A very spirited piece of writing, I have to admit. It actually sounds more like a speech held in front of a crowd than an essay, and it shows: * lack of structure: half the time I don't know why he suddenly starts talking about something * biased semantics: calling us the chosen ones, the underdogs and the other guys sharks and goliaths is very florid, but when somebody aims for my ego, I usually assume that he doesn't have the arguments to aim for my mind * supposition: he talks a lot about what companies (very complex entities) "think," but gives very little indication how he learnt this
However, there is one key point that completely destroys the article, in my opinion: He only talks about the States! The internet is generally accepted to be a global thing, and while US IT companies (Google, Microsoft) may have global reach, US carriers do not. I don't know a single person whose internet is delivered through Comcast, TimeWarner or any other company he named. And to think that the US carriers could use any stranglehold on the states market to gain global dominance... well, that's pretty ludicrous. Because all the european, asian or other carriers will just be happy to roll over and die. Right.
As a location reference: I am currently in Norway, but usually live in Germany.
I am not quite certain how it is with contract law in the USA, but in German law, certain types of contract clauses have been ruled by court to be "contrary to custom." This simply means that such a clause is not enforceable, no matter how many sheets of paper you signed. For an everyday example, landlords may not forbid their tenants to entertain guests of the opposite sex, not even if you signed in blood on a parchment featuring this requirement in bold 72px letters. Attempts to do so nevertheless will be summarily thrown out of court. Simply evicting you for a bullshit reason is much more difficult than it sounds, so this is pretty neat.
I would imagine that the USA have the same thing: Certain rights that simply cannot be signed away. Free speech may not be one of them (since it doesn't apply towards privant entities in the first place), but there is most likely some limit to the scope of what a school may demand from its students.
Am I misunderstanding something here? In the post-senate empire, there was still a rather elaborate system of consuls, praetors, regional commanders and such. Obviously, those who performed poorly or broke the law stood to lose their jobs (mayhap their heads, too) if the caesar learnt of it.
However, I can't see the likeness here. The roman empire of the post-republic period was at its most powerful, a well organized monarchy. What does this have to do with the record industries or Hitler?
Our student dorm has its own network volunteer group, which I'm part of. This worm made a big entrance tonight, scoring 27 infections in two hours, on a network comprising about 300 machines, maybe 220 of which are running Windows. We had to take the suckers off the network AND because that's part of our self-imposed policy, drop a filled-in piece of paper into their letter boxes. I felt like the mail man, running around in the entrance hall with a wad of papers under my arm. Oh, and our upstream ISP got pissed at us, threatening to cut our connection alltogether. To sum it all up, I'm going to kill the guy who wrote this, right after I cheerfully refuse to reconnect all the suckers who fell for it!
Mine is a semi-local page. I live in a university dorm of sorts, and every one of the about 400 computers this site of our central switch can be considered semi-local: Connection speeds of 95 MBit/s, for real. Now, there happens to exist a traffic limit: We are only allowed 3 Gigs of internet traffic per month. The bean counter that ensures this is an old K6 called "KGB". It also shows off some nifty stats how traffic has developed over the last day, week, month, year. As such, its an important page which can contain some curious information as well, and which loads instantly. The latter is what keeps me from using www.google.de, as that usually takes 1s or so.
They have not yet seen the true greatness of the European Comission's plan. The true scope of this strike will unrevel over the years. It goes something like this:
Fine Microsoft scary amount of cash (just for show)
Have Microsoft appeal in the most painstaking, bogged-down way imaginable
Watch incredible amounts of $$$ flow into the European legal business and become EUR=> Profit
Do you now see the brilliance? All that cash being siphoned off from America's flourishing legal system, will be transferred directly to Europe. And the best thing is, Microsoft is doing all the dirty work for us!
Is there a reason that 2.2 has only one tiny release more than the 2.4 kernel? I mean, if you look at the most recent tiny versions:
2.0.40 2.2.26 2.4.25 2.6.3
I believe that the releases of 2.x.0 were about equally spaced, so why isn't there 2.2.34 or something like that coming out? Fewer bugs? A more laid-back maintainer? Not as much movement in the OSS world?
So you're saying that advertisers could use the hit counts they get for their ads at googlemail to guess your email? Because, after all, the ads are put together to be relevant for the email's content, and thus, more hits on an advertising for flatirons means there should have been mails about flatirons. Not really.
