It's amazing that Doctorow is so thick as to not understand his privilege.

The FBI agent probably dropped it as soon as he realized who Boing Boing was.

Your average home user or small business running a tor exit node is not going to be treated with anywhere near that kind of kindness.

My net connection is lame and I don't like time dilation so EVE is right out for me. If a game doesn't have single-player, I won't spend any significant amount of money on it.

As long as he is dumping his own money, that is all fine and not even much of our business.

But, as recent history has shown, government politicians may choose to force the reset of us to follow his lead. And that should not be allowed.

As you say, you want to feel like your economic choices have consequence, and not just for your pocketbook. If I buy all the fish in town, then not only should the price of fish go up, but the fishing industry should spend its money in predictable locations and boost other industries.

As my subject line alludes, the real place this crops up again and again is in space games. If I'm buying and selling the complete available product of a planet in some particular industry, that should have significant effects. Or, if I blow up a bunch of cargo ships carrying spaceship parts, then that should have significant and immediately noticeable effects. Instead, none of this is true at all in basically any game but EVE.

If you don't look up, the difference would be less shocking than you imagine... especially since the motorcar is so very much cleaner and quieter now than it was then.

This drone thing is a fad, it will come in waves. This is the "pretty cheap" wave, it is fairly annoying. The "practically free" wave will be even worse. Then it will settle down to a dull background murmur.

I've read and re-read your comment, and I still don't see how it makes sense as a reply to mine. Neither linked article contains the word "Titanfall", nor does my comment...

And you can get a ~12VDC to 5VDC@3A with micro-usb or mini-usb for three bucks or so on eBay; I like the "CPT" brand in this price range. I use them for automotive GPS and phone charging. Much more slick to just have a little charging cable tail someplace than to dick around with lighter sockets.

Instead, build yourself a nice peltier cooler. Start with an existing ice chest or cooler, then add even more insulation. Peltier junctions and heat sink/fan combos are readily available, but I scavenged my junctions and sinks from peltier-equipped ice chests with fan problems sourced from yard sales. The junctions run well on 12V and they're very simple. Thermostatic switches with a remote bulb are easy to come by. An extra couple of inches of styrofoam all around a cooler with a lid on the top and built into a counter, with some simple PC-style ventilation. There's just not much to it. Make it permanent with thermal epoxy or use high quality long-life thermal compound like you would use on a PC.

The best solution would probably be a windmill pump and an elevated water tank. You can get by with around 25 psi, which takes some fifty feet of rise. Obviously, this is most readily available in hill country. Make sure to get some appropriate exposure. Flat land is bad land anyway. It seems convenient while you're working on trucks or whatever...

Most of the equipment in use, the wiring and the switches and so on, has insulation rated for up to 250V. So having a pretty hefty voltage isn't really a big problem, is it?

The converters are pretty cheap when they only have to decrease voltage, though. It's only when they have to increase it that they become expensive.

Which still produces CO2, and which is based on fracking. We reached peak natgas some time ago, if you measure it by readily available sources.

No, that's bollocks. But it might be 40% overall when you consider the ancient (passive) ballast, and redesign with reflectors to angle more of the light down to the street. There is very little efficiency difference between an arc lamp with a modern digital ballast, and an LED with its driver circuit. The difference between an old-school ballast and a modern one is not as big as you imagine; it's measurable, but it doesn't even begin to approach 40%.

You can refine methane by yourself, though. You can refine it with just a membrane. The problem becomes compressing it so that it's useful for more than cooking. That's expensive, because it requires a fancy compressor.

That's OK, because 2015 (or perhaps 2016) is the year of the keyboard and mouse on consoles. (Sony is also licensing a kb/mouse peripheral, AFAIK this is a licensing first. Yes, I know that there were mice for prior platforms; I have them for SNES, PS, and DC. (That's all of them, right?)

Even better: Get a network postscript color laser printer.

Not only will it last forever, but you will be able to use the generic drivers that come with your OS to print on it. No more 200MB driver downloads only to find out that they've dropped support for your OS or don't work on 64 bit systems or whatever. The network postscript color laser is the last printer you'll ever need to buy, and they can be found in the $200 range easily these days.

No, we're lucky he expects to get paid, or they'd let him make every movie