So the US won't trade with them. Ok, but while the US is a large nation, it isn't the be-all, end-all. Canada, the EU, China, Russia, they are all perfectly ok to trade with Cuba. So Cuba has access to most of the world for trade goods. Yet, they still have an extremely low standard of living.

Sorry, but the US boogeyman thing doesn't play, not in this day and age. Cuba has a large responsibility for the problems in Cuba.

When incompetence is pitted against extreme radicalism, I'll take incompetence any day. As bad as Quinn is, he's head and shoulders above Blago or Ryan. However, the Republican would have to be pretty bad, one I would fear would really screw the country up (anyone named "Bush" would do it). In likelihood I'll vote Greenie or Libbie, depending on their candidates.

Not just Kubrick but damned near every other science fiction writer. Hell, Asimov had antique cars that were not only self-driving but sentient, six years from now.

But a few hundred years from now? I don't think ion drives driven by two fusion generators is out of line for that timeline. By then there will be technologies we can't even dream of today.

I did make a huge math error by not actually doing the math and I'm not sure how I'll fix it. Someone pointed out that you could get to Mars' orbit on the other side of the sun in three days at .8G. Damn.

I know this is an old thread ... but I really don't like Pulseaudio.

I never installed it on my Gentoo system. On my Mint systems, removing Pulseaudio is one of my first post-installation steps.

If I want to play sound over a network I export a read-only filesystem containing my media to the machines on my LAN (Samba does this nicely). Then I can play video and anything else over the network too, in a transparent way. I've never seen a single benefit of running Pulseaudio but I have seen lots of difficult-to-resolve problems. It's just useless bloat to me. I have a much better time using straight ALSA.

Welcome to the Internet.

VR headsets are expensive... and really who wants to shell out more money for another bit of junk.

But this duel use concept has value. All the expensive bits are already in your phone.

This is perfect. This is how it should be done.

I have a T23 that I use when travelling - but it has an SSD in it now. Its great because the HD is easily accessible to I can switch between Win7, WinXP (for my embroidery machine) and Ubuntu (for getting work done).

I also have a T21 which I use as a dumb terminal for configuring servers - cos it has an RS232 port. Currently runing Xubuntu, but was running FreeBSD till I decided I wanted to try Xubuntu on something.

I also have a T61 (Also Xubuntu) which is used by visitors of all ages. None has needed any significant traiining AFAICR.

Oldest of all is a 760E - it still works, but lacks USB or any kind of networking, and a new OS means loads of floppies - so it may work, but it is not much actual use. One day I will put the HD in something else to install NetBSD, and then I could use PCMCIA network and USB cards.

How many kilowatt hours do you see all of that using per day?

Exactly, if the data is proprietary it belongs to the entity that paid for it's collection, namely the public. If that entity were a private one there might be an advantage to hindering competition by keeping such data secret but it is in the public's interest to speed up every project, both public and private that might make use of it.

Otherwise the public might well be paying for the same research and collecting more or less the same data over and over again.

Public schools in virginia receive public funding, public grants, and staff performing research get public funding for it. And yes, the public pays the tuition for most students at most universities in the form of student loans.

True enough.

The reason it all exists the way it does it to maximize the appeal of these arms on paper when it comes time to drum up valuation for them or sell them off. Additionally, the way they have it structured likely makes it look like they should owe little to no taxes when that time of year comes.

You think a few grow lights are going to significantly warm the earth?

By your logic geo thermal cooling and heating wouldn't work.

Yet they do... People run air through the ground to cool it... and it stays cool all year round even if you run the system 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

In a battle between your petty heating system and the planet... the planet wins.

A wiser move would be kicking your moronic politicians out of office.

They did this and they'll do it again or something just as bad until you clean house.

So long as you tolerate bad politicians you're partially responsible and your tax money is forfeit.

Ummm, if you bothered more than a cursory glance at my thing you'd notice I AM advocating open solutions. Monowall is FreeBSD, with some mods and a nice WebUI stuck on it for configuration. EdgeOS, that runs on the ERL, is a fork of Vayetta, which is a fork/mod of Debian.

Both are open solutions but both are under active development and support by a team. Hence I'm a pretty big fan. Monowall was last updated in January, and they still support their legacy version for old hardware like WRAP systems, and their new version for more powerful systems. EdgeOS was updated in March, and they have an alpha for the next version going you can opt in to.

On the other hand the OSS firmwares are half-abandoned it seems. When I Google for Tomato I get a page that talks about it as a WRT54G firmware and looks like it hasn't seen updates in 5-8 years. Further down there's a "Tomato USB" mod on it that was updated in 2010 and still runs on 2.6.

This sort of thing does not engender trust in long term viability or freedom from bugs/exploits.

Also there's the issue that some of us have high speed needs. My Internet connection is 150/20mbps. So I need something that can support that. Triple stream N is pretty much the minimum (dual stream N maybe can in ideal cases) and AC is a better choice. Also the "router" part of the router needs to be able to keep up with that kind of speed, even when I've set up my firewall rules and such.

Finally you seem to confuse reliability with swappability. Sure, you can have a whole host of cheapass old routers and if one dies, put in a new one. However it is hard to do when you need more powerful, and thus expensive, hardware but also that isn't reliable, that is just having extras. I'd rather just have something that has less issues, that works for years on end with no problems, and not have to mess with it. That's what you get with something like a monowall box.

Also like I said, one component may need replacing before others. My Edgerouter Lite will last me a long time, unless it breaks, since it can handle around gigabit speeds with the setup I have (I've tested it). However if I get much faster Internet, I'll need a new cable modem, since mine is only 8x4 stream, and to go much above where I'm at you usually want 16 streams down. Likewise if my WAP is likely to get replaced sooner than the ERL, but probably not as soon as the cable modem.

I can have latest tech where I want it, older tech where I don't and it is all good. Also in my experience setups like that are extremely reliable.