Normalize is junk, what you need is Replay Gain.
on
US Bans Loud Commercials
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Normalize is junk and it doesn't do what you think it does. What you need is Replay Gain, or dynamic compression if you don't care about dynamics (ie, speech).
Take a music sample from a cd that sounds low (ie from the 90ies). Make a copy of said sample and add a peak noise somewhere (the kind you hear when you unplug/plug your analog line in). Make another copy and apply heavy dynamic compression.
Normalize all three. Puzzled? The first sample sounds loud, the second sounds much lower, but the third one sounds the loudest. That's why normalizing is useless, and you need something else.
NoScript is a WHITElist, you only allow the sites you trust to run scripts, it means NO by default. It is perfect, the best sites can run without scripts just fine, and you know immediately with noscript when something was designed with accessibility and standards compliance in mind, versus dis-functionality and laziness.
A script-less web experience is the fastest there is, zero running code in client is faster than the best of the engines; and selectively picking whom you allow to execute scripts makes for a very fast web experience, especially with slower machines.
The reason i started using noscript, is because some sites started to use scripts to defeat adblock. Ad related scripts come from third party servers most of the time. It also happens to do a flashblock like experience not only to flash, but the rest of the annoyances that make web browsing slowdown to a crawl. If you want that particular web thingie to execute (say, embedded video) you click to it and allow it temporarily; in short it will only run after you tell. You can't imagine how wonderful it is to regain back control; i want nothing with a browser with an incomplete implementation of noscript; especially coming from one of the ad serving companies...
Now if Adblock Plus starts acting too funny, i guess is time for a new fork.
It had nothing to do with the location, it had to do with placing everything in a single place. It's probably cheaper that way.
If the plant were in the US and the flooding occurred there, the result would have been the same. Capitalism logic dictates: to maximize profits you need to lower expenses, including wages as much as you can. Especially if you have someone competing with the same product.
"Third world" (obsolete term without Second world) countries allow lower wages and more exploitation (more working hours with less benefits) than "First world" countries, in short, it is cheaper so production moves there. Otherwise your competition will do it and undercut your prices and steal your sales.
In the past, there were many more companies making HDs, so if a plant failed, it didn't hurt that much. But nowdays, there are basically 2 left, and if one fails you lose half the world production.
Things like these have happened to ram production as well. There is nothing to do but wait until production is restarted and prices go down again. I wonder how SSD manufacturers will capitalize this?
Netbooks started with SSDs but moved to HDDs because they were cheaper, but now?
Unless you get rid of monarchy, or autocracy for that matter, because even when not written it WILL be enforced. It is taboo, forbidden to criticise your head of state unless you live in a republic with sufficient citizen rights, and even some of those have exemptions. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lese-majesty
Yes, and it's the only way to keep a similar experience across distros. Many people dislike gnome team's choice, and are implementing their own (different) solutions.
Well, i suppose the KDE people are doing just fine... And we thought no one could surpass kde4 trauma; never underestimate the gnome team...
I personally will remain away from gnome. Gnome2 had its own silliness and it was hard forgiving things like that horrible registry re-implementation. Well no more, this year i abandoned gnome for good.
Kudos to the Mint people devoting efforts to revert user alienation; I'm sure they will gain a few more fans with this move.
Actually XFCE can be made to look the same, including the "Places" menu, dual panels, etc. Some things are better in XFCE such as changing window button positions (drag n drop vs cryptic gconf). Desktop compositing is available, and can be turned off.
Talking about piracy when referring to shows aired for free on TV in a different country, and people devoting their time and effort to make quality subtitling often surpassing "professional" translation (ie Sekai no monshou/senki series) begs for silliness at best. Which is why I'm against the whole licensing thing (or cries about "stop distributing when licensed" junk).
For starters, Japanese animation studios barely ever take count of international exposure. They want their show success in their land and is paid by advertisers there already, period.
