Yeah, the Nook lineup seems to a be a lot more open than the Kindle. You can also root most (all?) Nooks if you want to. I have a simple touch and really enjoy it.

You can tell pretty easily from the MAC address, which is broadcasted in the clear even on an encrypted network. You *can* change that on most routers, but most people have no reason to.

Mine was "linksys" for a long time -- not actually the default on my router but it was an open network and I figured most people's computers would already be configured to automatically connect to it.

Now I live in a denser city, everyone secures their networks here and if you don't you'll be hammered with torrent traffic all day.

No, your laptop by itself couldn't, but the protocol is certainly capable of handling the distance if you tweak the timeout settings and have a powerful radio and a good antenna setup.

They probably wouldn't actually use wifi though, some of the cellphone-based standards are more suitable for this type of system.

To use this you would probably need an antenna and modem set up on your house, much like satellite Internet. It would still be a challenge though, I've streamed data off a balloon before and we were tracking it manually with a high gain antenna and used extremely slow data rates. They're going to be limited to solar power too, which limits their radio output power a lot.

Most encrypted .zip files do not encrypt the file names. I wouldn't be surprised if at one point it was the most commonly used encryption scheme. So yeah, that problem is definitely out there.

It might just be personal preference on my part. Not many people seem to complain about this, but I am pretty much incapable of deciphering speech when the newer GSM codecs switch to their lowest bandwith settings or try to fill in for dropped packets. To me it just seems like a bunch of speech-like sounds that don't resemble real words in any way. And the ~1 second latency (often times two cell phones) gets bothersome as well.

I only noticed jitter once or twice. It was less severe than jitter I've experienced through normal cell connections (and even on landlines), although I'm sure it could get way worse with bad network conditions.

In any case, that phone is broken and the carrier doesn't offer any UMA-capable phones for almost free with a contract anymore. I don't like talking on the phone anyway so meh.

My old phone had UMA, which let me connect to my carrier network through wifi alone. I generally preferred the call quality through UMA over GSM except when the network was heavily loaded. It also let me take my phone while traveling and still be able to send texts, make calls, and check voicemail from time to time without paying a dime extra or trying to buy sim cards overseas. I think that being unable to charge roaming fees is why most carriers have either discontinued or never even tried to support this.

Yep, my parent's house had some good old balanced pair (not twisted) phone lines that were probably installed before the house even had electricity. The main phone box consisted of two copper buss bars with bolts you could tighten onto wires. It handled dialup just fine for many years.

If you do a search for "Texas police tank" you'll see that some police department does have a small armored vehicle. I suppose it might technically qualify as a tank but it has road tires and no gun on top. From what I've heard, they didn't use it much and eventually stopped driving it due to fuel costs. I don't have a source on that, is was some random guy on the Internet ;)

And it turns out that it's much cheaper to buy bullets by the ton. I certainly hope our tax money doesn't go into buying bullets at Walmart prices.

Utility knife for opening boxes and stuff.

A cheapo multimeter. You're working with electronics, having one of these is a requirement even though many people in IT try to get by without them.

Perhaps a soldering iron and solder sucker. Hopefully you'll never need them but weird shit happens.

A set of precision screwdrivers is sometimes needed for taking stuff apart, and can be pushed into extra duty as pin extractors or whatever else.

A dedicated Ethernet tester can be pretty handy too. And get a crimper for these if you don't have one already.

BTW, "geek" isn't an insult anymore...

I think even my TI-83's rand() function beats free will.

I had the same printer. We only got rid of it once all of the plastic paper guides had broken off the front, around 10 years after we bought it. I've never seen an inkjet live up to its reliability, and the price of the ink was amazing.

They did print the uprights with Titanium EBM, but the article neglected to mention it.

It looks like they have a few specs on their website: http://www.formulagroupt.be/pages/car

It doesn't mention their cooling system, but often these motors are oil or water cooled and have a radiator.