The problem is, this means reversing a complicated text-fitting algorithm. I'm quite positive that this wouldn't be a simple Markov-Chain (and even those are not really reversible). Bayesian stuff, maybe a few lookup tables, history in anonymous databases. Add to that the disturbance you get from statistic noise, like people getting your ad displayed even though their mail has no relevance to flatirons. In the end, you could blow any amount of money and work on this, and get no more data about your customers that a simple survey couldn't have given you much easier. Reconstructing individual mail texts from it is ludicrous.
Well, so far everybody has suggested some kind of sexual favour... but either it's happened already or you have reasons why not. Oh well. Here are ideas you can actually tell him about in front of your parents:
take him to the luxus sauna for a day. Complete relaxation, total comfort. Gets you off at 60$
Get him a nice piece of decoration he can use to brighten his computer/workplace/shrine with. Good modern art, some kind of astronomy picture, something to focus his eyes on when he needs to calm down after some bughunting
Any book he always wanted but could never afford? Get it and a few tidbits from the left-over money.
Invite him to dinner to a nice restaurant. Something classy, but not necessarily posh. Good food is a must.
Organize a surprise network party for him
Music or a game he likes.
I think you get the drift. Do
not give him a bulk network card, no matter how useful it would be, because, while it would make him happy, it would also lack the certain something. What's important is something that makes the gift seem thoughtful, so either good presentation or a truly original idea are necessary. Hope I could help:)
I just tried to download the virus, only to find that this is once again Windows-only software. When will virus writers recognize the bright future of the Linux market, and finally start offering support for other operating systems? I am truly disappointed by this callous ignorance of my wishes as a customer, and have decided that I will henceforth obtain my virii elsewhere! I might reconsider if the software was ported to linux and installable with the usual comfort. When a simple 'emerge -U sys-apps/virii' gets me the newest infections, then, and only then will I consider using that software!
Note: Blatant sarcasm... but if you didn't already know that, it's hopeless anyway:)
True, but KDE is quite good at running Gnome apps, too. GIMP runs very well, it just isn't quite as integrated as a KDE app would be. AFAIK, Gnome doesn't have that sort of integration (ioslaves, Kparts, DCOP) anyway. Besides there are a few categories were the balance goes the other way:
If you count QT as a KDE feature: lyx-qt > lyx-xforms dcgui-qt > dctc/dcgui
Besides, KDE is fixing a lot of its problems very quickly. Startup speed from login on my machine is now under 8s (I kid you not), which is less than half what it once was. Konqueror is rapidly improving, its main deficit still in HTML rendering and plugins. As for KOffice and Kopete... well, who knows. The K-ifikation of OpenOffice is getting first results and Licq still does the job--usually.
Hmmm. I can't really see the point of this anti-cheating thing; seems to me it creates a lot more troubles than it removes.
Using anti-cheating website:
Blatant mistrust. Students get offended, and rightly so
Has problems with people working on exercises in a group
Needs failsafe, or rather possibility of appeal
Not using it:
A few people will try to cheat
People will learn to incorporate data from various sources when the people they study and work with are considered proper sources (i.e. concept of cheating changes and becomes less of a problem)
No technical difficulties: "Sorry, Professor, we couldn't hand in the assignment. The website got slashdotted"
I rather like the way it's handled at my university, where the exercises during the term are not checked for copying at all, and group work, as well as research in the library or online are fully permitted. The reasons: These are necessary skills to survive as a scientist or engineer. What's more, passing the exercises gives you permission to participate in the end-of-term exam. No more. These exams are extremely difficult to cheat in (not least because you need a lot of information, and most methods of cheating have a low data density). Anyone who hasn't acted responsibly and learnt their stuff, perishes cruelly *startEvilLaughter();* Of course, if you're caught cheating, you get a zero on the exam, meaning you wasted half a year (and that's a big chunk of your life).
Once again, designers make a laughing stock out of themselves by refusing to use common sense. As a result, their "prototype" has obviously never been lived in for even a few hours. Three glaring points:
LCD TV. Above the stove. So it can catch the oil crackling in the pan, the smell when something gets burned, as has occasionally been known to happen and the condensation when cooking something in boiling water. Yeah, right! No way anyone's going to hang an expensive LCD there.