When someone imports a show taped from free to air tv of a foreign country, and even devotes his/her time/skills to add subtitles, for free; how can you claim "piracy"? It is unauthorised promotion at best...
Ah, but you might hurt the clueless American licensee wanting to sell DVDs... Who acted like 3 years late to begin with, added unwanted dubbing and bad translated subtitles. Well that is your problem in your country anyway (and the Japanese can't care the less either).
Crunchyroll is annoying. Just like that other tv show streaming thing nobody but US residents care about. Its restricted to few countries, perhaps only the US. Yet, they make appear shows are already "licensed" thus thwarting WORLD fansub distribution.
Ok, Crunchyroll killed a few quality fansub groups; fortunately other groups (outside US) emerged and restored the situation. Since Crunchyroll is only for Americans to begin with.
Also, and very importantly, not everyone can stream HD, or even SD in many places. It sucks with free services like youtube, I can't even imagine what someone would feel if using a paid streaming service, perhaps thru (paid) proxies to avoid that stupid US only mentality, often adding the ISP fee and the fact a foreign country with a much worse economy where every single of your dollars takes 10 times more effort to make.
Granted, if those with licenses are going to sue people left and right for something which is not even theirs to begin with (because an absurd legal system allows them to), a service like crunchy might seem preferable (just like some people find iTunes acceptable, even tho lossless drmless content is out there...).
However, as you can see in the many cases of shows NOT licensed (ie. not in crunchy) the torrents still beat the alternative, both in quality (720p and 1080 being common); good beyond professional translation (often including explanation for cultural differences) and availability (the day after it was aired). And, there is content you will NEVER be able to watch "legally" as the studio that made them is no more or doesn't want to license it.
I'm sure you can somehow extrapolate this to games. As the successful Valve's strategy in Russia shows. Steam, for starters, is not restricted to the US... And being able to pay in your local currency, with prices realistically adapted to your local economy, is a must. Hence, you see movie studios selling movies in China for 3$ when the unauthorised copies go for like.5$; still reaps far more profits than drming and suing everyone to death (which they can't in a country where they can't purchase enough politicians to do their laws).
This is how you install Openbsd. You can download a small iso for your usb/cd, and that will download anything needed thru the net.
Back in the version 3 days, you needed only a floppy or two to start such an install, nowdays is the same, but ppl mostly use usb sticks now (the floppy image still exists).
Going for randomly made iso images on bittorrent was a very stupid idea. The only reason i could see someone needing a whole iso is if they lack connectivity.
Two young Mexican attorneys attempt to exonerate a wrongly convicted man by making a documentary. In the process, they expose the contradictions of a judicial system that presumes suspects guilty until proven innocent. -- IMDb
I think Convergence is better. The EFF should put up their own notary and just join Convergence instead of having their own separate way of doing the same...
I have already switched and added a bunch of random notaries. Everyone can just self sign and the notaries do the rest. Man in the Middle? Most notaries will warn your data differs. If a notary sucks, kick it and add another. Simple and clean.
The remaining crude is heavier, in deeper places. Needs more energy to extract, and refine, and its market price is lower than the lighter ones. One of the last places with good amounts of light crude oil is... Libya.
Fossil fuels are not going to run out anytime soon, they are simply getting less profitable, more expensive to get. It is one of the effects of "peaking", after more than a century of extracting the best (and even burning away perfectly good but then less valued natural gas).
Eventually the private companies will give up or reduce their size drastically and mostly State owned operations will remain. See the refining business? Of course you can't sue your country for a spill in the ocean or a national park they will drill into... Might even subcontract scapegoats to blame into oblivion for any mistakes.
Opec might even be reaching production limits, but this can never be disclosed to prevent market panic. In the meantime other powers are literally destroying Opec members one by one, only to leave the places unstable and unable to even reach previous Opec production levels.
