Didn't you read TFA? The US isn't a police state because the FBI has defined itself as being no longer the police.

It has a lot to do with this discussion, because this product is only interesting because it can be dicked around with. It is a product meant for people who intend to spend some time setting it up. Joe Average is going to drop $40-70 on a regular router, not $300 on this open source job. IMHO, snapping a few boards into a case absolutely pales in comparison to getting an OS loaded and configured. I totally get that people don't want to build a PC and are willing to pay for that privilege, but lets not pretend that we are considering our time as particularly valuable when selecting this particular product.

Attic is usually a better place for electronic equipment...

Not where I live. You'd be looking at $300 or so each month just trying to keep the equipment from frying in the 100+ degree heat up there during the summer unless you spent a ton of money putting walls and insulation in. Of course flooding is a concern with a basement installation, but there are ways to mitigate that risk.

Aren't you angry? Yes, I meant OpenWRT.

But I wouldn't do all that. I would either ask Hilman for a list of the parts he used, or go to a forum where they do this sort of thing.

Barring that, I would buy one of the many under-$100 routers which work well with open-source firmware.

I think your point is that some people are willing to pay for a pre-assembled kit because they don't want to screw around with hardware. I agree with that.

But we weren't discussing whether it would be fun to build your own or not, we were discussing whether or not you should include labor costs when comparing the home built vs the packaged unit. My opinion is that no, time is not an issue here since the thing is meant to be screwed around with. If your time is so valuable that it needs to be considered, you probably aren't in this market at all.

I have no idea what such a beast would cost. It's entirely possible that SJHillman is way off.

I agree that someone might not "want to", and that very well might be worth the extra cash for that person. But using the labor argument against a solution where you are going to spend a lot of time dicking around anyway is weak, IMHO.

I'm failing to see your point. SJHilman made a router for $200 that could easily be expanded with a wireless card for $300 total. The retort was that his setup does not include labor. I replied that labor is silly to include in a discussion where people are dicking around with the firmware anyway.

If you are buying a router to screw around with DD-WRT, you almost certainly aren't counting labor anyway.

Yeah, my jaw kind of dropped there at the price.

The selection bias I was referring to was his observation that climate scientists seem to blame global warming for every calamitous weather event. I hear it brought up every... single... time... by idiot reporters, but I don't think I've ever heard a climate scientist make this claim.

I'm certain that the models are not complete. In the 90s I was quite skeptical of them, as they weren't doing a good job fitting new data coming in, and they varied from predicting cooling to predicting very unlikely amounts of heating. In other words, the error bars were too large and the fit too poor. Different models had different predictions. Over the years, however, the models all seemed to begin to converge. I have since come around to believe that the models probably have the long term trend right, and they probably have the root cause correct. That said, they obviously are trying to model something that is insanely complex, and there will obviously be factors that they miss.

I'm glad to see anthropomorphic climate change skeptics building models. In the past they were just pointing at charts and discussing convenient correlations. Climate is too complicated to simply point to correlations. The more talent we have working on models, the better.

Yes, I have missed them. Please do enlighten me! Maybe I'm a bit odd, but my threshold for "climate scientist" is quite high. I feel like you need to be involved in the construction and testing of climate models in order to call yourself a climate scientist. At the very least, you need to be in the data collection end of things.

Also, while I wish people pushing for reduced carbon emission well and hope they succeed, I don't think that they will. I think the efforts are wasted - people will probably use most of the world's fossil fuels as long as they are the cheapest way to get energy. Perhaps technology will save us, but barring that we should probably be putting money into mitigation efforts. There should be some centralized effort to cope with the effects of global warming: Do we continue to rebuild low-lying areas? Do we build sea walls? Do we pump cooling material into the atmosphere? And so on.

I obviously can't speak for every Slashdotter who thinks that the scientific consensus is probably correct, but I know it pisses me off when they do that.

I suspect that is selection bias on your part. While the media do love to play up the "global warming" angle after every calamity, in every interview with an actual climate scientist that I've seen, the scientists seem pretty eager to distance themselves from that sort of speculation. If they have their dander up, they might point to theories which predict that the frequency and intensity of storms will increase, but that's about as far as I've seen them go.