just asking how you install an alternative firmware on a consumer router; if so, it's pretty easy, you just go get the firmware you want (after checking that it works on your piece of hardware, be sure to check the HW revision number too!), and then follow the instructions. Usually, they just use the standard built-in firmware upgrade process in the router's web interface, except instead of loading one of the mfgr's firmware versions, you point it to the alternative one.
If your old router isn't on the supported list, however, it's either not possible (due to hardware limitations, such as insufficient memory on the device), or no one's figured out how to get it working yet and publish a build for that router.
According to this page, IPv6 is supported by DD-WRT, but ip6tables is not built-in by default, so you may need a special build to make it an IPv6-capable firewall.
Have you tried DD-WRT, Tomato, or OpenWrt firmwares? They generally have excellent feature sets, including support for VLANs and other high-end features not usually found on consumer routers. The catch, of course, is that these firmwares only work on certain models (and sometimes only certain hardware revisions within a model), so if you're looking for a router to run one of them on, you have to be very careful about which one you buy, using the firmware project's online database to make sure the model you're looking at is supported. The Cisco/Linksys stuff is among the better-supported hardware out there, and you can frequently get it cheaply on Ebay.
I wouldn't hold out too much hope for Belkin. I have heard good things about Buffalo routers, however.
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I honestly don't see how this would even evade the copyright laws and DMCA (however, IANAL, so I may be missing something). .torrent he wants to download, and server S directs him to D3, which acts as a proxy to download it from D1. Well D1 is probably safe, since D3 is covering for him, and D2 (the agent) can't see D1's IP address. However, D3 is not safe! Sure, he's passing the data in encrypted form so that only D1 and D3 can see what it really is, but does that really matter? He's still aiding and abetting copyright infringement, and he's distributing copyrighted material. I don't see how D3 can get out of that just because he doesn't know exactly what it is.
One big problem with this scheme is that it isn't really anonymous. Let's suppose D2 is an MPAA/RIAA agent: he finds a
If someone (who you know has a criminal history) gives you some goods in an envelope, and asks you to go visit someone at a particular place and get $50 from them, and give them the envelope in exchange for the money, and bring the money back to him, I'm pretty sure you're liable for "aiding and abetting" in that crime, even though you didn't open the sealed envelope to see that it had some marijuana in it.
Hmm.. Last time I installed Linux on my laptop I got to spend several hours hunting down solutions to both sound and wifi problems
That's funny, I haven't had much trouble at all; I just pop in the Linux Mint install disc and it works.
How well does Windows install on a random laptop anyway? Last I heard, you had to hunt down a bunch of driver discs or download them from mfgr websites. How many people ever install Windows anyway? Why is it the Windows fans always gloss over this fact?
Also, LibreOffice is crap, absolutely. Sure, its high principles, and it gets the job done, but it still doesn't play nicely with Office.
It works fine for us. It only has problems with Office files if you have to exchange files with MS Office users a lot. We don't; this is for home use. People at home writing up their own documents and such don't exchange files with other people. I'm not addressing business use here, as you seem to be.
and I really don't know how well my parents with deal with having to add repos, typing in yet more arcane gobbledygook, and hoping it doesn't break anything else
Again, WTF are you talking about? You don't have to add repos in any normal install. You just use the ones that are there. It's all automatic.
Do I have to mention ALSA? Pulse Audio?
What about them? They work fine. I've never had a problem.
Forcing people to use Unity, where, in supporting my parents, the difference between DE and kernel would pop up.
More red herring bullshit. No one is "forced" to use Unity, unless they insist on using Ubuntu. What about Metro, which your parents would be forced to use if they get a Win8 machine? How is that somehow OK, but Unity isn't?
At least to the point where I'm happy having my parents use it. I have better things to do with my life than help people with computers for free.
Your WIFE, this means you probably live with her, and you probably are the guy doing all the support.
That's funny, I haven't had to do any support on her machine since installing it. Everything "just works". Unlike Windows where I see Geek Squad cars pulling up to my neighbors houses from time to time.
Honestly, by now you seem like a MS shill claiming to be a Linux fan, but inventing bullshit problems that don't really exist, and which normal users do not encounter in normal use.
