Actually, rent one. Two, preferably.

First, find a local VAR who knows everything there is to know about Juniper Networks switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs, etc. Juniper's gear is rock solid. Definitely not cheap, but solid.

Second, find a competing VAR who knows everything about a competing brand. The obvious choice for most people is Cisco, but they will overcharge you up front on hardware and every year on support contracts. For a small business, I would instead look at HP ProCurve or SonicWALL.

Have the resellers figure out what might be wrong with your existing network and recommend upgrade paths. Assuming they actually know what they're talking about, buy the gear from them and have them help install and troubleshoot.

Do not try to do it all solo without professional assistance.

AC, you yourself do not know what you are talking about.

Huck still referred to Jim as a nigger in the final chapter. That's the only term that would be believable in the thoughts and speech of a youth with his upbringing. He wasn't rich/educated enough to conceive of Jim as "colored" and "black" wasn't part of the common parlance.

"The use of the word 'nigger' is central to the book's meaning..."

I completely disagree. If that's true, then Huck would have stopped using the term nigger to refer to Jim by the end of the book. He never does, despite having found respect and admiration for Jim and becoming his friend. The people of Twain's time (and many decades afterward) simply didn't routinely use other terms to refer to black people. The use of any other word by Huck would have made the dialog sound artificial.

At the time I first read the book, in the 1970's, many whites in Connecticut near where Twain lived routinely referred to black people as niggers. Many still do to this day.Because of my own context, I didn't see the term as being immensely racially charged. And I'm quite confident that Twain didn't, either.

I can tell you that the mindset of white folk in the 1970's in the vicinity of where Twain wrote Huck Finn was that people with black skin were niggers. Most didn't use other words, except perhaps negro. They weren't aiming to be especially harmful or shocking. That's just the word they used all day every day. It was part of the normal dialect, just as "African American" is today.

Is there any published evidence? Certainly. You can tour Twain's house and that of his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to learn about their efforts to promote racial and gender equality. They thought that all human beings should have equal rights. Yet I'm not aware of any cases of Twain trying to change the nation's vocabulary to remove the word nigger from common usage.

On top of that, Huck is still referring to Jim in the last chapter, despite having become his friend. Huck doesn't switch to some other term in an effort to spare Jim's feelings because the term didn't have the connotations of being a deliberately harmful insult the way it does today.

"Removing [one word] from it removes the entire point of it having ever been written or read."

You seriously believe that Twain's point in writing the book hinged on his use of the word nigger? Wow. I guess you would be content to read a six-letter abbreviated version of the book.

Insults don't help you make your case.

Regardless, you must have grown up in a different part of the country than I did. My home town had a population of about 6,000. Of those, only a dozen or so were not white.

Even in the 70's, many locals still used the term nigger to routinely refer to black people, as in "a nigger came into the store today." It was a common part of the local dialect. The usage of the word was certainly insensitive, but it wasn't meant to be malicious. Perhaps you find that hard to believe, but it's true. That's just what life was like in that part of the country not long ago.

Because of that, I don't believe that Twain's repeated use of the term nigger was intended to be harmful. That's simply the term that Huck would have naturally used given his upbringing. Anything else would have made the dialog sound artificial. If you go back and read the book, Huck is still calling Jim a nigger even in the last chapter. Despite being friends and having respect for Jim, he doesn't change to using some other term. How, then, do you back up the conclusion that Twain intended for the word to be viewed as intentionally injurious?

The book was absolutely meant to highlight the belief that everyone, even non-whites, should be free. But Twain wasn't trying to change anyone's vocabulary. And I don't believe he would care overly much about the use or avoidance of any specific words in his book other than free and freedom.

And before you go saying my hometown had nothing in common with the world Twain lived in, it was only 20 miles from where Twain was living in Hartford when he wrote the book. The people living there are exactly like the audience he was trying to reach when he wrote the story.

Perhaps I'll do that.

Meanwhile, try this experiment. Head to the nearest major metropolitan area. At night, go to the projects. Find a group of young black men. Go up to the biggest one and say, "Yo, nigger. Wassup?"

Let me know how he feels about hearing you say it.

