Anything worth having has been updated to later kernels long ago. And yes that is meant to apply the logic backwards, if your shit hasn't been updated to work beyond 2.6 by 2014 then whoever's supporting it is fucking useless. If it's not supported anymore, then you need to be looking for a replacement.

Software is a moving target, anything designed without that in mind has failed from the start.

Well it sort of does. RHEL is intentionally outdated because that's what their market wants. It's stupid, I know, but there are a lot of people out there who still really want a world where software never updates so the hacked together shit that runs their business can keep running rather than doing it right.

Are the inevitable people bitching about another player watching their screen.

Guess what? We can all see each other's screens. No one has an advantage here. Learn to use the information at your disposal, and learn to minimize what the other players can get from you.

Beyond that, today we have both the screen size and the resolution to allow each player to have more size and pixels than they'd have had with an entire screen to themselves just a few generations back. As long as your friends aren't the aforementioned whiny douches it's so much more fun to be in the same room.

BGAN is a high speed satellite internet network run by Inmarsat. If you have line-of-sight to geostationary orbit it'll work.

Bad choice of example. Core 1 machines are pretty much garbage thanks to one stupid choice by Intel, the return to 32 bit. 64 bit was already standard at that point. We could have had Windows 7 as a 64 bit exclusive if it weren't for the fucking Core 1 and similar timeframe Atoms meaning there were 32 bit only systems still under warranty.

Fuck Intel for releasing those things.

DNS has absolutely nothing to do with NAT. Certain protocols, such as HTTP and SIP, allow the *same* IP to host multiple domains which are differentiated by a field in the request. A reverse proxy can send traffic that hits this same IP to go to multiple servers, including different ones based on domain, but NAT's involvement is over with by the time anything cares about the hostname on the request.

As opposed to it not being trivial to modify your DNS cache?

Anything that's checking standard local resources will be trivial to edit for someone who cares to. Sending a list of flagged hashes would be the more privacy-safe way to do this. Whether they do or not I have no idea, but nothing about the information I've seen posted so far including any of the decompiled code seems to indicate one way or another.

Correct. I'm no fan of Canonical when they try to impose their will (Unity of course being the biggest example), but for fuck's sake people this is making a big deal out of literally nothing.

Quoting directly from the Canonical Intellectual Property Rights Policy (emphasis mine):

Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries. This does not affect your rights under any open source licence applicable to any of the components of Ubuntu.

Just like Mozilla, just like Red Hat, and just like many other major open source projects Ubuntu uses trademarks to protect their brand. Don't use their brand and you're just forking an open source project as normal. See also Iceweasel, CentOS, etc.

There are two things a Kindle does with its WiFi connection: Downloading content from Amazon and running a barely functional web browser. If you aren't going to use the Amazon store there's basically nothing worth using the WiFi for.

Funny how the real reason for the "privacy respecting" certification is that many of the most popular color printers will not print exactly what you sent, open source driver or not, but instead will add "microdot" coding that uniquely identifies the actual printer used. This is officially to track down counterfeiters, but given how obvious a printed counterfeit really is compared to a properly stamped bill I don't see that justification as legitimate.

I see this as something you'd use if you tend to work in a GUI that's just full of terminals. You can keep a gitsh terminal open and easily switch over to it to run git commands without having to drop out of something else.

Then guess what? They were obsolete when released and/or were continued to be produced with obsolete technology long after they should have changed. Just because someone kept making it and someone else bought it doesn't change that. It's 2014, five years old would be from 2009 when 802.11n was officially ratified and draft-N hardware had been on the shelves for months. If anyone was buying hardware that only does 802.11b in 2009, that's their own fault for being fucking stupid.

To argue that a technology which is 15 years old and has gone through three further generations since which scaled performance exponentially isn't obsolete is just crazy talk.

As someone who's never owned a structure but has had wired ethernet in every room of every place he's lived, I have to call bullshit. Sure, wiring is harder when you rent, but it's not impossible.

Some landlords actually welcome the improvements, seeing the value in modern connectivity, and allow more traditional wiring to take place. My current rental house is like this and over the month I've lived here I've spent an hour or two per weekend with fiberglass rods, fish tape, and a cable bit getting Cat6 from a patch panel placed in the office to the TV, bedrooms, garage, and anywhere else a permanent network device sits.

Others may not be officially interested in such things, but that doesn't mean you can't do them anyways. Ethernet cables are tiny, the hole required to pass one through a wall is trivial to patch over. If you have attic or basement access as I did in my last apartment, you can often follow existing cable or telephone lines from there in to the wall, then just swap the faceplate from the single outlet to a dual combo or a keystone-style configuration. In that last place the laundry room had a vent pipe going straight to the attic. I used that to get wires upstairs for the bedrooms by just climbing up there and dropping some plenum-rated wire down the tube. The other ends followed a cable wire down in to one of the bedrooms and was just punched through the wall behind the box to reach the other room.

Tucking wires along baseboards, running them under carpet, through ducts, etc. All great ways to run low-voltage wire in a residence when you can't just do it the right way. I'd never recommend a business network be done this way nor anything carrying dangerous power levels, but for home ethernet it's perfectly safe and much better than any wireless ever will be.

LAN parties are still alive and well. Yeah, in the era of broadband it's a lot harder to justify the old two-man LAN when Hamachi and the like make VPNs accessible to the masses and most games support easy connection to your friends online, but the experience of getting together with a bunch of friends and competing or cooperating in the same room is hard to beat.

Just last weekend I hosted a small LAN. Just six people showed up due to the weather, but we still had a great time. Cooperative titles like Payday 2 and TF2's Mann vs. Machine mode are great fun online with a good team, but it's just so much easier to communicate and coordinate in person that it ends up making things move more smoothly even when they're going horribly wrong in-game, making it more fun win or lose. Competitive titles are usually built for more people so we'd need closer to our normal of 10-12 for most of them to work, but topically enough a Starcraft II community gamemode called Squadron Tower Defense works brilliantly for 2v2 through 4v4 (1v1 is doable but has no margin for error).

Look around and if you live near a populated area I'll bet there's at least one public LAN event within 50 miles in the next few weeks.

As a side benefit the whole ability to really be face-to-face with the other players tends to eliminate a lot of the problems experienced in online gaming. Dickheads can't hide behind a dynamic IP and username, so trolling tends to be limited to good natured pranks and the like. Obviously there is the risk of some participants being intolerable either for their personality or occasionally their hygiene, but a good group will weed those out over time.

Not much of a thinker, eh? Ever gone on vacation? Ever realized at the airport that you should have set your thermostat lower/higher to save energy while you're gone?

No?

Ever gotten back after having perfectly remembered to do the above, walked in to your house, and wished there was some way you could have fired off the A/C or heat remotely and brought it back to normal living temperature before you got home?

It's a legitimate convenience, so don't act like there's no good reason someone would want this ability.