ALSO country population and economies grow, and that needs more energy, period. China and India to name the biggest 2. Right now US & friends are having a field day bombing whomever they want, but soon enough those powers are going to act to protect their suppliers, and perhaps a bit of world balance will be restored (by way of tensions, sadly).
The US will have to learn from Europe to live with expensive energy and become more efficient, even if that means the collapse of suburbia, give up SUVs and live closer to work; not to mention relearn to produce their own stuff (including food) again.
I had not experienced those bugs with thunar. I use it quite often because it loads much faster than nautilus, which i keep around just in case. I use thunar mostly with local files and removable media, haven't tried much its gvfs abilities.
Note also i trimmed some fat by using this psychocats apt-get remove line as a guide to remove many packages, it might have helped. Maybe just installing ubuntu minimal (at boot press f4 to choose "command-line system") and then just sudo apt-get install xfce4 afterwards could be better.
If you think your LTS starts getting stale, take a look at the various PPAs. For instance you could keep a current stable Firefox (v6 atm), by adding the firefox-stable ppa to your Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
I personally switched to Xubuntu (XFCE) because i don't like gnome3/unity/kde4, had no problems using 11.04.
I'd say no support for rolling, support only LTS. With support meaning "backport bug/security fixes to the specific version you deployed" oh, and the actual corporate support of course... With true rolling, as soon as a fix is ready, there is a new version from upstream which would only need to pass the distro requirements (alpha/beta etc) to go in the official repos.
This might even relieve Canonical from supporting that many releases in a given 2 years time frame (1 instead of 4 + the previous LTS...)
My country has been in the Priority 301 for a couple of years, and the fact that remains there means our government is not willing to bend and prosecute their own people to satisfy foreign interests.
The main reason is US pharmaceutical patents which we do not enforce. People's lives are above US corporations, period. And they can all leave for all we care; there is still a whole world willing to trade with us and many do so without "IP" restrictions (technology transfer) in many countries who "coincidently" appear in that list.
If a country is not in the list, it means their politicians are willing to prosecute their own people to defend foreign interests, acting like a subjugated colony of an imperialist state.
The US gov is quick to "qualify" others in issues like Human Rights, Trade, Drugs and Terrorism, but fail to apply the same measure against themselves, which would make them fail in all.
Also the US foreign policy is one of the dirtiest, as proven by cable leaks worldwide, they will never back down and continue to disrespect the international community: spy, bribe, incite countries worldwide to favor their interests (mostly commercial, to hell with freedom), as you will see they won't leave Libya to have Libyans manage their own resources in sovereignty; instead, they will pass "the invoice" and basically ransack the place until they revolt and again bomb the place to change leaders as they have done for decades in countries worldwide.
Without the soviet power to exert some counter balance, the US corporate machine simply acts like they own the world, accountable to no one, they continue to apply pressure to enforce THEIR (corporate) laws worldwide, disregarding whatever it is people think or care.
If your country is in this list, be proud. If not, be in shame.
Actually, true communism has no separate government; everyone is part of it. A modern communist society would have a direct democracy system where everyone is consulted of everything, not a dear leader or a selected party/assembly taking decisions for you and me (much less oligopolies, lobbiers etc). In the past such a system (direct democracy) would had proven unfeasible, but IT today can actually make it happen.
The only problem is the rich would oppose it. Because richness needs poverty to exist. Unless this battle is waged by the majority poor against the minority rich, it will never occur. Which why the theory of a violent revolution as a means of change holds.
Of course there are many theories about how to make a transition into it, some claiming a middle stage (socialism) needed, others saying this middle stage would actually make it impossible since it would make a State too powerful against the people to ever relinquish power (here is where Socialists/Anarchists clash).
In the mean time the rich remain rich, while striving to become even richer and more powerful and the poor become poorer and more oppressed to prevent the necessary revolt that could put and end to it.
This project makes sense, IF you finish linking both sides. That means Alaska and Canada as well as Russia and China, Korea, etc. The Chinese are already building lines elsewhere to reach Europe, can't how they wouldn't also help build lines to reach America.
