Which is why this is a never-ending competition, one thing is size but what about mass/gravity? Does it have a magnetic field? Does it have a Jupiter to clear the solar system of debris? Does it have a moon to produce tidal forces? Still, we know there's some slack in that life is almost everywhere on this planet from Sahara to the Arctic.

It's a pretty new product, which is why you haven't heard of it. It isn't the greatest thing EVAR, as its web UI could use some work, and some of the features it has can hit the limited CPU pretty hard (VLANs and encryption notably) but it is pretty damn good.

It is what lives at the edge of my home network, and I'm real happy with it.

They also make larger models, should you have the need.

The flip side of that is that Canonical has been pretty clear that they're not building this for their existing users but rather to get new users on phones, tablets, phablets, convertibles, touchscreen laptops, TVs and whatnot other household devices. To trot out the old Henry Ford quote, if I asked my users what they'd wanted they'd say a faster horse. Well that's you, you want a better "classic" desktop the way it's been for the last 20 years or so but the users they have is 1% of a declining PC market that's being swarmed by other non-PC devices. That's why they won't listen when you complain that they're trying to put a steering wheel and pedals on your horse cart, they're trying to build a car and going back on that is clearly a step backwards compared to their goals.

Yes, he's trying to be Steve Jobs just like Google is, just like Microsoft is and when giants like that throw their weight around it's easy to get flung into irrelevance which is why the new business isn't exactly rolling in and the old business is cranky. Particularly now when Android has rolled in almost everywhere he wanted Ubuntu to be. He could just tuck his tail between his legs, admit defeat and say we'll be building a desktop of the geeks, by the geeks, for the geeks and that's that. Or at least aim the sights back to Microsoft, the old archenemy even though Ubuntu never managed to get very far there. But my impression is that he's too ambitious and stubborn to do that, besides "We're making this new Unity thing that no one wants and we'll force it on our users before its ready" sounds like GNOME 3, KDE 4 and a bunch of other projects so he fits right in.

That is, in theory, a good idea. But for a third party to play a meaningful role, the first thing that would have to change is that first-past-the-post had to be abandoned. Else, all the effort you take to establish a third power will be void soon, history shows that a potential third power immediately results in one of the former two powers becoming irrelevant quickly and the power you established replacing it, resulting in a new, but by no means different, two party system.

The only ones that could change the system itself are, though, exactly the same entities that have no interest at all in changing it. If there is one thing that two parties in a FPTP system agree on, independent of possible differences, is that the system is great. Because it does exactly what is in their interest, ensure that they have only one potential competitor instead of many. And eventually the two competitors become so similar (for the simple reason that they want to appeal to as many voters as possible, I can get into detail but I guess it's self explanatory why the two parties become very similar over time) that it doesn't really matter which one you support.

The system ensures that you have two near identical groups to choose from and both of them have no interest in changing the election system to one that allows more variety in the political landscape.

The main reason that it works for most of Europe is that few countries in Europe actually have a first-past-the-post system in place. Coalitions are very common in most European countries, with parties needing usually between 3 and 6 percent of the votes to make it into parliament. And it's far from impossible that such comparably small parties can become part of the government if a big party needs just a few more seats to get a working majority. That's why the Greens actually made it into governments in Europe.

And now tell me how this should possibly happen in the US.

It's true. I hated Unity with a fiery passion around 12.04. I still dislike it (largely because of poor discoverability), but it's a great deal more bearable now.

The problem is all those consumer wifi+router deals tend to have kinda crap firmware. While there are, in theory, OSS alternatives they seem to be less than speedy with the updates and support for new hardware.

So I'd look elsewhere. The two things I'd put at the top of your list:

Monowall, on an APU.1C. It is like $150 for the unit, and then $20-30 for an enclosure and CF card. Monowall should support everything you need, it is really feature rich, is pretty easy to use, and the APU.1C is fast enough it shouldn't have issues even with fairly fast internet.

A Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite. This is a funny looking and named lil' router with quite a bit of performance under the hood, thanks to the hardware routing logic its chip has. $100 and it can push gigabit speeds for basic routing setups. It is also extremely configurable, since it runs a Vayetta fork, which is a Linux OS customized for routing. However to configure the kind of things you want, you might have to hop in to the CLI, I don't know that the GUI has what you need. It supports that though, and you can even hop out of the specialized routing CLI and get a regular Linux prompt where you can install packages and such.

