Oh I do my own little projects at home. Lately I've been generating a fair bit of video from gopro footage of my skydives. I also do some programming for fun. Traditionally my setup at home has always been a little better than my setup at work. If I got used to working with a huge amount of screen space at work, I'd want something similar at home.

So how many Xterms can you have open with 6 30" displays?

If I had that setup at home, I'd find the fucking postage stamp I'm allocated at work to be insufferable. Actually I already do. If I had that setup at work, I'd have to drop a few grand to duplicate it at the house.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find a game I'd want to play that'd allow me to make effective use of that many monitors. Maybe if I were building a realistic VR flight simulator with X-Plane, or something. I guess you could use it for bitcoin farming or nuclear physics simulations, if you were into that sort of thing...

Do you know why that is? Because the younger generation will do anything to differentiate themselves from their parent's generation. Even if means abandoning a good product.

"Or, it's just more of keeping things simple."

Or it's a matter of security and user experience. Without an SD card you won't be getting a bunch of forum posts like this one: http://www.droidxforums.com/fo...

I'm guessing the desktop isn't the enviable real estate it once was. They're probably going to fumble around in the mobile space some more. The last time they were caught this flat-footed by a new technology, IBM was trying to start up competition with them on the desktop and Microsoft's position was quite strong. They just had to... borrow... the TCP/IP stack from BSD and they were good to go. They just had to poke IBM in the eye a couple of times to convince them to go elsewhere. I suspect they'll find Google to be a somewhat more difficult competitor to deal with. Especially given the state of Microsoft's search engine and... mobile platform.

"devices capable of emitting electromagnetic radiations"

Does this mean they'll confiscate the alternator on my car? And what about my brain?!

So, in other words you didn't read the article.

[...] and two Android phones (albeit I keep wifi off on mine)...

May I ask why you keep WiFi off at home? I completely understand keeping it off away from home (Thank you Llama!) to keep ad-snoops from trying to tag me in stores, etc... But home?

Then again, my poorly-positioned and very outdated Linksys WRT-54G can't get a VOD-capable signal into my room from the den some days, so it's mobile data at home a lot for me ><

It sounds like you just made that up. What evidence do you base that on?

The good side of humans is part of our nature as well, and according to the trend it is an increasing part of our nature. Did you even bother to look at the article I linked?

You should read the article I linked. It's much longer range than three or four generations.

"All the hippies need to get over it and come back to reality."

The reality is that evolution isn't finished. We are possibly evolving into something much greater than what came before. Steven Pinker exhibits that the human race has overall experienced a decline in violence in the recent past. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/history-and-the-decline-of-human-violence/)

Maybe the reality is that the hippies were right.

"The huge machinery behind the NSA / CIA / FBI and all those alphabet agencies wants total control, and it has the enthusiastic support of private companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, amongst others"

While I admit that we have a de facto oligarchy here in the US I have to wonder that if the above were true then why have a warrant canary at all?

I remember the original Saccharin scare in the '70's, and several of the hippy chicks in my extended family warning me and my parents off artificially sweetened "poison." Yeah, they actually said "poison." Hippy chicks are like that. Fast forward to the late '90's and the food companies start pushing the idea that "No, they're fine! Really!" As annoying as the hippy chicks are, I'm more inclined to trust them over some corporation whose entire profit-driven reason for existing is to turn me into a fat fuck. The guys who own them probably also own the pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs that try to fix all the side effects of being a fat fuck, too. That's a win-win for them, right there.

Ultimately if you want to solve this problem, don't eat sugar OR artificial sweeteners. Don't put anything that could be found in a vending machine in your body. Good dietary tip right there. If everyone in the world just stopped drinking soft drinks, that'd be an enormous win for humanity's overall health. Sure, it would destroy a few of the most powerful companies on the planet in the process, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

If I recall correctly, most of that is coming from the universal service fund. It's designed so that some farmer who's the only guy for 40-50 miles can get phone service at all. The last mile problem gets MUCH worse when that last mile is 50 miles.

It this country, we have an expectation that phone service will just work everywhere, that you can turn on your tap and get drinkable water, that you can turn on the lights and they'll always work and that you can get on the road and drive anywhere. Out west, none of those things has ever been guaranteed. I can see a future where "We the People" make it increasingly difficult to pay for the infrastructure that makes these things possible. There have been several instances in the news recently where some city or other can't (or won't) provide drinkable water to its people. In other "Advanced, industrialized" countries (like India,) daily blackouts are a thing in a lot of places. We only avoid that because we had the foresight to build our infrastructure. Once all that falls to shit (Which it's doing rapidly) it's going to be a LOT more expensive to get back to this state than it would have been if we'd just maintained it in the first place. I'm getting older and will probably die before the country REALLY starts to collapse, but you kids might want to start getting used to farm living now. It looks like that's all the previous couple of generations is going to leave you.

Well, sort of. There has been a much larger outlay of cash necessary to break into digital photography. You may realize a break even point sooner if you would have shot lot of rolls of film, but the initial barrier to entry is much higher than it was for film cameras, which really only needed to be a light-tight box. Having said that, the price of good digital cameras has come down a lot since the late 90s, so what I observe is more of a trough where film was pretty much phased out yet digital cameras were still really expensive.