Also, this should include high speed data links for Asia/America communications.
IMO Open mesh should do the job. 60$ to 99$ a piece, no dependency to third parties (unlike meraki); free, open source. Zero config, just plug in power and go. You can centrally manage things like bandwidth, splash page, etc.
Meshes have no practical coverage limits, can be finetuned as you are using many small APs (which connect wirelessly to each other) to customize the coverage areas, only one of them needs a link to the lan/wan.
Meraki started nice, but became proprietary and expensive, open mesh retained the openness of the original MIT project, and is even more reliable.
The original copyright lasted 14 years plus ONE extension of 14 more years. The idea for copyright was to put an END to hereditary printer guild rights over written works.
Before that, authors had to sell their work ONCE to the printers; and these could sell copies again and again and again without giving a cent back to the author. That industry had control over printing, because printing was very expensive and only few could afford the infrastructure and distribution to do so. Sounds familiar?
The United States of America is a country built upon infringing the "intellectual property" of others, especially the English at first, but they also stole and copied technology from many other countries until well into the 20th century, and a bit more discreetly after that.
Internet has made the industry obsolete. Physical media is irrelevant, radio and television are redundant. The powers that be, decided to alienate their customer base by declaring them criminals, thus starting the war.
The right to copy should be restored. Non profit copying should be permitted, period. And State enforced monopolies for commercial exploitation should be granted for very limited time, 5 years at most. This is the main agenda of the "Pirate Parties" of the world.
Artists never made money over sold discs, labels did.
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Normalize is junk and it doesn't do what you think it does. What you need is Replay Gain, or dynamic compression if you don't care about dynamics (ie, speech).
Take a music sample from a cd that sounds low (ie from the 90ies).
Make a copy of said sample and add a peak noise somewhere (the kind you hear when you unplug/plug your analog line in).
Make another copy and apply heavy dynamic compression.
Normalize all three. Puzzled? The first sample sounds loud, the second sounds much lower, but the third one sounds the loudest. That's why normalizing is useless, and you need something else.
NoScript is a WHITElist, you only allow the sites you trust to run scripts, it means NO by default. It is perfect, the best sites can run without scripts just fine, and you know immediately with noscript when something was designed with accessibility and standards compliance in mind, versus dis-functionality and laziness.
A script-less web experience is the fastest there is, zero running code in client is faster than the best of the engines; and selectively picking whom you allow to execute scripts makes for a very fast web experience, especially with slower machines.
The reason i started using noscript, is because some sites started to use scripts to defeat adblock. Ad related scripts come from third party servers most of the time. It also happens to do a flashblock like experience not only to flash, but the rest of the annoyances that make web browsing slowdown to a crawl. If you want that particular web thingie to execute (say, embedded video) you click to it and allow it temporarily; in short it will only run after you tell. You can't imagine how wonderful it is to regain back control; i want nothing with a browser with an incomplete implementation of noscript; especially coming from one of the ad serving companies...
Now if Adblock Plus starts acting too funny, i guess is time for a new fork.
It had nothing to do with the location, it had to do with placing everything in a single place. It's probably cheaper that way.
If the plant were in the US and the flooding occurred there, the result would have been the same. Capitalism logic dictates: to maximize profits you need to lower expenses, including wages as much as you can. Especially if you have someone competing with the same product.
"Third world" (obsolete term without Second world) countries allow lower wages and more exploitation (more working hours with less benefits) than "First world" countries, in short, it is cheaper so production moves there. Otherwise your competition will do it and undercut your prices and steal your sales.
In the past, there were many more companies making HDs, so if a plant failed, it didn't hurt that much. But nowdays, there are basically 2 left, and if one fails you lose half the world production.
Things like these have happened to ram production as well. There is nothing to do but wait until production is restarted and prices go down again. I wonder how SSD manufacturers will capitalize this?
Netbooks started with SSDs but moved to HDDs because they were cheaper, but now?