The bed. In the middle of an open square, so it takes maximum space. This is a bit so-so as they might have thought of a couple. The whole room gives off a rich-bachelor feeling to me, though. Most bachelors I know have the bed pushed up against one wall to conserve space.
The sinks in the bathroom. They're round bowls with no shelf space in sight. Where do you put toothbrush, toothpaste, hair gel, combs, shaver, soap? Well, I'm sure the tooth fairy will be ready to hold them for a while.
As you can see, I don't think that what is shown in the pictures has anything to do with an apartment, which is made up of connected rooms where and this is important! people need to live, and need to want to live.
I just downloaded the tarball, modified my 2.6.0 configuration a little bit (what the heck do I need UFS support for?), compiled and rebooted. Without any tweaking, ALSA, LVM2, ide-scsi (in your face, Torvalds!), the Promise IDE-Controller and all the usual tidbits work. Nice one.
BTW, does anybody know how to make K3B understand the new ATAPI cdburning stuff?
Re:Help: re-introducing myself to the intracacies.
on
Kernel 2.6.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It wont break your system, but a few subsystems change:
* Module loading: There are new tools for this (usually called module init tools). These are MANDATORY. * Logical Volume Management: lvm2 is available but possibly not required (not sure on this) * Alsa: Can now be compiled in the kernel. Might need minuscule tweaking * A few modules have been renamed. (e.g. printer.o -> usblp.ko)
A lot of people have asked about the relevance of this: Basically, there is none. But that's all right. It's a nice story to entertain their readers, and I'm willing to bet it was a lot of fun for them, too. Not everything needs to have a point, you know.
That said, there's one thing that would still interest me: Now that we've seen them overclock that wimpy Pentium 4 (I hate that architecture! How can anyone build a 20-step pipeline?), let's have some real techno-porn: Liquid Nitrogen-cooled 2x2.0GHz G5 Powermac! That would be quite a sight to behold. Especially with that nifty 1Ghz FSB.
I've got what is probably the least silent keyboard in the world: The good old "Model M" from IBM which has been mentioned several times already. The version I possess was built in 1985, thus being only one year younger than I am. The first 13 years of its history, it served as my father's keyboard at work. Since he's a researcher with a desk job, you can assume heavy usage 9 hours per work day. Five years ago, he brought it home, exposing it to three computer-happy boys by plugging it into the computer in the house. Now, 17 years after it was build, I'm using it, and it's still a mechanical wonder, with unsurpassed feel. On the downside, it is rather loud. But it's nevertheless impressive, considering that no modern keyboard lasts more than a few years, while this one will probably last for as long as computers support PS2 keyboards.
Why is it that all the supermarket linux boxes, which might actually get some marketshare among the populace, are set up with very dubious distributions? I mean, first there's Lindows. Blearghh. A linux that runs you as root. Yahooo. Just what nobdoy needs. At all. Now there's Sun's JDS. If I remember the review on Slashdot a week ago, it was a rather lukewarm welcome for the new linux distro, with worries about features, poor design and performance dominating the comments.
And here's The Question: Why doesn't some actual linux company get in touch with some supermarket chain which sells computers (there are enough, after all). Mandrake might have made the cash they desperately want, SuSE might get some market penetration in its competition with RedHat, and some Debian-based thingie could have gotten its ticket into the market. So why Sun and Lindows? It's not like Sun was traditionally in the home computing market; certainly not with prices like that.
Oh, one last thing: Some people mentioned the problem of grandma&grandpa(TM) going into the shop, looking for a photo editor, or some such, and of course finding only Microsoft-compliant stuff. I do not know about JDS, but any *nix (RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Mac OS X) I have ever used already had one of those! If you have the SuSE professional, there is precious little you might want that is not on those 2 DVDs. That's the beauty of a linux distro to my mind: (almost) everything you need/want in a box.
Yes, in this context, "ein" das mean "one" or "a". However, I don't remember ever seeing that quote before, especially since it doesn't make any sense. "Hummer" is a lobster, and the word "State" doesn't exist in German. So, no idea on what's meant here.
I've got a cheap, high-quality solution with a do-it-yourself flair: Take a 5m cinch-cable, plug one end into your soundcard's line-out, take the other end to your stereo's amplifier, plug it in, voila! All my music, at a touch with all the comfort and features of XMMS (or Zinf, Juk, Amarok, etc.). In my opinion, a portable music player should carry around its own music, otherwise "portable" means "within 15 meters of your real entertainment center.