This isn't everyone's cup of tea though, and you have to admit it is a bit overwhelming to some. My parents would be hopeless, for example. I can't imaging having to explain the difference between a shell and a kernel to them, when they still haven't figured out the difference between a webpage and a web browser.
Oh please. They don't need to know any of this stuff, any more than they need to know it to use Windows. You don't need to use a shell to use Linux; my (non-technical) wife has been using Linux Mint KDE (and previously Kubuntu) for probably 2 years now, and she doesn't even know how to bring up a terminal window, much less actually do anything with it. As long as she can run Firefox and LibreOffice Writer, she's fine; that's pretty much all she does with it. People like this aren't going to know anything about different DEs, they're going to see them as different OSes altogether; they're also going to be using the easy-to-use distros and variants, more of which would certainly pop up if MS and Windows were to somehow suddenly disappear.
Linux also has the problem (in some eyes, not mine, and perhaps not yours) where you have to spend a lot of time working with the OS itself. You have to think about Linux, and not the task at hand. This has gotten much better, but I still view it as an issue. I still have to spend a bit too much time mucking around in command lines, and figuring out how specific bits of hardware might work.
Huh? WTF are you talking about? As I said before, my wife's been using Mint KDE for a couple years now, and has never needed to touch a command line. The whole thing is dead-easy: you install it, and that's it. Even the install is usually pretty easy (and it's not like non-technical users ever actually install Windows themselves either). After that, there's nothing to do. Most hardware is even plug-and-play; sometimes there's some which has a problem, but again, on the Windows side, nothing is 100% either, with various hardware losing support when people upgrade to newer versions. "Regular" people have to call the Geek Squad to make a personal visit to their homes all the time for various computer problems; if anything, this would be much less in a Windows-free world.
Also, there is no interface guidlines (or ones that anyone follows, at least), so much of the software is a bit of a mess.
Much of the software is a mess on Windows too. Proprietary vendors just do whatever they want, and some of them stray pretty far from the UI styles used in Windows. And now with Win8, it's a total mess with two totally different UI styles coexisting on the same machine. Besides, if, for instance, a KDE user sticks with mostly KDE applications, they're not going to see any serious irregularities.
This isn't true. There's stylii for capacitive touchscreens that have the same dimensions as a regular ball-point pen, with a 2mm-diameter ball in the point. You have to turn the gain way up when you're using one of these stylii on your system, as compared to the giant-crayon-sized stylii you're thinking of (which have a 5mm-diameter ball in the tip), but it's quite doable; I developed the drivers for a credit-card terminal using one of these stylii a couple years ago.
So we're forced to get Linux desktops, and live with all its issues.
What issues? The fact that there's no single standard desktop environment? Why is that a problem? No one ever says that Microsoft and Apple should have the exact same desktop environment/widget set/ABI or that any other part of their OSes should be standardized by some neutral organization. So why is it a problem that Linux has variety?
Maybe it'll help you if you think about Linux not as a single OS, but rather a bunch of different OSes, which all happen to share some components and mostly be software-compatible (esp. for statically-linked commercial software).
If MS died and disappeared (which would be a great thing IMO, though there'd be some pain at the beginning), other vendors would be able to offer Linux versions, without MS's monopolistic powers preventing them from gaining marketshare. Apple wouldn't be that much of a factor here, because Apple refuses to work with other hardware makers like Lenovo, Acer, Dell, HP, etc.; and they're certainly not going to want to just close up shop. Linux would be the obvious alternative here, since it runs just fine on all this disparate hardware. Different OS vendors would pop up, offering their own versions, using most of the same components, being compatible with commercial software (again, it'd have to be statically-linked), while each customizing the system for their own preferences, some using KDE, some using XFCE, etc. We'd probably see some new UIs pop up too from different sources, to satisfy consumer demand (unlike our present situation, where MS makes a UI no one wants, and tries to force it on everyone). In the end, everyone would have the ability to choose the OS they want to use to a much better extent than they do today, which is exactly what you said you want.
Of course, this isn't likely to happen since so many applications are Windows-dependent, but you never know. Just look at Valve's big push lately to make Linux its best-supported platform for gaming. And with the rise of iOS and Android, MS seems to be becoming less and less relevant all the time. People might be ready for a change before too long.
