No, it's not broccoli. Nor chocolate. It's creamed chipped beef on toast a/k/a sh*t on a shingle. Only on stale toast. You eat it because you are there to take orders. Not to think.

No, NAT will not die. NAT is a good idea, not a bad one. Virtually everyone uses firewalls nowadays, most of which do NAT, which adds a level of security (not enough by itself, but it helps).

It is a critical flaw in TCP/IP architecture that the application translates the name to the address and sees the IP address. And there's never a good reason for applications to have numeric IP addresses inside them. NAT only breaks broken applications. IPv6 is Just Plain Stupid. It's ugly and it wants to die. And it will. The people who are pushing it are the kind of people who seek out authority in order to obey it blindly.

Apple isn't using them because a) they're not out yet, b) they aren't mass-produced the way Apple needs them, and c) Apple has volume contracts for screens with its great friend Samsung.

(Yes, the irony is real -- they are suing Samsung while simultaneously buying tons from them.)

A lot of Toyota engines failed due to a cylinder cooling problem. They were replaced by Toyota, but it was a big costly deal for user and company alike. These were in Camrys and Siennas (minivans).

But my Corolla has been exceptionally reliable. The new ones look really cheap though. The LE of 2012 has a flimsier interior than the CE of 2004.

There still are collocators, just not as many. The FCC adopted policies in 2000-2004 that made it harder to be a CLEC, and many went out of business. There are still some, but they tend to concentrate on business customers, who can pay more. Collocation is also used by some CLECs that provide wholesale interconnection services to VoIP providers. In general, a VoIP provider needs a CLEC to get blocks of numbers and interconnection to the ILEC. Level 3 is probably the biggest wholesale player.

The huge savings in telephone company real estate happened over 20 years ago. Their big buildings were built for electromechanical switching systems, mostly installed between 1920 and 1970. The digital switches mostly installed in the 1980s were a fraction of the size, leaving lots of empty space in the big buildings. Some space has already been repurposed. And some is available, but the Bells don't want to give it up because it would make competition easier.

Most of the real estate still used by telco gear is for line drivers, the stuff needed to run analog phones. Whether these are fed by VoIP or TDM doesn't matter; 90 volt power ring and 48 volt battery take space. They also take power, but home-based analog terminal adapters (local battery) use even more, so centralized power (common battery) is a net savings.

Berninger is simply repeating Cisco memes, that somehow the magic pixie dust of IP makes everything wonderfuler. It's bullshit, but somebody has to call them on it.

The large (Bell and other) telephone companies are not regulated on rate of return any more. They are on "price caps". Only the smallest carriers, the mom'n'pops and subsidy-dependent rural ones, are on rate of return. That's why the Bells have laid off so many people and stopped investing - they are milking their old plant for all it's worth.

Most of these sites have the word "jersey" in them. It looks as if the NFL's licensing squad went a-hunting, and gave the list of unauthorized vendors to Uncle Sam. What's not obvious is whether all of these sites simply sell unauthorized jerseys, or whether other jersey vendors, or people from a certain island or state, also got nailed in the crosfire.

ITU is not the primary standards body for this, and their definition of 4G is irrelevant. Geeknet doesn't write COBOL standards either. 3G was defined by 3GPP (GSM -> WCDMA/UMTS/HSPDA) and 3GPP2 (CDMA2000). All 3G is based on CDMA. Now 3GPP has defined LTE, which is different and newer technology, OFDMA, so it's a genuine generational shift. That's 4G, no matter what the speed. It gets more bits per Hz though.

ATT and T-Mobile are flogging their HDPDA+ (WCDMA) networks as "4G", because under really good conditions, they can get more speed than older forms of 3G. But it's just a late-life kicker for 2000's technology. VZW, to their credit, already has LTE, which is the real 4G, while ATT will have it later. And Sprint/Clearwire's WiMAX is sort of 4G, though not equivalent to LTE.

But they really should get rid of the "C:\" convention for disks. Sure, you can do some remapping, but it's homage to the floppy-disk days of MS-DOS.

Cutler's previous OS, VMS, got it right, and better than Unix (dare I say it here!). A drive had a physical name that was based on its hardware:
DJA1:
But that was normally hidden and mapped to a Logical name, which could refer to any node in a directory tree, including a cluster of disks, or just a directory:
SYS$SYSTEM: (which might point to DJA1:[SYSTEM]
SLASHFILES: (which might point to DJA2:[CMDRTACO.SLASH]

Applications could then use the logical name, and if drives were added or subtracted, nobody worried about things breaking, so long as the logicals were correctly mapped.

Boeing bought Narus in 2010. Boeing is best known for its civilian aircraft, but it is also a huge military contractor.

These aren't just telco grants. Two of today's four grants go to rural telcos. One goes to a university consortium, the other to a state agency that will compete with the telcos. The Bells don't play in this pen.

The Telstra-NBN deal illustrates how the telecom industry should be restructured.

In the US, recent policy has moved in exactly the opposite direction, towards more vertical integration, so the telephone companies, who own wires built with monopoly money, don't have to let competing ISPs use them at all. They only have to let competitive phone companies (CLECs) use them under certain circumstances, which are shrinking; this basically is limited to old copper wire in urban areas and town centers.

A "LoopCo" would be a company that owns the outside wire and leases it equally to all comers, building fiber for all who want to rent it, even cable. One fiber plant is a lot easier to afford than two or three. The original NBN plan would have built a new fiber plant to compete with Telstra; as customers moved off of Telstra's old copper network, Telstra would have lost money. Telstra blinked: They're selling their existing plant to NBN, so that they will be the biggest wholesale customer, not a competitor. Telstra wins: They get to use the new network, and get paid A$11B for their old wire. The country wins: They get NBN's new fiber, and don't have to fight Telstra all the way, or pay twice.

The Bells in the US do not see it this way. Nor does the FCC, which is squarely in their pocket. Expect the US to fall farther and farther behind, as the farce called "National Broadband Plan" leads to more of the same, just with higher taxes to subsidize CenturyTel, TDS, and other rural subsidy whores who can use the subsidy money to put local wireless ISPs, who are not eligible for subsidies (only one subsidy recipient in a given place - it's literally a monopoly fund) out of business.

HR is really popular in Russia, where it is called Radiosport. It has a lot of geek-friendly sporting activities. For instance, DXing is trying to talk to as many countries (loosely defined!) as possible. Contests take place many weekends, to try to make as many contacts according to some set of rules (to a given place, to as many lat/long squares, to as many countries, on a certain band, etc.). Some people do fox hunts (hide a transmitter and try to find it with a portable radio and direction antenna).

And yes, there's the ability to just chat with fellow geeks, anywhere, without depending on somebody else's network.

You're really out of date.

It used to be true that the station license specified a location, and if you operated anywhere else, you were "/3" in code or "portable 3" or whatever district you were in. To get around it, you could pull "secondary" licenses, with separate call signs, at each address. I had a couple of those. But that went away by the early 1980s, or late 1970s. (I've been licensed a lot longer than that.) Now you get one call sign and can use it anywhere in the country, and take it with you when you move across district boundaries. So call districts really only apply to how they assign you a new call sign, based on mailing address.