BTW: "Those pesky rooms without CAT5"...
I live in a 14 square meters student dorm room. My net has an average speed of >1 MByte/s.
I believe you might have misunderstood our political system. For the cost of sacrificing one good idea, for 25 years we have kept countless politicians too busy to do any real harm. Plus, there's the entertainment value.
Slashdot Mirror
A very spirited piece of writing, I have to admit. It actually sounds more like a speech held in front of a crowd than an essay, and it shows:
* lack of structure: half the time I don't know why he suddenly starts talking about something
* biased semantics: calling us the chosen ones, the underdogs and the other guys sharks and goliaths is very florid, but when somebody aims for my ego, I usually assume that he doesn't have the arguments to aim for my mind
* supposition: he talks a lot about what companies (very complex entities) "think," but gives very little indication how he learnt this
However, there is one key point that completely destroys the article, in my opinion: He only talks about the States! The internet is generally accepted to be a global thing, and while US IT companies (Google, Microsoft) may have global reach, US carriers do not. I don't know a single person whose internet is delivered through Comcast, TimeWarner or any other company he named. And to think that the US carriers could use any stranglehold on the states market to gain global dominance... well, that's pretty ludicrous. Because all the european, asian or other carriers will just be happy to roll over and die. Right.
As a location reference: I am currently in Norway, but usually live in Germany.
I am not quite certain how it is with contract law in the USA, but in German law, certain types of contract clauses have been ruled by court to be "contrary to custom." This simply means that such a clause is not enforceable, no matter how many sheets of paper you signed. For an everyday example, landlords may not forbid their tenants to entertain guests of the opposite sex, not even if you signed in blood on a parchment featuring this requirement in bold 72px letters. Attempts to do so nevertheless will be summarily thrown out of court. Simply evicting you for a bullshit reason is much more difficult than it sounds, so this is pretty neat.
I would imagine that the USA have the same thing: Certain rights that simply cannot be signed away. Free speech may not be one of them (since it doesn't apply towards privant entities in the first place), but there is most likely some limit to the scope of what a school may demand from its students.
Am I misunderstanding something here? In the post-senate empire, there was still a rather elaborate system of consuls, praetors, regional commanders and such. Obviously, those who performed poorly or broke the law stood to lose their jobs (mayhap their heads, too) if the caesar learnt of it.
However, I can't see the likeness here. The roman empire of the post-republic period was at its most powerful, a well organized monarchy. What does this have to do with the record industries or Hitler?
Digging into the results of six years of latin class, it means "God from gold," similar to "deus ex machina," which means "God from (a/the) machine."
So this is the candidate for the preview release for the final release? What is this called? Release Candidate Candidate?
Our student dorm has its own network volunteer group, which I'm part of. This worm made a big entrance tonight, scoring 27 infections in two hours, on a network comprising about 300 machines, maybe 220 of which are running Windows. We had to take the suckers off the network AND because that's part of our self-imposed policy, drop a filled-in piece of paper into their letter boxes. I felt like the mail man, running around in the entrance hall with a wad of papers under my arm. Oh, and our upstream ISP got pissed at us, threatening to cut our connection alltogether. To sum it all up, I'm going to kill the guy who wrote this, right after I cheerfully refuse to reconnect all the suckers who fell for it!
Don't you mean "All your boards are belong to us" ?
Mine is a semi-local page. I live in a university dorm of sorts, and every one of the about 400 computers this site of our central switch can be considered semi-local: Connection speeds of 95 MBit/s, for real. Now, there happens to exist a traffic limit: We are only allowed 3 Gigs of internet traffic per month. The bean counter that ensures this is an old K6 called "KGB". It also shows off some nifty stats how traffic has developed over the last day, week, month, year. As such, its an important page which can contain some curious information as well, and which loads instantly. The latter is what keeps me from using www.google.de, as that usually takes 1s or so.
- Fine Microsoft scary amount of cash (just for show)
- Have Microsoft appeal in the most painstaking, bogged-down way imaginable
- Watch incredible amounts of $$$ flow into the European legal business and become EUR=> Profit
Do you now see the brilliance? All that cash being siphoned off from America's flourishing legal system, will be transferred directly to Europe. And the best thing is, Microsoft is doing all the dirty work for us!Is there a reason that 2.2 has only one tiny release more than the 2.4 kernel? I mean, if you look at the most recent tiny versions:
2.0.40
2.2.26
2.4.25
2.6.3
I believe that the releases of 2.x.0 were about equally spaced, so why isn't there 2.2.34 or something like that coming out? Fewer bugs? A more laid-back maintainer? Not as much movement in the OSS world?