Ballmer's been running MS into the ground, slowly, for a rather long time. I don't see how this would be the end of Ballmer, because as I understand it, he and his cronies (BillG namely) have far too much control over the company. If it were possible to get rid of him, the other shareholders probably would have done it by now.
Depends on what you're doing. With normal laptop applications and OSes and their widgets, the icons and such are too small to be accurately manipulated with a fingertip. For instance, how do you differentiate between clicking in a window, near the border, and clicking in the ~10-15px border zone that allows you to horizontally resize the window? In a touch OS like Android, that's not a problem: all apps are fullscreen, so you never need to do anything like that. On a desktop OS, this isn't the case: things are more complicated. You could take away this complexity of course, and just make all apps run fullscreen on your desktop or laptop too, but now you've just turned your work machine into a glorified cellphone/tablet, good only for "content consumption" and not doing any real work. The whole reason mobile touchscreen devices work so well with touch input is because they've simplified everything so much, by removing most functionality; this isn't a problem on these devices because you'd have to be a masochist to want to do any real work on a cellphone.
Um, no. My calculations are going under the premise that LED-LCD displays use less energy than plasma displays, which is absolutely true. I'm not addressing e-ink at all.
If you read my post further, I did note that even when you adjust the numbers for the amount of usage they'd get in this application, it's still not that much money. I was just pointing out that the difference is much more than $8. Of course, if you add in the fact that you'll need to toss out that plasma in 6 months because it'll have burn-in, that adds up to more money, but still not enough to buy some super-expensive product instead of using a cheap off-the-shelf product.
Still, however, this whole post does point out how large e-ink displays could be really useful for certain markets. It's not just his company with their "dashboard"; there's many other posts here pointing out similar applications, from displays outside of university classrooms showing class schedules, to airport displays showing flight statuses. Of course, the fact that e-ink requires sufficient ambient light to be easily readable may be a problem that could limit its use.
The Jewish thing is just silly. So now every mindlessly greedy character is supposed to be something for the anti-defamation league to get upset about?
IIRC, the objection isn't that the blue character was greedy, it was that he was so greedy, and he had a very prominent hooked nose, which is something Jews have been caricatured about a lot in the past.
Well to be fair, the middle east is full of oil, which is pretty important to Western economies, especially America's.
Instead of oil, Serbia has.... what? They gave us a wonderful inventor about 120 years ago (Nikola Tesla), but other than that, and conducting genocide against their Kosovo neighbors, they're not really known for anything over here.
Jar-Jar Binks brings to mind the stereotypes of blacks in the south - at least to me as a Canadian.
Nope, totally wrong. Jar-Jar was a stereotype of a Jamaican black guy, but with an amphibian-like body. I believe the voice actor was even Jamaican.
Jamaicans and Southern blacks do not talk alike at all.
It's exactly the same here in the USA with Mexican immigrants. The ones who have immigrated here are uneducated rural people (or their descendants) who came here as a cheap labor force; they're even different racially from the upper-class Mexicans, who look completely "white" (as they're fully descended from European ancestors), while the poor ones who've immigrated here are brown-skinned.
It's not just bad guys; he obviously looked at far-East mysticism for inspiration for good guys (Yoda) and some other concepts in the series (The Force). The whole Star Wars saga borrowed heavily from various cultures and religions around the world. It was pretty brilliant really, except for Lucas's horrible screenwriting.
The US is a European colony; especially before WWII, most of its inhabitants (and virtually all of the ones in the controlling socioeconomic classes) were of European origin, frequently not far removed from their European ancestors, or even freshly-immigrated. It's becoming less so in recent history, with more and more immigration from non-European countries, but the culture of the US is definitely descended from Europe.
It's not just the US: all of the Americas are European colonies. Canada was colonized by the British and French (in Quebec). Most places south of the US were colonized by Spain and Portugal. Most of the people (and definitely all of the people in the higher socioeconomic classes) in Latin American countries are descended from European settlers, with little or no "native" blood in them, just like in the USA. There's a reason most people in the Americas speak Spanish and English, rather than Inca, Aztec, and Navajo.
We American (and westerners in general) have no real concept of extended family clans any more.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Why should I care more about someone just because they happen to be my cousin, rather than someone I"m not related to yet I share a lot in common with? I don't have anything in common with my extended family.
