production - How do the Whale Web Cams on Revenge TV Series work?

There would be several ways for the cameras to get a live signal to Nolan's computer.

One would be satellite (i.e. what television news has been doing for decades), but as the cameras are indoors, that's not a real possibility.

A second would be for the whale cams to connect to the local WiFi router wherever they're placed, and with Nolan's hacking skills this is a theoretical possibility, but it would require a lot of preparation - he'd have to hack each individual WiFi network and then encrypt all his intrusions so that the whale cams couldn't be tracked.

The third possibility, and by far the most likely, would be for the cameras to transfer their stream via cellular technology... any smartphone can already do this. You would just need the camera, a 4G radio, and a battery, and it could then transmit to a server that Nolan could log into and watch the live streams. Something like these, for example.

More support for this last possibility has to do with NolCorp - though it hasn't been explicitly stated, it has been very subtly implied that NolCorp manufactures mobile technology... in episode 2 of season 1, the big announcement about which company would be making components for a NolCorp product is reminiscent of Apple always making such a big deal over who makes their components. What's more, the ABC site has a series of supposed memos that Nolan wrote to his company, and one of them mentions how the NolPad will be better and faster than the iPad or Samsung tablets. If NolCorp makes mobile technology, then a 4G hidden camera makes more than enough sense for the fiction of the show.

grammar - We like to wish you .. VS We would like to wish you...

I'm having some difficulty with this sentence.
Can one say: ''We like''...(to wish, to ask, to join etc)

In my opinion one can never say ''we like to'' but must always say ''We WOULD like to'' or ''we'd like to''.

Not a native speaker, help me out :)

margin call - Significance of Sam Roger's dog references?

The dog may also be a metaphore for his job and the firm (or at least the team) that he is running. Rogers is a compassionate character who cares about the work, but is not afraid to take hard decisions. His speech at the end shows that he recognises what he has done. The film focuses on his moral choices.

The dog is a selfish indulgence - he spends a fortune on it. It is sick with cancer, as is the business he works for. It is living on borrowed time, being kept alive by money (like the business). In the end, when it is clear the music has stopped, he puts the dog down, destroys his job with a quick death (he puts it down), destroying his relationship with his clients. He has no control over either event. In the end, he accepts what has happened, buries the dog, mentally buries the events of that day (he decides not to quit) and moves on.

single word requests - What's a good adjective or phrase to describe your feeling when confronted with absurdity?

If you are feeling the anger and the hilarity simultaneously, you actually are feeling

ambivalent

ADJECTIVE

Having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about
something or someone:

The strength of your anger, and the strength of your amusement are both at play in your mind:

"simultaneous conflicting feelings," 1924 (1912 as ambivalency),

from German Ambivalenz, coined 1910 by Swiss psychologist Eugen
Bleuler (1857-1939) on model of German Equivalenz "equivalence," etc.,

from Latin ambi- "both" (see ambi-) + valentia "strength,"

from present participle of valere "be strong" (see valiant).

A psychological term that by 1929 had taken on a broader literary and
general sense.

Usually the ambivalence is between the strength of love and hate (anger), rather than anger and hilarity.

The etymology of absurdity intersects at incongruity and dissonance of your emotional experience:

late 15c., from Middle French absurdité,

from Late Latin absurditatem (nominative absurditas) "dissonance,
incongruity," noun of state

from Latin absurdus "out of tune;"

figuratively "incongruous, silly, senseless,"

from ab-, intensive prefix, + surdus "dull, deaf, mute" (see
susurration).

You're so mad you shouldn't be laughing, but you are!

etymology - When did people start "boinking"?

The OED dates boink as a verb back to 1984, citing Stephen King's Thinner, where it appears to be used as onomatopoeia, similar to bonk:

He half-expected them to begin bopping and boinking each other.

For this sense, the OED gives the definition "to strike, to knock", which is fairly similar to how bonk is used. As for the sexual meaning, their earliest cite is from two years later, a 1986 posting to the newsgroup net.singles by Andrew Tannenbaum:

When you and your honey boink away, you're doing what the doggies do.

Can boink be antedated? Perhaps. But take a look at the following chart from Google Books Ngrams Viewer:

So at the very least, boink wasn't widespread until after the mid-80s.

Searching Google Books, I was able to find some examples of boink from before 1986, but none with a sexual meaning. I chose to search for boinking first to reduce false positives because Google Books (unlike their Ngram Viewer) is case-insensitive and Boink is a name. I did also search for boink, but it was less useful. Searches for boinked and boinks had fewer false positives than boink did, but neither turned up any pre-1986 citations with a sexual meaning.

Most of what I found was like the following snippet from The Complaint Booth (Jack Kurtz, 1978):

Fairies pass through audience boinking people with their wands. Elves up and down aisles "beeping."

Here it seems similar to bonk. And we can find scattered earlier uses with the same meaning, as in the following 1966 use with a similar meaning in Science & Technology:

This causes a mechanical wave to travel around the circumference of the sleeve―in the same way it would if you kept "boinking" the top of a metal can with your fingers.

Using the same tools, Frank found an even earlier example, apparently quoting something Senator John Thye said in a 1947 congressional committee meeting:

Mr. Sears, how would you propose to perfect the general farm program, disregarding soil conservation which is just one small phase of the enter program, but boink back to parity price, the ever-normal granary, and those programs?

There are more like this, but it didn't seem to be especially common and none of the pre-1986 examples I found had a sexual meaning. Of course, that doesn't mean people didn't use it that way, only that I can't find it in print using online tools. It seems likely that the word was used in speech before it appeared in print, but I can only speculate as to how much earlier.

Given the dates, including the citation Frank found, it seems reasonable to guess that boink goes back about as far as bonk. As for the sexual use, it seems safe to say it became commonplace after the mid-80s.

word choice - "Nikki's and Alice's X" vs. "Nikki and Alice's X"

Wikipedia has this:

A distinction is made between joint possession (Jason and Sue’s e-mails: the e-mails of both Jason and Sue), and separate possession (Jason’s and Sue’s e-mails: both the e-mails of Jason and the e-mails of Sue). Style guides differ only in how much detail they provide concerning these.[7] Their consensus is that if possession is joint, only the last possessor has possessive inflection; in separate possession all the possessors have possessive inflection. If, however, any of the possessors is indicated by a pronoun, then for both joint and separate possession all of the possessors have possessive inflection (his and her e-mails; his, her, and Anthea’s e-mails; Jason’s and her e-mails; His and Sue’s e-mails; His and Sue’s wedding; His and Sue’s weddings).

More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Possessive_apostrophe

So in your example, unless they are writings that Giovanni and Walker co-wrote, you should use Nikki Giovanni's and Alice Walker's writings. Although I agree that it trips off the tongue better with just the second 's, and no doubt only the pedants in the audience would pick you up on it ;)

Is Nebula 9 a real (or maybe inspired) show?

In Episode 6 of Season 5 of Castle ('Final Frontier'), there is a murder, wherein the body is placed inside a fake spaceship designed for the 'Nebula 9 Fan Experience'.
I Googled Nebula 9 and all results are abc.com or Memes released by it.

I'm pretty convinced that it's made-up, but just wanted to confirm it is.
And if it is made-up, was it inspired by some long-forgotten failed Sci-Fi show?
If yes, which one?!