If you want a more supported solution, you could look at a Cisco RV320. Costs like $200 and is a fast lil' wired router (uses the same basic chip as the Edgerouter, just slower). I haven't used one but I'm given to understand you can make them do a lot. Sounds like they firmware may be a little flakey though.

You then just set your consumer WAP+router in to "access point" mode and have it just do the wireless functions.

This is all more expensive and complex than just running on a consumer WAP+router, but more likely to be able to do what you require. It also means you can change out components without as much trouble. Like say your WAP gets flakey, and you want a new one with the latest technology. No problem, just buy it. You don't have to worry if it supports the routing features you need because it doesn't do that for you.

If you are stuck on doing an all in one, then you could look at a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 or the new Linksys WRT1900AC. The Netgear does have bandwidth management and QoS in its native firmware (I haven't played with the features, but I can confirm they are there as I own one) and there is a "myopenrouter" site that has OSS firmware for it (ddwrt mod I think). The Linksys router supposedly is going to have OpenWRT support soon as Linksys worked directly with the OpenWRT team for it.

The difference is that the homeless person did not CHOOSE to be homeless. He didn't get up one day and ponder that it would be so much nicer for him to abandon his home and live on the street.

The bully has always the choice NOT to bully someone. Instead he deliberately took the choice to be a bully.

Unless someone forces a bully to be a bully, I cannot follow your argument.

There is exactly zero reason for someone to be a bully, and exactly zero excuse to be one. The earlier kids learn that actions have consequences, the better.

If you have any ideas that offer anything that could end in a success, I'm all ears. But I'm done riding against windmills.

Hmm... fleeing the country and be free or staying and getting locked up but having your full moral support ... decisions, decisions...

Someone should've told that prick Washington and his cronies, then the Brits would still have a nice big colony.

You're right, I guess there are a few too many "nots" in the construct to be clear.

I should not write my messages the way I write my code for the IOCCC. :)

If you look at Microsoft's pricing, it's fairly obvious why. If you're first getting Outlook for 135 euro then another 135 euro to get everything else is an easy sell-up, particularly since I'm guessing the sales reps will give you a volume rebate on the Office suite but never on Outlook alone. For at least a decade I've heard product after product being called "Outlook killer" but they all seem to fizzle and my impression mostly because they focus on being POP/IMAP clients. Calendaring is probably more essential to an organization, and I don't mean the simple one-off meeting.

When are people available and what meeting rooms are available. Setting up recurring meetings (like say a weekly staff meeting) that lets you easily modify single instances (because this week is easter), calendar sharing, forwarding events with proper notification to the meeting owner, overviews of who will/will not attend or haven't answered, including the agenda or attachments, corporate directories, personal directories, all that practical stuff like that if I start writing a mail to someone in-house it warns me right away they're going to send an away message instead of waiting for me to send it, get the auto-reply, realize what I just send won't work, then another email to say forget that, let's do something else when you're back on Monday.

Geeks hate meetings and scheduling, every one of them myself included. Good calendar software which makes it easy to drown people in meetings is just begging to be swamped with them so it's not exactly an itch we'd like to scratch. We're very busy trying to invent and push non-meeting solutions like email or IM and claim we're solving it better. I'm not going to fire up debate, but the fact of the matter is that getting all of the people involved in the same room at the same time to discuss/decide matters is still a very popular idea. And if you want to get rid of Office, you need to get rid of Outlook and if you want to get rid of Outlook you must handle this well. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like to drop Exchange and the CALs, using non-MS products despite still sending around MS documents so it should be easier than taking down all of MS Office at once.

As I stated before, of course these indies exist. On a municipal level where they have little, if any, influence on the grand scheme of things, or if at a higher level, then they're embedded in enough members of The Party to be kept under control. How many independent senators/congressmen are there? And, please, REALLY independent ones only, not some R or D that decides to go "indie" because he lost the primaries.

If you suggest that kids are little angels, pure and unable to be sinister little bastards, then yes, you are. They are quite capable of being little scheming assholes worthy of being kicked hard enough to fly half a week past Wednesday.