If the ISP is redirecting every port coming from your IP, it doesn't matter what protocol you use. Instead of getting the "hotel" like page, you get nothing.

Exactly and literally. Smokey and the Bandit was still in or just coming out of theaters when I was 14. And yes, we were trolls (not on CB though). We did real world trolling. Smoke bombs, bottle rockets, bb guns, sling shots, chunking wax balls from those stupid wax sippy candy at cars (no damage, in case you got busted) etc. We used to do all kinds of crap that would have gotten our asses kicked if we didn't know the alleys and yards you could jump fences in without a dog biting you. Trolling on the internet is for pussies. We were bored, but we got a good work out, without inflicting TOO much damage. I don't recommend what I did, but kids that think that they are breaking the rules, trolling, from behind a laptop that mummy and daddy bought them aren't exactly rebels. They are just cowards.

Come one, how can you not have that as a choice? It has all the movie and nerd cultural references you could ask for.

Not exactly. There is no freedom of panorama in the US, so sorry, but you are mistaken. Some photos of the inside might be ok, but anything that has arguably has artistic content (ie: more than text) would be fully copyrighted by the designer. You could argue "Fair Use", but the copyright still doesn't change hands, it isn't yours. Years of arguing with lawyers and such on Commons will teach you that.

I've never understood why passwords can't be sentences, like "I'm going to take my dog, Spot, to the park today."

They can be, but it would be incredibly stupid to use something like that. A dictionary attack would crack that password in seconds.

Are you sure about that?

No question, particularly in Arizona. The lack of rain makes it "older" on the surface, less erosion. I would love to build a giant metal detector and go searching for meteoroids and the like. I lived in Phoenix and miss roaming around the govt. land, which is plentiful, so there isn't anyone to ask permission. Just do the roaming in the winter, which is very mild, bring lots of water and curiosity. The mountains are climbable and everything is fairly accessible. You can bet most every day will be sunny and clear.

Oh, I hate blue LEDs. When they first came out I thought they were so awesome, then I mistakenly bought an alarmclock that had a blue display. Two layers of automotive window tint later and I still couldn't stand it, had to switch back to red. The blue one now lives out in the tool shed so that its radio can be used while doing yard work.

I have an access point in the bedroom with some obnoxiously bright blue LEDs. They're bright enough that you can almost read by the light it throws off. To make things even more obnoxious, the WiFi indicator blinks constantly once it's fully up and running.

Fortunately, all of that is fixed with a strip of electrician's tape. It doesn't even look too out-of-place. Tape wouldn't work too well for a clock (my Moto X is my alarm clock), but it'll tame blue LEDs in most other devices.

WRT54G is well known for its stability and reliability.

I keep hearing that, but I've owned four of them and I kept having overheating problems or similar. I'd have to power cycle them once a week or more. The last one would shit itself when my lady fired up her Fujitsu T900 for no known reason.

What firmware were you using? I've been using a WRT54GL for somewhere around 10 years. I had OpenWRT on it for the first few years, and it mostly worked...had to power-cycle it every once in a while. I think it only started acting consistently weird when I started hammering it with BitTorrent traffic. I switched over to Tomato because I wanted easier-to-configure QoS, and it's been pretty smooth sailing ever since. It's currently using a Shibby build. The last time it was rebooted was when I was troubleshooting what turned out to be an outage in Cox's network.

All that said, I suspect my 25/5 connection might be approaching the limit of what it can handle. I've augmented my network with a D-Link DAP-1522 to add 802.11a/n, but that's all it does. One box that could replace both and have enough processing grunt to keep up with a faster connection would be nice, and I'm inclined to stick with something that runs Tomato. I'm leaning toward the Asus RT-N66U, as that's gotten favorable comments here and elsewhere, but I've not yet pulled the trigger on one.

IIRC, AOL didn't offer actual internet access until pretty late in the game.

Today's date is Tue Sep 7644 07:32:08 PDT 1993

Sounds like a good deal. I did opt for a lot more options, tv card, wireless, dual burners, fairly high end card in its day etc., which ate up part of the balance. I know I could have built for a little less, but sometimes it is a matter of putting the risk on someone else, and how much your time is worth at the time. But either way, it shows it pays to buy quality. I'm using that computer right now, on my TV in the bed room :)

but this is the perfect example of american greed the most pure and wasteful greed i have ever seen.

If you'd taken ten seconds to click over to TFA, you would've learned it's in this Georgia, not this Georgia, you America-bashing twat.

I tend to buy boxes with fairly high end parts (not expensive, just high quality), and when I built them I did the same. High end enough that I really didn't have to upgrade until everything was no longer "state of the art", so no parts to recycle in.

My ooold computer has a Q9550 and 8 gigs of ram, just as I ordered it. It is still pretty usable as a daily backup video player, and not bad for midline gaming like Portal 2, Goat Simulator, etc. Upgraded the video 3 years ago, $150-175 for what was then a steal.

5 years old, and the CPU is still on the front page of Passmark, at >4000 pmarks. Not bad. Paid around 1800 without monitor. Upgraded to 7 Pro over Vista, but even the original install is intact. Hard to beat that kind of stability, and not convinced you can build it by hand anymore.

it has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible

Are you sure it's not merely pining for the fjords?

I love the quote, "Five hundred kilometres is pretty much as far as a normal person would want to drive in a single day." Oh, man, I've driven further to see a live show, and driven back essentially the next day

Indeed. Aren't things in Australia nearly as spread out as they are here? 300 miles is nothing. 300 miles won't even get you from Las Vegas to San Diego. I've done that as a same-day round trip. I've driven from Las Vegas to Denver in one day. 770 miles makes for a long day behind the wheel, but it's doable. You can cover 600 miles in 8 hours at 75 mph.

So my question is: what is holding everyone else back from freeing themselves from contacts and glasses?

I don't need contacts or glasses, you insensitive cl...oh, wait.