And I *still* think we got a better deal than some other country that was founded by Puritans.

I have a HDHomeRun located upstairs with no real way to get the network signal down to a proposed MythTV box next to the television. A friend suggested HomePlug for ethernet over the electrical wires. The HD HomeRun (dual tuner) states 100Mbps network connection for its specification. HomePlug is 85MBps I believe and should be sufficient. A single HD stream is roughly 19Mbps I believe so all should be good. Note: all theoretical at this stage but perhaps worth looking into for yourself.

Props to you. Well done! Speaking out for common sense when a situation arises is what this world needs much more of.

Assuming you reach your potential then -- if you are graded to a normal distribution -- it comes down to the luck of who is in your class as to where you end up.

If this is true, it's hard to see how prior art isn't automatically existing on these apps.

The right-wing thinking seems to be that since businesses bring in money -- which is A Good Thing -- then anything a business does or wants must therefore be good. I'm not sure what a political system run by businesses (or at least unduly influenced by businesses) is called but we can summarise it with the acronym USA.

Only for Americans. Obviously HDMI is digital but SCART has been a European standard for around three decades, including three channel video. Welcome to 1980!

Your implication that they are therefore free and independent if they never receive money from the government is unsupported.

I agree that mandating a physical switch would have little effect on consumer habits. I've also measured most of my appliances and computers with my Kill-A-Watt and while many are close to zero or a watt or two some of the older stuff is around 10W. Energy efficiency is a large factor in my purchasing decisions -- bought a Wii instead of a PS3 or XBox, for instance -- and I tend to unplug (when not in use) devices I know have more than 1W power draw. Only a few essential things, like TiVo and refrigerators, are regularly left on. Now that we live in the US, I do miss the Australian power outlets with their built-in switches http://placelessness.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/powerpoint.jpg

Insulation is a huge factor. Our new house of ~2000 sq ft. with double-paned windows and floor, wall and ceiling insulation means a peak electricity usage in late southern California summer of around 20kW per day, 12kW per day last month (

Of course, if you really want to influence consumer behaviour have the price of the energy reflect its true cost, including clean-up and investment in new technologies. Fairly good chance the lazy people will make it off the couch when it has a large enough impact on their wallets.

There, fixed that for you.

No version for linux is a good thing.

Regarding the demise of light rail and government intervention: http://culturechange.org/issue10/taken-for-a-ride.htm

Agreed. For instance, the Californian DMV seem unable to process a driver's licence (or renewal of such) without one. The claimed they needed it and, when speaking with Social Security about getting the number to comply with the DMV demand, DSS pretty much said, "No they don't. Good bye" As an identifier for Social Security it's fine. As a unique public ID that is corralled into systems it was never designed to be in, that's a dumb idea and one does not find it surprising that identify theft is so high in the US.

Always Innovating has something very similar shipping already. ARM-based with 10 hours of battery life when you include the keyboard section -- plus it's open source.

Perhaps the Always Innovating Touch Book fits your bill of requirements the best? http://alwaysinnovating.com/ It's founded on open source, uses an ARM processor for very long battery life and there are a few demo videos showing it doing some cool stuff.