Unless you get rid of monarchy, or autocracy for that matter, because even when not written it WILL be enforced. It is taboo, forbidden to criticise your head of state unless you live in a republic with sufficient citizen rights, and even some of those have exemptions. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lese-majesty
Yes, and it's the only way to keep a similar experience across distros. Many people dislike gnome team's choice, and are implementing their own (different) solutions.
Well, i suppose the KDE people are doing just fine... And we thought no one could surpass kde4 trauma; never underestimate the gnome team...
I personally will remain away from gnome. Gnome2 had its own silliness and it was hard forgiving things like that horrible registry re-implementation. Well no more, this year i abandoned gnome for good.
Kudos to the Mint people devoting efforts to revert user alienation; I'm sure they will gain a few more fans with this move.
Actually XFCE can be made to look the same, including the "Places" menu, dual panels, etc. Some things are better in XFCE such as changing window button positions (drag n drop vs cryptic gconf). Desktop compositing is available, and can be turned off.
Talking about piracy when referring to shows aired for free on TV in a different country, and people devoting their time and effort to make quality subtitling often surpassing "professional" translation (ie Sekai no monshou/senki series) begs for silliness at best. Which is why I'm against the whole licensing thing (or cries about "stop distributing when licensed" junk).
For starters, Japanese animation studios barely ever take count of international exposure. They want their show success in their land and is paid by advertisers there already, period.
When someone imports a show taped from free to air tv of a foreign country, and even devotes his/her time/skills to add subtitles, for free; how can you claim "piracy"? It is unauthorised promotion at best...
Ah, but you might hurt the clueless American licensee wanting to sell DVDs... Who acted like 3 years late to begin with, added unwanted dubbing and bad translated subtitles. Well that is your problem in your country anyway (and the Japanese can't care the less either).
Crunchyroll is annoying. Just like that other tv show streaming thing nobody but US residents care about. Its restricted to few countries, perhaps only the US. Yet, they make appear shows are already "licensed" thus thwarting WORLD fansub distribution.
Ok, Crunchyroll killed a few quality fansub groups; fortunately other groups (outside US) emerged and restored the situation. Since Crunchyroll is only for Americans to begin with.
Also, and very importantly, not everyone can stream HD, or even SD in many places. It sucks with free services like youtube, I can't even imagine what someone would feel if using a paid streaming service, perhaps thru (paid) proxies to avoid that stupid US only mentality, often adding the ISP fee and the fact a foreign country with a much worse economy where every single of your dollars takes 10 times more effort to make.
Granted, if those with licenses are going to sue people left and right for something which is not even theirs to begin with (because an absurd legal system allows them to), a service like crunchy might seem preferable (just like some people find iTunes acceptable, even tho lossless drmless content is out there...).
However, as you can see in the many cases of shows NOT licensed (ie. not in crunchy) the torrents still beat the alternative, both in quality (720p and 1080 being common); good beyond professional translation (often including explanation for cultural differences) and availability (the day after it was aired). And, there is content you will NEVER be able to watch "legally" as the studio that made them is no more or doesn't want to license it.
I'm sure you can somehow extrapolate this to games. As the successful Valve's strategy in Russia shows. Steam, for starters, is not restricted to the US... And being able to pay in your local currency, with prices realistically adapted to your local economy, is a must. Hence, you see movie studios selling movies in China for 3$ when the unauthorised copies go for like .5$; still reaps far more profits than drming and suing everyone to death (which they can't in a country where they can't purchase enough politicians to do their laws).
This is how you install Openbsd. You can download a small iso for your usb/cd, and that will download anything needed thru the net.
Back in the version 3 days, you needed only a floppy or two to start such an install, nowdays is the same, but ppl mostly use usb sticks now (the floppy image still exists).
Going for randomly made iso images on bittorrent was a very stupid idea. The only reason i could see someone needing a whole iso is if they lack connectivity.
