Even for the home power user, it's a pain if you are forced to buy brick and mortar and on a deadline because the family needs a new machine. Old-style PCI has become a pain to find on cheap towers.

I had to shelf a bunch of cards when our old ~2003 machine died 2 years ago:

• an old $120 PCI video card (the cheapest replacement costs ~$60 these days)
• a Soundblaster card (I miss when they used to have MIDI and joypad ports)
• a potentially secondary NIC that would have helped me play around with work multi-nic setups and software firewalls
• an adapter card for 3 Firewire inputs.
• a modem card (didn't get more than a couple uses after we went to DSL, but can save you a dollar and a trip to the Western Union when your potential new boss requires documents faxed before you're hired)

An old system I used to maintain had 2 native USB port and about 4 more via a PCI card I added. I think my switch from the hand-me down ISA to my self-bought PCI setup had only 1 card that got dumped. We just have so many more gadgets today.

A few cents or dollars per NEW module kills timely standard adoption. We're talking about ISPs, so let's use a well-known evolutionary example with WIFI routers available to users even outside the ISP chain:

First, no wifi at all,
then default / empty passwords all neighbors could steal,
then WEP only because WPA wasn't supported,
then no WPA2...
then (or mixed in with the above):
no support for G,
then no support for N
finally, "support" for N on just 130mbps, but not multiples of it. The unwritten word is also SINGLE band (2.4Ghz)

That is what I remember from a ton of different routers I either got from ISPs, owned, gave away or just troubleshooted. The great fragmentation tells you that it won't be an easy problem to solve. I mean, just check your Wifi now and see how many of the ancient no-nos you can still see from neighbors around you who PAID for their routers --I don't even want to know what they have to settle for at the Modem level.

Providing an upgraded router may not be the same as just "going" up to an IPv6-enabled router. Supply chains take forever (5 years) to provide today's optional features.

If you need more proof that a 2 year cycle for upgrades means nothing, just look at how few top of the line smartphones *refreshed yearly* support 5Ghz bands. Even if you paid through the nose to correct that, you still must leave the 2.4 Ghz band open because your pricy game console [refreshed every 5 years] isn't that lucky or your visitors' gadgets are behind. It's not a pretty picture. Give it 10 or 15 more years

Interestingly, your post made me think that google glasses might be a foot in the door techwise for something 100 times dorkier and less public: Virtual Reality Googles.

Those guys playing Temple Run today don't yet realize some augmented reality version may be coming to glasses near them

The 3D is cheap
The immersive stereo view is built into the nature of glasses
The GPS and compasses are already in all smartphones and there's several apps that act like smart HUDs.
It's portable and more natural than a headset, and if you [Google] builds it, [someone] will come with implementations.

I just don't want to see people looking like druggies when they extend their hands to touch things that are floating in their HUD. The eerie effect of talking into thin air left Behind by bluetooth is already sad enough

I find it extremely creepy that while they responded badly to this, he had exactly what we are afraid of: good quality pictures / video of your environment at all times. I don't agree with the violence. It's just going to be harder to paint ourselves into corners to avoid connecting with everyone else's field of [perfectly recorded] vision. If Glass takes off, it will be like walking around trying not to step on anyone's shadow: impossible.
Here's a stray thought: What will having so much visual info do to people's social networking feeds?

Did you forget "reading slashdot clearly at *any* zoom level?" ;)

I don't know where my router's DDWRT implementation went wrong, but the USB port support has been horrible.
I have some NTFS-formatted USB drives and a USB enclosure but it triggers a known issue that consists of an endless reboot loop. The Windows-only driver to use with the stock firmware (this is the Dlink DIR825) had an annoying imposition. It prevents more than one connected user from viewing the files at once.
Its DDWRT USB print server fared better, but after some print jobs the router stops processing jobs silently until rebooted. If there are alternatives to DDWRT, it would be nice to hear of them now.

My 2007 router has had native and DDWRT support, but the telco only offers DHCPv6 to its 50Mbps fiber clients. No service in my building because they don't care about wiring up the landlord's property for now.

Meanwhile, their DSL offering was supposed to pump IPv6 late last year since the fiber pilot program has been working. Their website FAQ has just stopped being updated on the matter. It reminds me of Firefox's Electrolysis project page (or what you may know in Chrome as multi-process tabs)... vaporware stinks in software, but even more in hardware.

Software at least comes down the pipe eventually, but hardware must be supported from the core out, which is what makes it so expensive and slow to reach the home user. The slow switch to Wireless A, G, N (stage by stage) and now to 5Ghz is more proof of just what kind of timeframes we are talking about. My 6 year old router offers so many features I cannot use due to a sucky ISP. Since IPv6 is an industrial product that benefits enterprises more than a home-based solution, you'll have to wait a long time before dropping your IPv6 tunnel solutions so you can swap your router.

