Haha, that reminds me of my old school district. They blocked just about everything interesting on the Internet, *except* for Slashdot. I always assumed that the guy who controlled the blacklist was also a slashdotter. One year they experimented with giving the secretaries the power to remotely monitor computers and add sites to the district wide blocklist. I got caught browsing Slashdot and immediately unplugged the computer so that my session would disappear from the monitoring software. . . By the time I was logged back in, whoever was in charge had unblocked Slashdot :D

X11 used to do the exact same thing, it would normally show a black screen for several seconds when you stared it but it was actually showing whatever was sitting in the display buffer. I could turn off my computer for up to several seconds and still make out my background image when X restarted. That was an ancient computer too, with a power switch that actually cut all power.

They can go use it whenever they want, and such parks are large enough that thousands of people can partake in all sorts of sports or other activities at the same time, from barbecuing, to playing catch, to even playing golf, without interfering with one another.

In typical American parks you can expect to be harassed by the police for such things as being there at the wrong time of day, walking your dog in the wrong area, parking during the wrong hours, or straight up arrested for bringing a beer to your barbecue. Not to mention the random extended closures, or the super weird people who make up their own park rules and go to crazy lengths to try to enforce them.

I'm not saying that I don't enjoy our parks because I do, but they are not a perfect replacement for having your own space.

While it is possible to patch small amounts of damage to carbon fiber, it's more complicated than fixing fiberglass and if you do it wrong, you'll have an extremely dangerous car on your hands. You really wouldn't want to trust your average crappy auto body repair place to do that safely and effectively, you would need someone with a degree in materials science. However, composites and aerospace companies are working on this all the time. In the future we will probably see more robust techniques for these sorts of repairs.

My router works fine from across the street and even a little bit at a nearby park. As far as I can tell no one even tries to take advantage of it. The one time I *thought* I had someone leeching bandwidth, it was actually a family laptop that I had forgotten about. There have been numerous times that I've benefited from someone's open wifi, so I might as well return the favor.

Of course, it's a different story when I'm living in the dorms. The university closely monitors for filesharing traffic and will get you in trouble for it, so every person has their own encrypted AP, interfering with one another and drowning out the university network, causing even more people to set up APs. . .

Yeah, when I was visiting Laos I was startled to come across a village with a big FTA satellite dish mounted to one of the huts. Apparently it's not that unusual for everyone to chip in for some gasoline to run a generator for long enough to watch a TV show or two. With a free internet connection, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine them getting a communal computer as well -- which could be great for them as there is almost no educational material even available in their language, and it would be easy to make such material available through the Internet.

Seriously, last design change, I had the ability to manually revert to the old style. Is that option gone now? Maybe I'm dull but I cannot find it. . .

I often go somewhere between the speed limit and 5mph under (in the right lane of course). If you're careful you can save a lot of gas. A couple years ago when gasoline hit $5/gallon and more I sometimes went considerably slower than the speed limit out of necessity. Luckily I didn't have to drive in very heavy traffic so I wasn't *much* of an obstruction.

They try to do this during AP exams in high school. Most students just keep their phones in their pockets rather than risk losing it. It was also a disruption because undoubtedly some of the students who put their phones in the box forgot to turn them off and received texts or calls during the test and had to run across the room and dig through to box to silence their phones.

Except many versions of dd-wrt don't support ipv6, and those that do don't have any firewall capability for ipv6. :|