Sweet. So if I could get my hands on a SAM powerful enough to hit an earth survey satellite, that's just fine, since it was photographing my back yard without my permission?

Hey, I plan to come out of retirement to fix the Y2038 problem.

No one is saying you need to replace working light bulbs. When they burn out, you'll have to get a halogen replacement. Honestly, we're arguing over the price difference between a $0.50 traditional incandescent and a $0.65 halogen bulb that lasts nearly twice as long. I have a hard time buying a price-based objection to such a change.

"So, which part makes me an idiot?"

The part where you can't read the post you're replying to. He's talking about halogen light bulbs, which have nothing to do with fluorescent lights.

That fact that you can't seem to understand that -- even when it's pointed out to you -- really shows off his point better than he could have ever hoped. You've become so angry over misinformation that you can't even mentally absorb the correction when it's waved in front of your face.

The thing about trademarks is that they are scoped to industries. Who has the trademark on "SAS"? Is it an airline/hotel company? A shoe maker? A software firm? A line of medical supplies? Is it a designation of Sig Sauer handguns? The name of global mining company?

The answer is "all of the above."

Trademarks are not globally unique like copyright and patents. I can call my car audio installation company "Protech," and you can call your home alarm monitoring company "Protech," and we can both maintain trademarks on those names. There's no problem because we're in different industries. Now, if you decided to start doing car audio installation under that name, we'd run into problems.

So it seems to me that Apple's use of a railway's trademark isn't really a violation of trademark law unless there is some overlap in the services provided by the two companies.

San Antonio? You're going to take a cab 160 miles to the border? I doubt you're talking any cab driver into doing that. Perhaps you meant El Paso? (But crossing from El Paso to Juarez has its own set of problems: I'd take capture by the feds over decapitation by the Zetas.)

Where are the analog audio out pins on USB? Or do I need to have a USB host controller in my cheap speaker dock just to interface with a device in your world? how about the audio in pins?

Where are the USB pins that allow a USB device (not a host, but a device) to provide power to an accessory?

Where is the Pr/Pb/Y component output on a USB plug? Composite video? HDMI? VGA? S-Video? Because the dock adapter has pins for all of those things.

The lawyer thing might be more realistic than you think, depending on how widespread the problem is. If it's just you, you'll lose money hiring a lawyer. Then again, if it's just you, customer service should be able to help you out.

But if you can figure out that other people with your ISP are having the same issues, you might be able to form a class and get lawyers to work the case on contingency. Such cases have been settled in the past, with substantial refunds made to the affected customers. For example, I'll be getting a few hundred dollars back from AT&T for years of failing to deliver the speed I was paying for. See https://dslspeedsettlement.com/ for details.

In the early days, it was less regimented, and sometimes as frequently as 4 times a year. For the past few decades, it's been a pretty steady spring/summer/fall meeting schedule.

Never mind the spec; 1, 6, and 11 do overlap (albeit only slightly) in real life. Go buy a 2.4 GHz spectrum analyzer, bring up three APs on those three channels, and see for yourself what the power curve is.

Yeah, it's kind of an overpriced crap pit with chronic theft problems in which the staff appear to be complicit (if not the actual perpetrators). But that wasn't really the main thrust of the article. :)

And that's ultimately what Chris did: we're now operating on four channels. Well, six, actually -- some of the APs could operate in the 5 GHz spectrum, so rather than leaving them off, they were re-purposed for the equipment that could use them (which offloads all the Macs and iPads from the 2.4 GHz spectrum, bringing the noise floor down). So now, running down one side of the building, we have 1, 5, 9 and 13; and then on the other side, 13, 9, 5, and 1. The APs on the tips of the building (it's shaped like an American football in horizontal cross-section) are on the 5GHz channels 40 and 44. The pattern is reversed for every other floor, to provide as much vertical spacing as possible.

This should help you visualize the layout: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/83/slides/slides-83-iesg-11-ietf-operations-and-administration-plenary.pdf

Keep in mind also that the APs, when we showed up, were turned up all the way up. Look at the diagrams, and keep in mind that these are small rooms (the building is maybe 150 feet wide along its longer axis), and you begin to see how the deployment failure was pretty complete before we got here.

Of course, we didn't show up with 300 directional antennas to fix the APs themselves. All we could do is change their configuration. The change has been dramatic.

I think you're a bit confused about typographical conventions around representation of Celsius. This is a quick and illuminating read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#Name_and_symbol_typesetting

The IETF has perennial funding problems. Suing for the purpose of getting money from the IETF is pretty much like rolling bums for loose change. It's just mean spirited, and you won't make any money doing it.

Some have. For some reason, they rarely turn out to be very good, and some are downright impossible to listen to. For example, if you are at all familiar with Jefferson Starship/Starship, I dare you to listen to this album: http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Hits-Of-The-80s/dp/B000VB9WSO/