Followup

hacker: I threw my linksys BE-whatever off a building and bought the netgear MR-814 you talked about. It rocks. It has plenty more features, and they actually f***in work. I called Linksys support before I did this to see what they were going to say, and I got the same recommendation that others got: to flash the firmware down a version, which I hear turns it into a brick with an antenna. So thanks :)

tk: thanks to your links I find myself reading and learning lojban today (heh). Probably the fact that I just read Snow Crash also has something to contribute to this....