You can compare this install method to Debian netinstall, or Ubuntu minimal iso images.
TIP: The installation and configuration guide is called "FAQ" for some reason.
Here is your due process: Presumed Guilty
Two young Mexican attorneys attempt to exonerate a wrongly convicted man by making a documentary. In the process, they expose the contradictions of a judicial system that presumes suspects guilty until proven innocent. -- IMDb
I think Convergence is better. The EFF should put up their own notary and just join Convergence instead of having their own separate way of doing the same...
I have already switched and added a bunch of random notaries. Everyone can just self sign and the notaries do the rest. Man in the Middle? Most notaries will warn your data differs. If a notary sucks, kick it and add another. Simple and clean.
Indeed: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman
The remaining crude is heavier, in deeper places. Needs more energy to extract, and refine, and its market price is lower than the lighter ones. One of the last places with good amounts of light crude oil is... Libya.
Fossil fuels are not going to run out anytime soon, they are simply getting less profitable, more expensive to get. It is one of the effects of "peaking", after more than a century of extracting the best (and even burning away perfectly good but then less valued natural gas).
Eventually the private companies will give up or reduce their size drastically and mostly State owned operations will remain. See the refining business? Of course you can't sue your country for a spill in the ocean or a national park they will drill into... Might even subcontract scapegoats to blame into oblivion for any mistakes.
Opec might even be reaching production limits, but this can never be disclosed to prevent market panic. In the meantime other powers are literally destroying Opec members one by one, only to leave the places unstable and unable to even reach previous Opec production levels.
ALSO country population and economies grow, and that needs more energy, period. China and India to name the biggest 2. Right now US & friends are having a field day bombing whomever they want, but soon enough those powers are going to act to protect their suppliers, and perhaps a bit of world balance will be restored (by way of tensions, sadly).
The US will have to learn from Europe to live with expensive energy and become more efficient, even if that means the collapse of suburbia, give up SUVs and live closer to work; not to mention relearn to produce their own stuff (including food) again.
And you can quickly recognize its a year and not some fancy version :)
Are you going to backport firefox every 6 weeks???
I had not experienced those bugs with thunar. I use it quite often because it loads much faster than nautilus, which i keep around just in case. I use thunar mostly with local files and removable media, haven't tried much its gvfs abilities.
Note also i trimmed some fat by using this psychocats apt-get remove line as a guide to remove many packages, it might have helped. Maybe just installing ubuntu minimal (at boot press f4 to choose "command-line system") and then just sudo apt-get install xfce4 afterwards could be better.
Well, if you do the heresy of RTFA, you'll find the proposal includes dropping the code names... and sticking to: alpha, beta and release.
The official version scheme is already YYMM. if anything, it should be changed into YYYY-MM as per the ISO 8601 standard.
If you think your LTS starts getting stale, take a look at the various PPAs. For instance you could keep a current stable Firefox (v6 atm), by adding the firefox-stable ppa to your Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
I personally switched to Xubuntu (XFCE) because i don't like gnome3/unity/kde4, had no problems using 11.04.
I'd say no support for rolling, support only LTS. With support meaning "backport bug/security fixes to the specific version you deployed" oh, and the actual corporate support of course... With true rolling, as soon as a fix is ready, there is a new version from upstream which would only need to pass the distro requirements (alpha/beta etc) to go in the official repos.
This might even relieve Canonical from supporting that many releases in a given 2 years time frame (1 instead of 4 + the previous LTS...)
My country has been in the Priority 301 for a couple of years, and the fact that remains there means our government is not willing to bend and prosecute their own people to satisfy foreign interests.
The main reason is US pharmaceutical patents which we do not enforce. People's lives are above US corporations, period. And they can all leave for all we care; there is still a whole world willing to trade with us and many do so without "IP" restrictions (technology transfer) in many countries who "coincidently" appear in that list.
If a country is not in the list, it means their politicians are willing to prosecute their own people to defend foreign interests, acting like a subjugated colony of an imperialist state.
