So, like the Jaws add in Back to the Future....?

Mixing 1000 and 1024 just made my day. Well done.

And while "baud rate" is now tacitly accepted as a term, baud already includes the unit of time. Saying "baud rate" is like saying "symbols/time/time" as if the data rate is accelerating. 2400 baud is already equivalent to 2400 symbols/second. /pedant

(re-reading your post, I think you understand this but I think the distinction is important)

And they charge $0.99 for shipping

Any system will stop working when the battery dies. The point of saying POTS lasting through outages is because Telcos have to adhere (or should) to strict standards regarding availability of service and they maintain their centralized battery backup much better than a consumer does (or can).

I don't have any experience with VOIP, so I don't know how long their batteries last. However, given that people tend to use their smart phones for everything (GPS, video, audio, etc.) how much of a battery buffer is left at the end of the day to last a 24 hour outage (since power outages are generally unplanned). I know the smart phones I've used can handle a couple hours of GPS, video, audio, etc. and there usually isn't much battery left for voice or standby.

All I'm saying is that while centralization provides a single point of failure, it also provides a single point of maintenance and allows much larger battery backup than would otherwise be possible. Not to mention that it is much easier to restore power to every CO in the city to restore phone service than it is to restore power to the entire city (much like how blocks on the same grid as a fire station are usually the first to have power restored).

I hate it when people lump electrical and computer engineering together. That shows a great amount of ignorance of the breadth of studies that an electrical engineer may undertake and I actually consider it somewhat offensive.

Also:

-you included your Cisco ID at the beginning, but removed it at the end.
-a few inconsistencies regarding punctuation at the end of bullet points.

-1 Wrong.

Gigabits per siemens?

correlation does not...awe forget it...

+1 Funny. Honestly. Thank you.

Damn, my mod points expired.

As another EE (who does all their work at about 3GHz), I must say you need to be modded to oblivion for that comment.

Please, just stop.

I don't find ultra "realistic" or difficult games fun to play. As a casual gamer, I want to play a game to pass the time and enjoy a sense of accomplishment. If I can't make any progress in what I feel to be a reasonable time, I drop the game and move to something else.

This is just plane ignorance on your part. Word has a powerful set of features for document and styles management. Sure, it is no LaTeX for scientific or mathematical papers, but I personally have reviewed thousand page proposals for various defense organizations that had made extensive use of Words advanced features. Your statement clearly shows that you have no such experience.

Not necessarily. Given that this is an apartment, the user will be in close proximity to his AP and many others. It is possible that boosting his power (in the presence of other interference) could simply overdrive the Wifi receiver in the laptop (driving it into compression). This creates an even higher noise floor (resulting from third order intermods) which desensitizes the receiver (and will of course reduce throughput). This will happen to even the most linear, low noise amplifier if you drive it hard enough. A properly designed receiver should have enough analog attenuator range to prevent this, but it could be a crappy/low cost design.