In all seriousness, I'm curious, educate me - I (naively?) thought if something was an FCC regulation, it would end up in 47CFR (maybe months later). Is there a difference between (administrative?) law and regulation, in the FCC's case or in general, and if so what is that difference?

I had to check to make sure you and I weren't the same person. I remember the dial string just because, in particular case, it rhymed.

**ODT5499403X

So I'm probably a couple years younger than you, because the modem was given to me. I stuck my Radio Shack Model 4P (the luggable with the handle on the top) onto a rolling desk chair, put the modem on top of that, and rolled down the hall in the dorm to get to the payphone. Unlimited local calls for a quarter, right? Worked pretty well.

I'm becoming everything I used to despise. :-)

HP has blamed some quarterly misses on SAP in the past, and you hear stories about how HP is distorting the market for SAP consultants... maybe they finally admitted it was never going to work? That's the kind of "operational detail" that is big enough to be materially significant in the SEC sense of the term.

I was going to post a link to ya'll, but I see you beat me to it. :-)

Not to burst your bubble, but most PoliSci majors are there because (a) they flunked out of engineering and (b) PoliSci has no minimum GPA to enter (2.0 to graduate). Virtually no incoming first year students apply to political science and there are practically no first year students in the program, yet it ends up being (by default) one of the five largest departments, year after year. It's not something you want to go into - it's something you wind up in when you run out of options. Sorry.

N810, does that count? I suspect most Maemo users are Slashdotters, so there should be a good ten thousand or so replies to the above... easily a new record. :-)

The losses at one meter are funny, in the "that's not what I expected" sort of funny. Sure, New Bern, NC is 43 miles inland, but a big slice of downtown is only a meter above sea level at that point. Then again, Newport, NC is 6 miles inland, and yet most of it would be unaffected. You'd lose basically all of Cedar Island, including Cedar Island Wildlife Refuge, and yet Pine Knoll Shores is close enough to hear the surf crashing and a solid three meters above sea level. What ought to get the attention of oil company executives, though, is the loss of an important chunk of Camp Lejune (and all of the access roads) and the attendant ability to invade oil-rich countries. That ought to spur them into action.

Seriously, people: the ice hockey team is called The Carolina Hurricanes for a reason. Real Estate Rule of Thumb: The Coast is Toast.

You have to leave 39 inches for ADA and room to get a stretcher through for EMS. But really, most jurisdictions have a "people per square foot" clause that winds up being the limiting factor. The idea is based on how many people you can evacuate in some number of seconds, and unless the building is long and skinny, you just can't put enough doors in. I also suspect this is going to increase, because you can't get a bariatrics stretcher through a 39" walkway. :-)

I doubt any Grand Marquis versions had the Taxi package. What you want is the 2.73:1 axle gears out of the taxi version of the Crown Vic. The easiest way is to swap the entire axle (unless you have rear air suspension, in which case, yeah, you're going to have to either take the axle apart and switch gears, or chop the air suspension out of the Marquis de Sade and switch to springs. And, if you have air suspension, you're going to have to replace or repair it eventually and it isn't cheap. Anyway, the 2.73:1 gears will turn in about 30 mpg on the highway and the car will run quieter to boot.


Fastest way to spot a Taxi version is to look for "P71" in the VIN on the dash through the windshield. When you find one, then you can crawl under it and read the numbers off of the sheet metal tag attached to one of the differential cover bolts. You're looking for "73" or "273", depending on the year. P71s are taxis, but quite a few of them got used as police cars by more cost-conscious departments.

No, a fork(2).

It turns out you actually can use several smaller towers instead of one big one for broadcasting. In digital TV, it's trivially easy - several fully independent stations pump out their signal on various UHF frequencies, but they all use the same PSIP - the "virtual" channel number encoded into the stream so the blissfully ignorant can "keep on watching channel three like I always did, bohygawd." Consumer decoder boxes are clever enough to only offer the one with the lowest bit error rate (=best signal). I have no idea how you license this, and if I did have some idea under 47CFR, it wouldn't apply in Tokyo, so whatever...

Analog audio broadcasting is slightly more complicated, and this is where it gets good. With AM, you can phase lock the carriers (and as a result, the modulation) to GPS. Sub-nanosecond phase accuracy is more than good enough at 1700 kilocycles. Vaisala will sell you such a rig off-the-shelf. It's kind of a neat way to get around licensing, too: each station can be configured as a legal, license-free Part 15 device, and yet with a handful of them you can cover a decent-sized town. FM is a lot more expensive, but it works the same way. You just write a bigger check.

Going back a ways, the first time I heard of using Bluetooth to tell what room you were in was from this paper:

http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/7431/CS021.pdf

Bonus points for running Bluetooth USB adapters without actually having a computer connected (at least after startup). I experimented some with this sort of scheme and my one warning is this: it takes 10.24 seconds to check all possible hopping patterns for all possible Bluetooth devices, so if it needs to respond quickly, you're hosed. But it's good enough for showing off, or updating a "Boss Proximity Detector", or that sort of thing.

Well, you said to correct you...

The FCC licenses US Citizens and Foreign Nationals living in the US not under the employment of a foreign government. If you're, say, a foreign embassy employee, then you need to be licensed by your home government's agency.

Nit picky, huh? :-)

There are an awful lot of PCI slots in all sorts of embedded systems out there, and some of them may be looking for a graphics upgrade. For that matter, I still have instruments that have EISA slots in them. I suspect I'll be running them for another decade. 10Base2 is getting to be a pain to deal with, though.

If your code is pure MPI C or Fortran, then the BG is a decent idea. Remember, the original name of the machine was "QCDOC", or "QCD On a Chip" - if you're running QCD, it rocks. Other things, not so good. Let's say you have a big code in Java and you want to run it on your Blue Gene. Well, you're screwed - there's no JVM for the worker nodes. Let's say you have a big code in Perl (and don't laugh - Perl is what about half of computational biology gets done in). That's a problem, because there's no OS on the nodes, so there's no way to run Perl. Couple that with the bugginess of the software, the brittleness of the hardware, and desktop-class I/O and you have a machine that basically is just good for QCD and linpack. So, yeah, running a real OS on the nodes isn't all that bad an idea. Which is probably why slashdot reported on the port of Plan 9 for Blue Gene back in 2007. Links to "official" IBM site down in there, which is now throwing Lotus Notes' version of a 404 - and did we expect anything else from IBM?