Hacker News Reader

Comment by consto | Hacker News Reader

Broadcast TV can be replaced with cable, WiFi can be (mostly) replaced with a good ethernet network in the home - it would have to be properly wired and I doubt powerline would cut it.

However no cell phones. I'm guessing landlines and VoIP are popular.

View on HN

Kids would go berserk in a setting like that, can you imagine? No Instagram, Snapchat, games, and on and on. Can smartphones even be plugged directly into an Ethernet socket? They only have USB ports AFAIK.

Any parent with kids >10yo who moves there with them will soon wish they had torn down the house and built a Faraday cage they can put Wifi into instead...

> Can smartphones even be plugged directly into an Ethernet socket?

Yup. I've done this with my Nexus 5. You need a USB OTG cable and a USB Ethernet adapter. Dorkiest thing ever, walking around the apartment trailing an Ethernet cable, but page-loads were pretty snappy, all right...

Neat. I should've guessed that there would be a USB adapter. Is it plug-and-play or does it require additional drivers?

I'm pretty sure it was plug-and-play. It's actually kind of cool how many USB peripherals Android natively supports -- keyboards, mice, flash drives, etc...

Of course; under the hood it's just Linux. Though Google has replaced most of the userspace drivers and stuff are still the same good old Linux ones.

I lived in the NRQZ and had no knowledge of the fact until maybe a year ago, long after I left. Some of the commenters here are ridiculous; we had cell phones, wifi, microwaves, radios, and probably anything else people here have come up with. I'll grant that the cell service was never great, but I always figured that was more a function of living in a pretty rural place (town of 20k).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com