So you're saying that advertisers could use the hit counts they get for their ads at googlemail to guess your email? Because, after all, the ads are put together to be relevant for the email's content, and thus, more hits on an advertising for flatirons means there should have been mails about flatirons.
Not really.
The problem is, this means reversing a complicated text-fitting algorithm. I'm quite positive that this wouldn't be a simple Markov-Chain (and even those are not really reversible). Bayesian stuff, maybe a few lookup tables, history in anonymous databases. Add to that the disturbance you get from statistic noise, like people getting your ad displayed even though their mail has no relevance to flatirons. In the end, you could blow any amount of money and work on this, and get no more data about your customers that a simple survey couldn't have given you much easier. Reconstructing individual mail texts from it is ludicrous.
So, no worries.
Well, so far everybody has suggested some kind of sexual favour... but either it's happened already or you have reasons why not. Oh well. Here are ideas you can actually tell him about in front of your parents:
I just tried to download the virus, only to find that this is once again Windows-only software. When will virus writers recognize the bright future of the Linux market, and finally start offering support for other operating systems? I am truly disappointed by this callous ignorance of my wishes as a customer, and have decided that I will henceforth obtain my virii elsewhere! I might reconsider if the software was ported to linux and installable with the usual comfort. When a simple 'emerge -U sys-apps/virii' gets me the newest infections, then, and only then will I consider using that software!
:)
Note: Blatant sarcasm... but if you didn't already know that, it's hopeless anyway
True, but KDE is quite good at running Gnome apps, too. GIMP runs very well, it just isn't quite as integrated as a KDE app would be. AFAIK, Gnome doesn't have that sort of integration (ioslaves, Kparts, DCOP) anyway. Besides there are a few categories were the balance goes the other way:
Konqueror > Nautilus
K3B > gToaster
KGhostview > ?
KDirStat > ?
If you count QT as a KDE feature:
lyx-qt > lyx-xforms
dcgui-qt > dctc/dcgui
Besides, KDE is fixing a lot of its problems very quickly. Startup speed from login on my machine is now under 8s (I kid you not), which is less than half what it once was. Konqueror is rapidly improving, its main deficit still in HTML rendering and plugins. As for KOffice and Kopete... well, who knows. The K-ifikation of OpenOffice is getting first results and Licq still does the job--usually.
Hmmm. I can't really see the point of this anti-cheating thing; seems to me it creates a lot more troubles than it removes.
Using anti-cheating website:
Not using it:
I rather like the way it's handled at my university, where the exercises during the term are not checked for copying at all, and group work, as well as research in the library or online are fully permitted. The reasons: These are necessary skills to survive as a scientist or engineer. What's more, passing the exercises gives you permission to participate in the end-of-term exam. No more. These exams are extremely difficult to cheat in (not least because you need a lot of information, and most methods of cheating have a low data density). Anyone who hasn't acted responsibly and learnt their stuff, perishes cruelly *startEvilLaughter();* Of course, if you're caught cheating, you get a zero on the exam, meaning you wasted half a year (and that's a big chunk of your life).
Once again, designers make a laughing stock out of themselves by refusing to use common sense. As a result, their "prototype" has obviously never been lived in for even a few hours. Three glaring points:
- LCD TV. Above the stove. So it can catch the oil crackling in the pan, the smell when something gets burned, as has occasionally been known to happen and the condensation when cooking something in boiling water. Yeah, right! No way anyone's going to hang an expensive LCD there.
- The bed. In the middle of an open square, so it takes maximum space. This is a bit so-so as they might have thought of a couple. The whole room gives off a rich-bachelor feeling to me, though. Most bachelors I know have the bed pushed up against one wall to conserve space.
- The sinks in the bathroom. They're round bowls with no shelf space in sight. Where do you put toothbrush, toothpaste, hair gel, combs, shaver, soap? Well, I'm sure the tooth fairy will be ready to hold them for a while.
