That's interesting. I hadn't seen details on power consumption of idle computers. I'd assumed they were using nearly as much power idle as active.

While I certainly prefer the stability of Linux, I don't understand why people are so resistant to shutting off their computers when they're not going to use them for a few hours. A few years ago, boot times were less than the time it took to make my morning coffee; since then, most linux distributions have put a lot of work into reducing boot times, and I find a reboot cycle is only about a minute.

Graeber made an interesting point, about how power groups are most concerned with denying the possibility of alternatives, to the point of undermining themselves. He gives the example of a demonstration outside a building where there were to be a series of IMF meetings. The demonstrators were met with an overwhelming police presence, and he went home feeling depressed, feeling the demonstration had been futile. But later, he learned that most of the IMF meetings had been shut down by security -- which is to say, the demonstrators had in fact scored a significant victory.

The lesson seems to be that we have to understand that our feelings of powerlessness are manufactured, and we need to learn to persist despite those feelings.

Windows phones are no simpler than iPhones or Android phones.

Good to know.

Well said. I tried to make similar points, but you explained them much more thoroughly and clearly.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis analyzes this at length: that in most of the world, the rich live in urban centers, and the poor have great difficulty affording housing in urban centers. The trouble is, of course, the urban centers are where all the jobs are. So, there are all sorts of messy, quasi-legal and illegal housing arrangements. It's quite common for people to have to pay rent to sleep on sidewalks, for example.

It's relatively recently that housing patterns in the US have started shifting to match those of the rest of the world.

Of course, many forms of work can be performed from anywhere, provided there's access to high-bandwidth communication, which would significantly ease the burden on many people to find affordable housing. But that rather brings us back to the problem illustrated in the original article.

Then you don't understand poverty.

Conservatives used to occasionally kick up a fuss about "unfunded mandates". Poor people have to deal with those all the time. One unfunded mandate is that Internet access is a practical requirement for participation in contemporary society. If you don't have Web access, you can't search for jobs or apply for them, or fill out legally mandatory paperwork, or do your homework.

As we all know, web-enabled devices are bargains, because they enable access to many different forms of communication and entertainment. I remember a furor erupting when a local newspaper, for an article about long-term unemployment showed a photo of a family in a one-room apartment. There was a table, with a smartphone on it. There were a few chairs, and some blankets and pillows on the floor, and no other furniture; no television, no other telephone, nothing. Yet people complained they couldn't really be poor, because they had a smartphone.

And yes, McDonalds is bad food, and overpriced. Try visiting a poor urban neighborhood sometime. It's a major problem that low-income neighborhoods frequently lack grocery stores, that the only food sources within a few miles are corner stores with overpriced convenience foods and fast food restaurants.

The ASUS RT-N66U's stock firmware prominently features this as an option (though I'd recommend replacing the stock firmware with RMerlin's customized version that includes OpenVPN).

I have a router that allows for setting multiple SSIDs and for setting the access rules, so I set up an SSID of openwireless.org a few months ago, with no access to my LAN but otherwise unrestricted access. I live in a dense urban area, near a heavily-trafficked shopping and dining area. I get a dozen or so unique MACs connecting to the open WiFi a day. They usually just connect for a minute or two. The increase in bandwidth usage has been negligible: less than 1%.

I haven't checked exactly what they're connecting to, but it looks a lot to me like they're just checking Google Maps, and no one is downloading porn.

Hear, hear.

The degree of cowardice in this thread is astonishing.

What is it with these anti-science hippies, quoting scientists, instead of trusting in corporations? We only produce about twice the amount of food needed to feed everyone in the world, so, clearly, we need to bring food production more tightly under the control of a tiny number of gigantic agribusinesses, in order to eliminate hunger.

That's my last line of psychological defense.

Science has fed the world with an unbelievable array of giant, hearty and delicious foods. It's called agriculture, and it was invented 10,000 years ago.

Hunger and poverty are political weapons.

I was beginning to think that the Democrats maybe weren't so bad, and maybe I should reconsider my stance of refusing to vote for them. Then I was in a bookstore, and saw Madeline Albrights lich-like grimace on a book cover, and I remembered.