"And the municipalities are nullifying the will of private citizens."

Every time the politicians running a municipality enact something desired by less than 100% of the residents it's "nullifying the will of private citizens", but it's also enforcing the will of other private citizens. If it does something which nullifies the will of a majority of the residents, said politicians will find themselves replaced come the next election.

Almost all of the members of the NC legislature are not residents of Wilson and I daresay the ones who voted for that law were more concerned with what TWC wanted than what Wilsonites did.

I feel reasonably sure that the elected officials in Wilson who got Greenlight started were residents of Wilson and a lot more in touch with the wishes for faster broadband of their fellow residents, wishes which TWC and Embarq weren't interested in dealing with until Wilson started Greenlight, and then, as I recall hearing at the time, all of a sudden they started whining about how they were going to "real soon now".

In my neighborhood in a different NC city, where we're only about 3 blocks from a switching station, I heard "real soon now" about DSL as Carolina Telephone and Telegraph became Sprint became Embarq became CenturyLink. At some point I gave up and went with cable modem.

He wants to believe it, therefore it must be true.

SSDs

Actually the FCC is preventing states from nullifying the will of municipalities.

Make no mistake, these laws, no matter what rationales are offered, are only about protecting outfits like Comcast and Time Warner Cable from competition, and keeping certain areas reserved for them until they feel like getting around to providing service in them.

Can't you restore an old iTunes backup or is that no longer available? Maybe this was back in the days when my wife had an iPhone.

You're also seeing people get annoyed with the latest iOS release and hold off on upgrading or revert back.

No purpose if we cease to exist after we die? Is not leaving a better world for our descendants not purpose enough? Is not making life better for our fellow humans not purpose enough? What is it with Christians and their "if humans do not matter for eternity they do not matter at all" sickness?

You are a member of a very unique species: a species able to define a purpose for itself. Nature spent 13,500,000,000 years creating a brain capable of this unique task. Honor the effort and use it. Or, wallow in your nihilist mental squalor. It's up to you.

People used to say the same thing about the "luminiferous aether," you know.

Personally, I think "dark matter" and "dark energy" don't really exist. Instead, I think there's something wrong with our understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe. Perhaps gravity doesn't behave with the inverse-square law across vast distances like we think. Perhaps there's a subtle force out there we've yet to discover that only acts over extreme distances. After all, quantum mechanics is only observable at extremely small scales, and a century ago nobody even suspected it existed. What's to say there's not something else that acts in an observable fashion only at galactic scales?

So we should let them pipe it down to a Gulf of Mexico port and put it on a ship because nothing bad will happen to those ships?

Fortunately I have a Beowulf of RPis to cut that time down.

Seriously though, I've been using h.264 MKV files for a number of years even before I owned a RPi and I've never had a problem playing videos aside from slight delays on high bitrate BluRay files.

That's the fault of the processor and not the GPU. People care more about the actual playback performance more than the UI (which could be done via a tablet or laptop anyway). Anyway, the faster performance of the RPi 2 makes this a bit of a moot point.

The first generation Raspberry Pi did SD pretty well and could do HD with a few caveats. The RPi 2 has even more CPU and memory and does quite well with the HD movies I've thrown at it. And it's 1/10 the price of the Intel offering.

I walked right into that one. Well played.

Outside of kids, that's probably true.

The safest option is to let Canada transport the stuff across Canada to a Canadian port.