We all use data transmission over light all the time (sort of) : IR remotes. That decently works when pointing the remote towards the direction of the device.

Biggest non-security concern : 2.4GHz is sometimes very seriously saturated. I tried free wifi at the most central downtown square : it's the kind of experience where you can barely access the portal and maybe google's home page but any google search or loading a bigger web page than that will fail.

There's Wifi 5GHz but smarphones don't even support it. Wifi 60GHz will be pseudo line-of-sight (with some multipathing) but it's not there yet ; I don't know about the cost in $ and power. Will be a ton faster than that visible light technology but won't work on tiny cheap devices.

Ads that sell death related products to visitors and relatives. This also becomes just another data point : your age, dead family members and friends, age of the dead when they died, age you had at the moment of their death. Eventually you may get ads for a retirement home when your mom's relatives are dead, ads for death insurance etc. (I'm feeling like a psychopath for writing these awful words..)

Now, I'd hope f***b**k users receive advertisement for a rope to hang themselves with and quit using the service one way or another.

I find it funny, like a RAID array efficiently replicating the corrupted data or data loss over all disks.

x86 did gain reliability features years ago, with the Nehalem-EX series and successors.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

Not sure if that's close enough for you. A year ago there were some additional RAS features (lower quality article : ) http://semiaccurate.com/2014/0...
Perhaps it doesn't go as far as the most paranoid mainframes but I wonder if such systems can be called a minicomputer.

Airports do happen to cost a shit ton on their own. Though in my opinion, perhaps both suck. Massively upgrading slow speed networks (as in ~100 mph and more on good tracks) with most of them electricity powered might be a good way to spend the zillions. Frequent runs, more places it goes too, cheaper fares, fuller trains, wifi/4G and maybe USB power for the people married to their phones and then who cares if the trip takes 5 hours instead of 3.

As I said on the bottom of the thread there's Philips BDM4065UC. It's an actual monitor, or a TV turned into an actual monitor so at the least you know you can have the pixels transmitted at RGB, get 60Hz and have no processing.

Maybe around 32" can be enough?

I question the need for a giant monitor (55", 65" etc.) in the first place. I don't even think they look good as you're looking at LCD motion artifacts, other LCD failings and excess brightness beamed at your eyes.

There's now a 40" PC monitor even, Philips BDM4065UC. Just what you're looking for with plenty of inputs except that according to the review I've just looked up, the scaling of HD sources is a bit crap. It shows content without processing it and has low input lag. Perhaps good if you use a PC with displayport or otherwise have players, receiver etc. that scale to 4K on their own. And oh, the HDMI is 1.4 not 2.0

I'm adding fb.com to my list of blocked hosts. Thanks, f***book.

That must be why sometimes gets firefox to use 107%, perhaps up to 112% CPU. That's the good old model of one thread does everything, many little threads spend their time doing nothing or take care of a few crumbles.

It might be worth trying to install a command-line Ubuntu and to apt-get install the Xfce desktop (check the recommends and suggest in 'apt-cache show xfce4'). I happen to not really like the Xfce desktop in Xubuntu and even in Mint Xfce 17.x but I remember than installing Xfce over command-line debian squeeze gave a rather nice clean state.

This illustrate one of GTK3's "features" : the little underlines under the F of "File", the E of "Edit", the V of "View" are permanently disabled, making the alt+letter shortcuts undiscoverable to new users.

Define cheap and great?
Some stuff is definitely both, but that's the electronics. Amplifiers, DAC or sound card : do your research and you'll see you can get one of these with audiophile quality for about $50. Really, that's what modern electronics (less than ten years) does for you! Cables are bullshit too : that means "audiophile" performance again with the cheapest ones.

Then you're left with the actual speakers and this is not as easy as these are real physical, mechanical items. So there's real cost (like say, a couple high end frying pans or a good sofa or whatever) and also a need for physical size and room around them. So you need to spend closer to $200 than to $50 at least and that's for two speakers, not five plus one speakers. Whether $200 is cheap or $20 is cheap will depend on who you ask.

I question the value of moving energy sources close to where they're used. What's better, one million little energy-creating devices and one million large batteries, or just one nuclear reactor?
The push for "decentralization" is much ideological with undertones of if something is decentralized then it's better, gives more freedom etc. But losses in the power grid are actually low. What's more : if you put the renewables on the grid, then you want power transmitted over thousands of kilometers to smooth out and average out the problems of production and demand. That makes the grid a lot more costly than it already is and becomes what I call "decentralized, my ass".
So I believe you can do a "decentralized" set up with renewable + storage on a very small scale in a rural setting (non urban, non suburban) and that's good if it's 100% off-grid ; with better energy storage it would become more viable (e.g. your own power for cooking rather than natural gas bottles and wood). With really good and cheap energy storage even renewables on the grid get desirable again but get ready for a Nobel prize of chemistry or physics if you can achieve that and if it's possible at all, maybe it's as far away as nuclear fusion is.

Interesting argument but go live in fully electric housing and use bicycles for transportation, then you won't miss fossil fuels much even though your use of everything is "unlimited". Of course, indirect uses of fossil fuels are inescapable such as the trucks that supply where you buy food at the very least.

#3 everything on a VM : that's very interesting but you need IOMMU support at the hardware, firmware and commercial levels.
Nvidia (for graphics cards) makes the feature enterprise-only, Intel has byzantine rules of "this i5 or i7 but not this one", AMD enables it everywhere but motherboard vendors sparingly care about the feature.