The US gov is quick to "qualify" others in issues like Human Rights, Trade, Drugs and Terrorism, but fail to apply the same measure against themselves, which would make them fail in all.
Also the US foreign policy is one of the dirtiest, as proven by cable leaks worldwide, they will never back down and continue to disrespect the international community: spy, bribe, incite countries worldwide to favor their interests (mostly commercial, to hell with freedom), as you will see they won't leave Libya to have Libyans manage their own resources in sovereignty; instead, they will pass "the invoice" and basically ransack the place until they revolt and again bomb the place to change leaders as they have done for decades in countries worldwide.
Without the soviet power to exert some counter balance, the US corporate machine simply acts like they own the world, accountable to no one, they continue to apply pressure to enforce THEIR (corporate) laws worldwide, disregarding whatever it is people think or care.
If your country is in this list, be proud. If not, be in shame.
Actually, true communism has no separate government; everyone is part of it. A modern communist society would have a direct democracy system where everyone is consulted of everything, not a dear leader or a selected party/assembly taking decisions for you and me (much less oligopolies, lobbiers etc). In the past such a system (direct democracy) would had proven unfeasible, but IT today can actually make it happen.
The only problem is the rich would oppose it. Because richness needs poverty to exist. Unless this battle is waged by the majority poor against the minority rich, it will never occur. Which why the theory of a violent revolution as a means of change holds.
Of course there are many theories about how to make a transition into it, some claiming a middle stage (socialism) needed, others saying this middle stage would actually make it impossible since it would make a State too powerful against the people to ever relinquish power (here is where Socialists/Anarchists clash).
In the mean time the rich remain rich, while striving to become even richer and more powerful and the poor become poorer and more oppressed to prevent the necessary revolt that could put and end to it.
Screw that, i moved to Convergence.
Ironic considering Amtrak is owned by the federal government.
Hmm to ship goods to the US maybe?
This project makes sense, IF you finish linking both sides. That means Alaska and Canada as well as Russia and China, Korea, etc. The Chinese are already building lines elsewhere to reach Europe, can't how they wouldn't also help build lines to reach America.
Also, this should include high speed data links for Asia/America communications.
IMO Open mesh should do the job. 60$ to 99$ a piece, no dependency to third parties (unlike meraki); free, open source. Zero config, just plug in power and go. You can centrally manage things like bandwidth, splash page, etc.
Meshes have no practical coverage limits, can be finetuned as you are using many small APs (which connect wirelessly to each other) to customize the coverage areas, only one of them needs a link to the lan/wan.
Meraki started nice, but became proprietary and expensive, open mesh retained the openness of the original MIT project, and is even more reliable.
You should, really stay away from american ereaders, and their drm, stick to chinese linux based with open formats only, no wireless, just usb and SD. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hanlin_eReader
I also dropped TV about 10 years ago, internet and gaming are enough for me; and the occasional show and live news also happens to be on the net.
The original copyright lasted 14 years plus ONE extension of 14 more years. The idea for copyright was to put an END to hereditary printer guild rights over written works.
Before that, authors had to sell their work ONCE to the printers; and these could sell copies again and again and again without giving a cent back to the author. That industry had control over printing, because printing was very expensive and only few could afford the infrastructure and distribution to do so. Sounds familiar?
The United States of America is a country built upon infringing the "intellectual property" of others, especially the English at first, but they also stole and copied technology from many other countries until well into the 20th century, and a bit more discreetly after that.
Internet has made the industry obsolete. Physical media is irrelevant, radio and television are redundant. The powers that be, decided to alienate their customer base by declaring them criminals, thus starting the war.
The right to copy should be restored. Non profit copying should be permitted, period. And State enforced monopolies for commercial exploitation should be granted for very limited time, 5 years at most. This is the main agenda of the "Pirate Parties" of the world.
Artists never made money over sold discs, labels did.