Reminds me of watching commercial- and float-free youtube before google's acquisition.

We are never given a chance to judge the app's invasive permission schemes when it's already on a brand new phone. I would not download it on the Market if given the choice.

Same here with cheap Android 2.2 device. If your device is rootable, you could had a choice of killing FB. Once rooted, you can use a root terminal to find the standard bin folder and move out or delete the facebook APK file. It disappears from the App list.

I wish I had done that much earlier: A friend quickly signed in to check their facebook messages when I lent them the device, the masses don't even dream of using HTTP when there's a juicy app icon they can easily find. They must have hurriedly OK'd the first-run defaults, synching MY Phone contacts with THEIR FB login. I later found random people in my adress book led me to discover the problem.

Even though I went back and decoupled his profile from my phone, Facebook will forever have my phone number, snapshots of my private contact list, location and whatever else researchers demonstrated is fair pickins for bad apps. I suspect that even if nobody ever ran the app on my phone, the SNS FB service had already given up all that info. Could be done periodically between the day I unboxed my phone and the day I uprooted it out of the phone.

I'll be interested to see some youtube uploads in the next few days, but the quality of budget cameras for low-light captures is atrocious. Almost every sky picture that is not captured by a telescope was taken on DSLRs with tripods and exposure tricks. It seems the star-tracking mandatory for telescopes is completely ignored on Flickr and google image results. I cannot believe the Hubble et al seem to lack pictures of the the Milky way from the sky, where they can be horizon free, devoid of light pollution, AND streak free.

About your post, I read in the nineties about a blind man who marveled what some sound was that apparently came from the Auroras overhead. The blind are known to have a stronger sense of hearing. This was on my mind when I went out near 9PM but I only aurora-free stars and a bunch of clouds. I have eyesight but have never caught auroras because I'm too far south, and people favor pictures of it rather than videos. Tonight could have been special.

I have grown adults in their fifties who ask me what to do when we're looking at something and a popup comes up when I'm at their side. I tell them to read it outloud and make a decisión on the two buttons below it. It's still hard for them to do.

Five minutes later a different question or error pops up and I still have to *remind* them that they are not reading an alien language. It is a pain.

You did say BUY a computer but there's little sale outside these top prebundled OSs:
Ubuntu App store
MacOS X App store
Windows 8 App store

It won't be easy finding legal Windows 7 copy without online merchants so that you can live App-free on your new computer.

Unless you plan to build your own PC and put non-Ubuntu FOSS on it, other choices call for wading into uncanny territory or buying older unsold items and used stuff

That said, I don't promote the idea of purchasing a tablet or phones for kids. There's already a living room PC and a laptop sitting around at home and kids do NOT need more room to hide their acts.

Solo mining has a very little chance to work out, so join a mining "pool". Solo mining is like winning the lottery: 25 BTC paid out every 10 minutes to a lucky guy while everyone else on the planet gets nothing for that round, IIRC. With pools you get paid BTC fractions calculated based on your work in the pool. When you hear "bitcoin" you're talking about milli and micro amounts.
You quickly get used to the oddly small fractions: 0.00011935 BTC per block processed despite hitting a reasonable 90 Mhash/s.

Any ATI GPU should be fine (AMD Radeon HD 6750 cost me 70 bucks to play games.)
I started mining like 3 nights ago in a "why not?" moment but don't think I'll due it more than as a bullet point thing.
The first big step is to get the wallet client and prep to get about 6GB worth of data blocks --run this overnight. I hear that it's better to pay the $150 or so USD to buy a bitcoin that you can hoard than to wait until you can waste enough resources to get lucky.

The pool I joined is well known but requires newbies to accumulate 0.01 BTC before sending the payments. I'm like 3 more days away. That's bittersweet.

For vertical tabs, I think Opera supports them.
Not sure exactly where you turn them on because I haven't used it in ages.
Chrome seems to provide extensions that support it, but I am extremely doubtful of the browser now --trying to just get AdblockPlus was useless because it's not designed for my computer setup or something like that. It used to work some months ago (using Rockmelt)

In case you have not heard, Hotmail's PC chat application, Messenger, is two days from being sunset in favor of Skype. That will be causing a massive migration from users who ignored repeated upgrade emails from the MS team.
Just when I thought it was hard to convince my long-term guests that they should ignore the Messenger Icon, forcing themselves to learn the freshly installed Skype forced down our throats, I have to worry about their malware risks from a new vector of attack.
I very sparingly use the hotmail/live/OUTLOOK/identityCrisisNameDUJOUR account, and would have uninstalled it if I didn't have said friends from a land where people KNOW nothing else*. The loss of Hotmail integration, loss of social media-ish features, and bold GUI design choices to force you to try their $$$ calling plans really is making me consider shutting the doors on the account.

*We stay off FB. They know OF Yahoo Messenger which I never use. My GTalk is unknown to them and all this stinks of network effects.