Which Metro? Maybe some, but definitely not all. The US is large and diverse, not everyone is packed in like sardines.

I went to a multi-band AC router because I have devices in my house that it just doesn't make sense to run a wire to. My basement was finished before I bought the house (new in 09, owner fully finished it) and the ceiling is all drywall.

Yeah, I can poke holes and run cabling just fine. However, it was just easier for me to spend some $$$ and now I can throw files back and forth from anywhere in the house at better than 802.11g speeds; typically half of gigabit wireline speeds. My internet isn't fast enough to really give me a boost - but that wasn't my main goal.

There's already wires that can tell the camera to turn on in the event the car is placed in reverse. They're called reverse lights, and they light up. This is commonly how aftermarket cameras are wired for power; no reason to feed power when the car is out of reverse.

That's not a metal screw, it's a plastic pop fastener designed to hold plasticy bits in place.

Definitely understood; I know money's always tight. Wasn't necessarily trying to come across overbearing, but if you know the requirements going into it - then it's a choice, even if the devs bloat the game in ways we may not like.

Oh, believe me - I always thought "Man, if I make (x) amount of money, I'll be SET" - but everyone's finances are their own. Back when I would spend money as quick as it would come in, I would have one of the better upper class rigs of my gaming group. Now? Core2Quad with a GTX280. Why? I have other priorities as well; paying off all of my debt is becoming a BIG priority even though I'm years away from retirement.

My point should have been more to - if you are into gaming and can afford to shell out the bucks for the big name games, then you probably have some income that you can save or just outright spend on a larger drive, spinny or SSD. Hence, buy a bigger SSD or HD. Simple solution. If not, then don't buy a game that has such large requirements and save up until you can.

Besides - even if you don't buy a larger drive, well... then offload some games? There's solutions; potentially sub-optimal for what you want to do. At this point it isn't like the creator/publisher is going to go back and re-do all of the sound files, right?

Buy a bigger SSD. Or use a faster HDD for those "less used apps" (I know, Windows kinda sucks at this, can't dynamically move a lot of apps). My recent SSD purchase was going back and forth between a 256GB and a 480GB precisely for this reason; I had a 300gb Velociraptor that was @ around 225 before I bought.

I went with a 480GB because I decided in the end, sacrificing space and having to shuffle apps or reload windows was not an option. Once this gets close to full, I'll probably buy Crucial M500 960GB to replace it, and have the 480GB as a scratch/additional apps storage.

Don't get me wrong - I understand space costs money. Honestly - if you have a gaming rig and are buying Titanfall for whatever the price is - invest in larger fast storage as well.

Hah. I'm far from rich. The basis of this implementation isn't in my opinion about changing how much someone pays for their locally served Comcast service. Everyone has their own thoughts (opinions as it is) on how things should optimally work, and I pointed out one of the standing issues that could impair usable performance for someone. My thoughts were not about others using wifi at all, but rather about Comcast adding these additional guest access points in the same airspace (whether they're on the same channel or not - can cause congestion.) I know others that live in more confined areas (apartments) have a potential to be much more impacted by this even if they don't know how wifi actually works, which is why I mentioned people in my neighborhood having wifi on channels that are overlapping.

The thing to note with this setup isn't about money or customer bandwidth in my opinion - if you are in a congested 2.4ghz area, those additional used frequencies have the potential to cause issues within the already congested space. Even with my home on a fairly decent plot of land sees a bunch of other SSIDs on 2.4ghz - and some are coded to non-1/6/11 channels. I'm doing my best to run with N everywhere possible on 5ghz, but some chipsets in older devices (wife's original nexus 7) don't have 5ghz availability. That's not even speaking to the diminished range of N given my router's location in the house either.

On a side note, it has been YEARS since I've witnessed a laptop that actually had the chance to spin down it's drives. Probably since win3.x days. Software being what it is today (McAfee at my place of employment) seems to have this bug of reading/writing to disk every few seconds, defeating any power management setups.

It's a balancing act that I'm sure they would rather rectify for the consumer - but they cannot. The content providers are always going to want to have some form of tied in advertising; Hulu can guarantee that the advertisements are seen - as opposed to DVRs which can skip (or fast forward) through the adverts.

I haven't paid for Hulu yet (bing rewards points provide this to me for free for now) and I've enjoyed running through shows I wouldn't otherwise watch. As much as I would love to see no commercials, unless there's some other way to plug in advertising into the actual show - I don't feel it's going to ever happen.

I had the pleasure of renting a vehicle with the rear cross-traffic alert. I hadn't noticed a vehicle moving behind me in a crowded parking lot... the system beeped like crazy, made me hit the brakes right away without any real prompting otherwise. Stuff like that is something I'll definitely have in my next vehicle.

My current house and the last house I lived in still maintains access to the cable network (TV and internet service) during a localized power outage. I'm guessing with the proliferation of their own VOIP service, they've had to do the same thing the telcos have - keep things up using batteries. 5+ years ago the midwest was hit with severe wind - and my neighborhood was out for 7 days. At that point I bought a generator shortly after - and I haven't had any notable losses since, but at this point I'd rather have the availability of the generator at least for the furnace in case it's cold out.

I forsee that most companies will be putting more and more infrastructure in to keep services running even with localized power outages.

I am with you on this - and nowadays, small upgrades can make an unusable machine very usable! Best bang for the buck as follows in my opinion:

1. SSD - I bought two in the last six months; one for an older core2duo laptop and one for a core2quad desktop. Both machines run circles around the other hard drive based machines in my house.
2. Memory - even though DDR2 prices are seemingly through the roof compared to DDR3, still less expensive than a new machine. Max out that memory if you find it hard to open multiple apps. The laptop is limited to 4GB, I find myself hitting that limit (no swap on SSD).
3. Graphics - can't do anything about the laptop, but even low end cards can beat the high end cards of years ago.

These three things will make me not need a new desktop at home for a while, and even though the laptop I own can't get a graphics update - for what I do with it, it's probably going to outlast the desktop excluding any hardware failure.

Was "home" at a higher elevation than Virginia Beach? I'm wondering if that didn't have a factor as well. A better test would have been to drive the exact same route and direction end to end and compare madman versus steady speed.

I've found using hills to my advantage ticks up my mpg by 1-2; I use as little fuel as possible to get to the top of a hill - even if it means slowing 5-10mph under the speed limit, then use the downhills to get to speed +5 or 10. Overall energy spent appears to be less, given the onboard computer readings as well as performing a calculated fill up.