As you can see, I don't think that what is shown in the pictures has anything to do with an apartment, which is made up of connected rooms where and this is important! people need to live, and need to want to live.I just downloaded the tarball, modified my 2.6.0 configuration a little bit (what the heck do I need UFS support for?), compiled and rebooted. Without any tweaking, ALSA, LVM2, ide-scsi (in your face, Torvalds!), the Promise IDE-Controller and all the usual tidbits work. Nice one.
BTW, does anybody know how to make K3B understand the new ATAPI cdburning stuff?
It wont break your system, but a few subsystems change:
* Module loading: There are new tools for this (usually called module init tools). These are MANDATORY.
* Logical Volume Management: lvm2 is available but possibly not required (not sure on this)
* Alsa: Can now be compiled in the kernel. Might need minuscule tweaking
* A few modules have been renamed. (e.g. printer.o -> usblp.ko)
A lot of people have asked about the relevance of this: Basically, there is none. But that's all right. It's a nice story to entertain their readers, and I'm willing to bet it was a lot of fun for them, too. Not everything needs to have a point, you know.
That said, there's one thing that would still interest me: Now that we've seen them overclock that wimpy Pentium 4 (I hate that architecture! How can anyone build a 20-step pipeline?), let's have some real techno-porn: Liquid Nitrogen-cooled 2x2.0GHz G5 Powermac! That would be quite a sight to behold. Especially with that nifty 1Ghz FSB.
I've got what is probably the least silent keyboard in the world: The good old "Model M" from IBM which has been mentioned several times already. The version I possess was built in 1985, thus being only one year younger than I am. The first 13 years of its history, it served as my father's keyboard at work. Since he's a researcher with a desk job, you can assume heavy usage 9 hours per work day. Five years ago, he brought it home, exposing it to three computer-happy boys by plugging it into the computer in the house. Now, 17 years after it was build, I'm using it, and it's still a mechanical wonder, with unsurpassed feel. On the downside, it is rather loud. But it's nevertheless impressive, considering that no modern keyboard lasts more than a few years, while this one will probably last for as long as computers support PS2 keyboards.
What the hell would /. do if Linus spent an evening partying in a whorehouse?
Easy. Do a slashdotting on the whorehouse's website.
Why is it that all the supermarket linux boxes, which might actually get some marketshare among the populace, are set up with very dubious distributions? I mean, first there's Lindows. Blearghh. A linux that runs you as root. Yahooo. Just what nobdoy needs. At all. Now there's Sun's JDS. If I remember the review on Slashdot a week ago, it was a rather lukewarm welcome for the new linux distro, with worries about features, poor design and performance dominating the comments.
And here's The Question: Why doesn't some actual linux company get in touch with some supermarket chain which sells computers (there are enough, after all). Mandrake might have made the cash they desperately want, SuSE might get some market penetration in its competition with RedHat, and some Debian-based thingie could have gotten its ticket into the market. So why Sun and Lindows? It's not like Sun was traditionally in the home computing market; certainly not with prices like that.
Oh, one last thing: Some people mentioned the problem of grandma&grandpa(TM) going into the shop, looking for a photo editor, or some such, and of course finding only Microsoft-compliant stuff. I do not know about JDS, but any *nix (RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Mac OS X) I have ever used already had one of those! If you have the SuSE professional, there is precious little you might want that is not on those 2 DVDs. That's the beauty of a linux distro to my mind: (almost) everything you need/want in a box.
Yes, in this context, "ein" das mean "one" or "a". However, I don't remember ever seeing that quote before, especially since it doesn't make any sense. "Hummer" is a lobster, and the word "State" doesn't exist in German. So, no idea on what's meant here.
BTW, what's a "b.j."?
I've got a cheap, high-quality solution with a do-it-yourself flair: Take a 5m cinch-cable, plug one end into your soundcard's line-out, take the other end to your stereo's amplifier, plug it in, voila! All my music, at a touch with all the comfort and features of XMMS (or Zinf, Juk, Amarok, etc.). In my opinion, a portable music player should carry around its own music, otherwise "portable" means "within 15 meters of your real entertainment center.
BTW: "Those pesky rooms without CAT5"... I live in a 14 square meters student dorm room. My net has an average speed of >1 MByte/s.
I believe you might have misunderstood our political system. For the cost of sacrificing one good idea, for 25 years we have kept countless politicians too busy to do any real harm. Plus, there's the entertainment value.