Not in my region, where you can get 0 DTV stations, and you can now get only 2 of the 4 analog stations that you could kinda fuzzily get before DTV.

You're right that a set without extraneous components wouldn't cost much less, but you're wrong about what can be removed. You need a total of one (1) HDMI connection for a 1080p television if you have a stereo with upconversion. This is where it belongs anyway unless you have a fancy home theater and then you will want a discrete upconverter box so that you can upgrade piecemeal. If you don't use the tuner then it makes much more sense to have a fancy stereo, because everything has to connect to the stereo anyway, and this scheme eliminates the largest number of cables.

I've drunk much more than two gallons of water in a day without taking salt pills. I salt my food liberally, though. This is not such a bad idea as it sounds because I cook it, it's not some bullshit processed food already made of a ton of salt. If you're taking in more salts, then you can drink a fuckton of water in a pretty short period of time. My first job was following the steam train up the mountain in Felton, and I definitely had to take salt tablets and drink more than two gallons of water in a day on occasion there and I was a teenager ferchrissakes.

I do know someone who drank enough water to have seizures and almost die. He wasn't consuming anything but water.

You can put some salt and lemon in your water and then you can drink as much as you like.

I cannot read your comment, Mr. wall of monospace, because it hurts my brain. If you want people to read what you write, don't get so froggy with the unnecessary HTML tags. You're not a fucking weather advisory.

It's funny you mention that, because I own a 1982 Mercedes-Benz 300SD W126. From the factory, it came with the ugliest headlights that Mercedes ever put into a vehicle, because its release coincided with regulations requiring the use of sealed rectangular headlights. They are a mockery of the W116's headlight design at best. They made a less-ugly version for the later-model vehicles when the US backed off from the "sealed" part and started permitting capsule lamps, which I have installed in my early-model W126. The euro-style version has one nice big glass headlight which takes an H3 for the driving light and an H4 for the headlight and it puts substantially more light on the road than does the stock US headlight. Thanks, USA! The truth is that many if not most of these regulations exist solely for legal protectionism. My 1992 F250 has the same brakes and the same rear axle as a 1992 F350 and a new-for-1992 improved-alloy chassis that is probably stronger than that of the F350 of the same year. It has a weaker front end than a 4x4 F350 (Dana 50 rather than 60) but it's still stronger than the 4x2 front end which is extremely lame. And yet, I am not legally permitted to tow as much as the F350. There's no technical reason why this should be so, but Ford gets more money for a F350 and they have got themselves some legal protectionism to force you to buy a more expensive truck, which by the way doesn't actually cost more to produce, it just has a more expensive sticker. The only differences between an F250 and an F350 are (or at least were in 1992) the chassis (again, irrelevant in this case) and the springs, and there's a plate for PTO.

It's what we're talking about, you might try keeping up.

There is no difference. Data is data, bits are bits. They don't take on some special property because you send them through a wire.

No, if you underestimate the flow that you will be using, then you will certainly have enough flow to activate the heater. If you overestimate the flow, and you have less than you think, then you might not have enough flow. HTH, HAND

That's cool, but most people on wells would prefer something that runs on propane because a water heater is a bit much to run from a generator and you want hot water even when the power is off.

You can't really trust people to properly fit the plug. Obviously we should simply replace the asshole with a quick-connect valve at birth. Hopefully a gate valve.

Well, you'd really have to say "everything built since the 1950s" because statistically they're all pieces of shit built just the same way, except they're pretty much all using glass or foam insulation now and they have a tyvek wrap.

Ah yes, but if you go back pre-WWII then you're going back to at least the end of the era when lumber was still cheap, especially if you lived near it and you should probably remember that California is the most populous state, and we not only still produce lumber but we're near the other states which make a name for themselves doing it. I lived for some time in a crappy little house in Marysville that was framed in 2x6s, and they were real 2x6s, not the fake ones we have today. Sure the lumber is rough; the homeowner doesn't care and the builder wore gloves, same as he does today.

Whatever you do, don't go tankless unless your water heater will be installed near to the kitchen. It will drive you goddamned nuts. The water heater should always be installed on the same wall as the sink (optimally on the other side, but sometimes there's no space) and then the second-nearest thing, which should also be as near as possible, should be the sink of the most central bathroom. This is always true, but it's especially annoying when you're dealing with the additional warm-up time of a tankless heater. Also, do yourself a favor and buy a Rinnai or a Paloma or, if you can find something else as reputable, something else of that ilk. You just don't want a Myson or a Bosch etc. at any price. And finally, it is painfully easy to overestimate the flow you're going to be using, and have the heater not switch on when you want to use it, especially if you're on a well system whose pressure delivery cycles significantly.

The problem with your idea is that you weren't promoting anyone worth voting for either. Voting for Obama was a waste of time, but it didn't actually harm anyone. If it wasn't Obama, it would be someone else doing the same things to us. Besides, Obama was clearly in the script. Look who they gave us against him, look at all the stupid shit they wrote for him to say at the last second.

People can't decide who we get to vote for, only corporations can.

There are exceptions at the low levels of politics, where it doesn't cost so much to get a good percentage of the vote if you're on target. But the higher up the ladder you go, the more it costs to participate, until only corporations can even (effectively) have that much money.

Mine entire argument is that one should not trust the encryption betwixt wireless ethernet card and access point to protect anything at all. Do not trust it to keep people off of your wireless network, and do not trust it to protect your email password, and do not trust it to protect your browsing habits. You may reasonably trust a combination of firewall and IPSEC provided you keep up with advisories and updates, and even that is plenty debatable. How do you define "trust"? You trust the tool to do what it is capable of doing. Not only have wireless encryption schemes been defeated in the past, suggesting that the same might happen again, but a router outside of your control is the very definition of an "untrusted" device.

OK, these days there's little reason not to use encryption, unless you have legacy devices which don't support meaningful encryption. But then, there's also no reason to believe that the encryption provided by the AP will protect your data. I assume that it is a minor inconvenience to an attacker at best, and I am never disappointed. If I care about security, then I use some kind of VPN technology, like IPSEC tunneling — probably the best scheme for the typical user, if they can manage the configuration, because of the broad compatibility. To wit, virtually everything works fine through IPSEC provided that there is no NAT involved, and many software packages which once did not work have been deliberately modified to permit IPSEC NAT traversal. And there is a fairly high level of compatibility between implementations, to the point that you can reasonably expect to get IPSEC working whether your nodes are running Linux or Windows or HP-SUX or what have you. Configuration, however, may be hairy and scary... Which is why stuff like openvpn even exists, AFAICT.

I don't disagree, but if your goal is to protect your login credentials from unknown third parties, then wireless encryption on an open AP is essentially useless. I have no way whatsoever to know that the AP itself isn't some kind of trap, and I have an equal lack of opportunity to determine whether the AP has been compromised without compromising it myself, checking its software version, obtaining a dump of the software, and comparing it to a reference download. As such, trusting any public access point is something that I must not do. If your goal is to protect your data, then you must do (or indeed, not do) the same.

That is truly one of the finest pictures of a trashcan I have ever seen.

Will someone, anyone please go stand next to that trash can and shoot a panorama?

Well no. I live in the boonies, and all I want from my wifi is more speed. I don't have interference to worry about, with no microwave and a 5.8 GHz phone next to a 2.4 GHz AP.