I don't read military fiction books, you insensitive clod. Seriously. I don't. They are all boring.

My home security system consists mainly of a number of conspicuous perimeter signs (which mention the main hardware provider, Smith & Wesson), a large and vocal canine, and some "hardware" as a last line of defense. 100% uptime (aside from some partial downtime when I take the dog with me) and effectiveness since installation.

If I may be perfectly sincere, a medium-large dog that barks when startled is generally all you need to protect your home. Most all dogs are incredibly vigilant, and no burglar wants to deal with a dog. From a criminal's perspective, it is much easier to move on to the next house than fight off a potentially dangerous dog (or dogs - it can be hard to tell whether a home with a dog has one or several). Most burglars don't spend days, weeks or months casing a house like bank robbers in movies do.

I did have a break-in once. There was no dog and no car in the driveway. 1:00 in the afternoon on a weekday and some homeless 37 year-old drug addict decided my house was the one to loot. Too bad for her (yes, her) I was home. Too bad for me that the prosecutor inexplicably refused to speak to me and had the charges dismissed six months later. Lucky for her I did not have "hardware" handy at the moment and was in utter disbelief.

Not a problem for those of use who use aftermarket/open firmware. Or not such a problem. The recent hubbub over Linksys routers only concerns those with stock firmware, no? Of course it is a bit disturbing nonetheless, but at least there are not major inherent flaws in the hardware that can not be patched. And I'm 100% positive that they are many routers that have much more serious issues. And how often are home or small business routers really directly hacked anyway?

Security holes in a Belkin something? Go on, you can't possibly be serious.

Useless!

That's your answer? Lasers aren't really a problem because the people using them should know better, and they should be easy to catch? Good one!

Wow, I'm gonna get rich at Bonnaroo this year! Every time the damn medical helicopter, photography helicopter, or sheriff's plane goes near the festival grounds, multiple people point green lasers at them. Gotta make sure to get the number of the local FBI field office, I guess. I'm not sure how musicians are never blinded at music festivals, since there are always idiots pointing lasers everywhere.

Don't tell HP: they're promoting WIndows 7 PCs again, due to "popular demand." This may be a result of Microsoft's sustained alternation-based release cycle. After ever decent version the Windows dev team take a long vacation and phone in the next release.

Examples: Win 95 - somewhat groundbreaking, Win 98 - buggy as all hell, Win 98 second edition - much better, Windows Millennium Edition - huge pile of crap, XP - much better, and still widely used, Vista - a bad joke with no punchline, 7 - best Windows ever(?), 8 - does anyone actually like or want it? Win 8 is probably so bad that 8.1 can't fix it enough, and isn't enough of an overhaul to count as a new version, but Windows 9 is going to be killer!

Disclaimer: I was a DOS and OS/2 user until they faded away, and have been 95% on linux since 2007 (except for my Android addiction), so maybe my opinion of Windows doesn't count.

There was a Goodwill thrift shop in Akron, Ohio that used to sell old, used computers with some odd linux distro on them. I don't remember what distro it was, something unexpected, but this was several years ago, and I was more than a bit surprised. Might just have been one person's labor of love and a way to repurpose old hardware for po' folks, who knows. I may go back in there to see if they are still doing it, and what distro it is now, if I'm in the area again.

Yes. It is well known that conventional automobiles suffer drive train power losses of ~15% or more, which gearheads know is the reason you get different numbers whether you measure horsepower and torque at the wheels or at the engine's output shaft. If you are using electric motors at each wheel with less spinning hardware you also have less loss, though we also know that comparing power ratings of electric motors to traditional cars is troublesome. So as you are alluding to, AWD electrically-driven cars shouldn't suffer the same losses (relative to 2WD ones) as traditional cars. Of course you have the added complexity and cost inherent in having more motors, but 4 smaller electric motors shouldn't bee too much more inefficient than one or two larger ones, right? If anything, the elimination of driveshafts and mechanical differentials should be a plus (aside from adding failure points), no?