Whether you want to believe it or not, words can have vastly different connotations depending on the context.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of blatant discrimination?

I'm white. I've been in the midst of a very poor, very non-white neighborhood with people walking up to me and demanding to know, "What are you doing here, white boy?"

That helped me relate to how black people feel about the n-word.

And I have a godson with cerebral palsy. Trust me, that radically changed the way I feel about the word "retard." It's not a term I want used around me or my family.

Emotionally charged words have power way beyond merely being a series of letters.

You might try empathizing with people who are upset rather than rushing to judgment.

"Removing [one word] from it removes the entire point of it having ever been written or read."

You really believe that? There's no value to Huck Finn beyond the repeated use of that word? I beg to differ. Among other things, there is still quite a bit about people becoming friends despite racial and other differences.

Hardly.

The issue here is that there needs to be an edition that can be used to teach children of all races and all ages.The original edition uses words that many people don't want to read and don't want their children to read. Twain was promoting racial equality, not racism. He wouldn't want his work to emotionally harm non-white children for generations.

Adults are more than welcome to make their own choice regarding whether or not to read the original. In the meantime, school-aged children shouldn't be forced schools to read words they find personally abhorrent.

Additionally, children are quite fond of repeatedly using new words that they have just learned. I can easily picture elementary school children tormenting classmates with the n-word after hearing it repeated over 200 times in class. That sort of behavior would get adults in the workplace fired. IMO, it makes sense to try to avoid that risk until high school when children can be more readily held accountable for their own actions.

It's reasonable to think that parents can work with their own children one-on-one to teach them not to use such words. It's not reasonable to think a teacher with 20+ students can get their entire class to behave acceptably. It only takes one threatened lawsuit "My Sally is being harassed ever since the class started reading that horrible book" to get it banned from a school. The edited version has potential to reach students who would otherwise never be given the chance to read the book and discuss it in class. That's important, because elementary school kids are not going to be able to guess at the larger context of the book or understand just how important it was simply by reading the original on their own.

I would expect many teachers to be allowed to teach the book using the edited text who are currently barred from using the original. There are many, many parents who want to protect their children from exposure to the n-word. The issue really isn't a question so much of whether kids should be taught using the original or the new edition. Far too many school systems simply won't allow the original to be taught. So the choice for many is to teach using a watered-down version or avoid it altogether. Given that choice, watered down is better than nothing at all.

I honestly don't see what the uproar is about. There are many, many editions of Huck Finn out there with the author's original choice of words faithfully reproduced. IMO, the new edition is an attempt to convey the author's intent rather than being fixated on verbatim wording.

Mark Twain was white. His intended audience was white. There weren't a whole lot of educated non-whites in America in 1884. Yes, Mr. Twain was hoping to help move the country toward racial equality, but he was aiming his message at white people. For his target audience, the words nigger and injun were commonplace. They weren't personally hurtful. In today's language, he could just as easily have used the phrase "non-white person" and conveyed nearly the same meaning.

IMO, creating an edition of Twain's work with less emotionally-charged wording is helpful, not harmful. The abundance of literal editions isn't going to evaporate, and the new one will be far easier for schools to use for teaching without having to get embroiled in lawsuits or other forms of parental outrage.

I took the time to download the FCC reports. One has clear statistics and charts of connection types by speed category.

As of June 2009, there were 36 million households with download speeds of 6 Mbps or higher. Of those, only 3% were using DSL.Over 88% were using cable.

The traditional telco providers in the US aren't providing broadband connections over 6 Mbps to any significant percentage of the population.

The design spec calls for the trains to be capable of at least 250 mph. However, maximum speed in densely populated areas such as between San Francisco and San Jose will require the speed to be capped at 125 mph.

Much of the planned route is covered with foothills. The hills either require extensive demolition or lots of twists and turns in the track. Integrating a new light rail system with existing rail or road rights of way requires a lot of turns, too. Turns limit potential maximum speeds.

When you also factor in the time spent slowing down, stopping at stations, and speeding back up again, a 4 hour trip really is a best case scenario. The marketing talks about 2 hours from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but that's unrealistic.