Valuing familial relations over real relationships with other people leads to nepotism, and dysfunctional family behavior where family members act extremely unethically so they can defend and enable one person in their family who's a slacker or worse a sociopath or criminal. Every time I meet a family where they have a strong "clan" mentality like that, they're always rife with dysfunction and codependence.
The summary referred to a 9.5-foot Kindle. That's one hell of a giant e-book reader.
You're absolutely right: plasma would suffer from burn-in pretty quickly in that application. But what makes you think the OP is wrong? Companies make bone-headed purchasing decisions all the time. You think the average manager knows about plasma burn-in?
The problem, however, is that there's no 30-foot LED/LCD screens (then again, neither are there any Plasma screens that large). This guy needs one of those outdoor displays like they use in Times Square or on highway billboards.
It's not $8. Those numbers came from probably very conservative assumptions about how much the average TV buyer actually uses his TV, which probably isn't 24 hours/day (or even 8-16 hours, as you might expect for a TV being used as an in-office "dashboard"). I'm guessing their assumption might be 2 hours/day.
I just did some very rough calculations: if the TV is going to be on 2 hours/day on average, that's 730.5 hours/year. If the TV uses 100W when operating, that's about 73kWh over the whole year. If your power costs $0.20/kWh, then the TV will cost $14.61 to operate for one year.
I'd assume that these "dashboard" TVs will be operated 10-12 hours a day, which is 5-6 times those previous numbers. Plus, commercial electricity costs more than residential, IIRC (I could be wrong about that). So it's probably much closer to $100/year to run these TVs, or maybe more. Still not an astronomical amount of money, though.
What I want to know is: what kind of TVs is the submitter using anyway? He's apparently interested in an e-Ink screen that's 30 FEET diagonally.
the lack of a subway to LGA initially is not due to lack of "common sense" by 1900 era urban bosses.
So you're telling me that it's impossible to build new subway lines in NYC, even though other cities in America have absolutely no trouble securing right-of-way through eminent domain and building light rails in already built-up areas?
Sounds like you're the fucking moron here.
It's generally as easy as installing a newer-version mfgr firmware on the router. But instead of loading "linksys-model-ver1.2.3.bin", you load "ddwrt-model-ver1.2.3.bin" or similar.
I'm not a DC resident, so I wasn't sure how much Dulles was used by locals versus Reagan; Dulles is a major international airport, though, so wouldn't a lot of tourists to the DC area come in through there? If so, it would make a lot of sense to put it on the subway, though I guess the bus works OK too as long as your bus fare lets you transfer to the subway.
The last time I was in ATL was in 2000; however you're right, now that I think about it, MARTA has a terminus right at the airport that I totally forgot about before.
Ok, so we can chalk up two US cities that were smart enough (and uncorrupted enough) to manage to put a subway station at the airport: DC and Atlanta. Apparently, all the rest are either too stupid or too corrupt (by taxicab company "campaign contributions") to get this right. Considering that DC is the city that was stupid enough to re-elect Marion Barry, that's a really sad testament about America.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand your question, and I think I'm missing something. It seems like you're just asking how you install an alternative firmware on a consumer router; if so, it's pretty easy, you just go get the firmware you want (after checking that it works on your piece of hardware, be sure to check the HW revision number too!), and then follow the instructions. Usually, they just use the standard built-in firmware upgrade process in the router's web interface, except instead of loading one of the mfgr's firmware versions, you point it to the alternative one.
If your old router isn't on the supported list, however, it's either not possible (due to hardware limitations, such as insufficient memory on the device), or no one's figured out how to get it working yet and publish a build for that router.
According to this page, IPv6 is supported by DD-WRT, but ip6tables is not built-in by default, so you may need a special build to make it an IPv6-capable firewall.
Have you tried DD-WRT, Tomato, or OpenWrt firmwares? They generally have excellent feature sets, including support for VLANs and other high-end features not usually found on consumer routers. The catch, of course, is that these firmwares only work on certain models (and sometimes only certain hardware revisions within a model), so if you're looking for a router to run one of them on, you have to be very careful about which one you buy, using the firmware project's online database to make sure the model you're looking at is supported. The Cisco/Linksys stuff is among the better-supported hardware out there, and you can frequently get it cheaply on Ebay.
I wouldn't hold out too much hope for Belkin. I have heard good things about Buffalo routers, however.