Short range wireless audio/video is still going to have a lot of the same issues in terms of quality and latency. Some solutions will do lossless video over short distances (the 60GHz wireless video stuff for example), although I'm not sure about latency.

What are you actually looking to put on the TV, though? If it's just media playback, there are lots of solutions involving either dedicated media players or HTPCs that are going to provide a much smoother user experience than how you describe using the laptop (they'll play stuff over your wireless network). If it's videogames, then there are solutions for that too, various in-home streaming options such as those provided by nVidia or Valve that can stream from your desktop computer upstairs to a cheap dedicated device (like an nVidia Shield or a Valve Steam Link, which will be out in November for $50). Those are not lossless, but the quality is decent, and since they're gaming focused, the latency is pretty low. They're designed to use a gamepad with them, though.

So maybe something that is more specific to your use case might work better. Some of them (like the nVidia Shield) could be used for both media and gaming. I think SteamLink is gaming specific, it's pretty optimized for that one task and nothing else, hence the low cost.

I'm not sure that I'd trust a passive 50ft HDMI run to do 1080p60, even at 26AWG... and 26AWG cables aren't exactly slim. If I needed to run 50+ feet, I'd use an active cable (like a monoprice redmere one) or some sort of Cat 6 based extender. The Redmere cable if you want something simple, the Cat 6 extender if you want something cheap (redmere cables are around a buck a foot).

Bonus to using Cat 6 is that it's easy to extend USB over Cat 6 too, so if you just run three Cat 6 cables, you can use cheap passive extenders for both HDMI and USB with a cheap USB hub for the keyboard/mouse.

You may be looking at two different solutions, then. One to handle the audio and video, one to handle the keyboard/mouse.

Does it absolutely need to be wireless? Both HDMI and USB are easy to run over ethernet cabling with pretty cheap passive adapters, and it's the only solution that isn't going to have any sort of lag or quality loss. $12 adapters get you 150ft over ethernet cabling for USB, $20 gets you HDMI over 98 feet of ethernet cabling, and there are active solutions if you need to get HDMI farther. Drill some holes between each floor and hide the cable and that should work for you. Note that these don't use a network for extending, they use the ethernet cabling directly.

If it does need to be wireless, it's not going to be cheap, it's not going to be lossless, and it's not going to be low latency. There are various solutions, like WHDI transmitters (~30 feet through walls, maybe $170 for a kit), or h.264 transmitters (~60 feet through walls, maybe $500 for a kit). You may also be able to combined the h.264 transmitters with a powerline network to get more range (the ones that I have do wireless or ethernet, since they use UDP/IP). Both will add latency and reduce quality slightly.

USB is trickier, as wireless USB extenders are VERY rare. The few that I could find had all been discontinued, so the only option might be enterprise-grade USB-over-IP extenders that might work over wifi adapters (they're not tested over wifi).

Really, just drill some holes and run some Cat6 cable with some cheap Monoprice HDMI-to-Cat6 and USB-to-Cat6 passive adapters. This will save you hundreds (or thousands) of dollars as compared to wireless gear that will always be a really crummy experience.

Whoever said that the electricity was free? It's the charging that's free, because they treat the cost of the estimated lifetime energy consumption of your car to be a sunk cost as part of the purchase. You've already paid for the electricity.

Tesla eventually intends to have their charging stations be completely solar powered. I'm not convinced that's actually feasible, but if it were, then the cost of electricity would be eliminated, and the remaining cost would be the construction and maintenance of the charging stations.

There are 217 stations in the US, not 100. They're still rapidly expanding.

The numbers are also not comparable. Gas stations are required for all refuelling of gasoline-powered vehicles. Supercharger stations are only required for long-distance trips that are typically quite rare. There are often many gas stations in close proximity to eachother, sometimes two or three at the same intersection. That may be useful when there are different gas stations competing with eachother, but pointless when you're talking about a manufacturer-provided charging network that is free to use.

Re-read the text right before what you'r replying to. Block-sized inserts. If you shift all the data by exactly one block, then the blocks would be the same.

Tesla has been very successful in very cold climates. They'll sell you the cold-weather version. Range suffers a bit, but not dramatically. Anecdotal evidence indicates 10-20% range reduction for very cold temperatures. The batteries aren't a problem because they would get very hot if they weren't actively cooled, so they simply need to be cooled less, and they need a bit of heating when you start.

I still see horses on the streets of my city. They may be very limited in number, and very limited in use (police and tourist carriages), but they're still there.

Right now, the largest fast-charging network in the US (Tesla's) is free to use. If they extend free supercharging to the model 3, there may be significant pressure on other auto manufacturers or charging providers to also offer the charging for free (if all else is equal, people may pick the electric car that has a charging network that is both free and more extensive).

I think the 5-10 years figure for a tipping point is correct, in that long-range electric cars will drop in price enough to enter the mass market within that timeframe (in under 5 years, more likely, and it'll rapidly grow from there), but I think there's zero chance of gas stations going away in the next decade. That'll take far longer.

I bet more homes are equipped with pool skimmers than shotguns, but then, I live in a country where almost no homes are equipped with shotguns, and firing one off in a residential area for any reason (even self-defence) would result in jail time.

IE hasn't been integrated with the shell for a decade. If you type a URL into an Explorer window in Win7 or 8, it just launches your default browser, which may not be IE.

Idiot drone pilot flying around other people's property a mere 10 feet off the ground? Damn straight you should have the right to take that thing out. But it should still be illegal to shoot it down with a gun. That's just a public safety hazard far worse than the drone. Saying that it should be safe because shot is small and doesn't hurt when falling is like saying that it's safe to point a gun at somebody and pull the trigger because you think the chamber is empty. Some idiot is going to eventually make a mistake and shoot at a drone with something he shouldn't, something that isn't going to be as harmless as birdshot.

My suggestion for dealing with low-flying drones: pool skimmer. If it's just hovering there 10 feet off the ground, just grab the thing out of the air (or smack it hard enough to down it). If it's flying low enough over your property for the pole to reach it, then it's flying low enough that you should be allowed to take it out.

No, you're right. Looking into it, there appears to be no reason why what I've described couldn't happen at the ZVOL layer, but none of the layers on top of it support it. An exception would probably be block-sized inserts in the middle of a file on a ZFS filesystem that has dedupe enabled. As the "new" blocks were written out for the rest of the file, the filesystem would see that they were identical to existing blocks on disk and just point to them instead.

Of course, dedupe on ZFS is a terrible memory hungry monster that should be avoided unless you can afford to throw ridiculous amounts of RAM at it. Enterprise customers might have hardware that can feed the beast, but a home user sticking three 4TB drives in a raidz vdev would be hard pressed to feed it the 60GB of RAM that those few disks would require.

You're far from a typical user, however, and 100 petabytes of this new stuff would be just as cost prohibitive as 100 petabytes of NAND or DRAM...