I was just out of university. My mentor, who was an awesome guy and whose name a lot of people here would know, came over to me on my first day of work. He held up a 3 meter piece of wire.

"Do you know what this is?", he asked. I'm sure I had a confused look on my face ("Ummmm... a piece of wire?!?")

"It's a byte. This 8-foot piece of wire can hold about 8 bits." Now I had a confused look on my face, I'm sure. Back then, my high-speed digital stuff was 10s of MHz probably.

What ensued was a fascinating, Socrates-like back-and-forth about electromagnetism, computer memory, impedance matching, and much, much more.

Every new grad should be so lucky to have such a mentor.

..."we called it the "Chinese smuggler haircut"

So I guess the "murdering dictator haircut" is in good company.

Or how about Mary Schiavo? After all, she was spot-on when she stated that "even a small black hole would swallow the entire universe". Ugh. (I'll also fault CNN's Don Lemon for even entertaining the question of black holes in some way causing this...)

I can tolerate ignorance, mostly... what I can't tolerate is talking-head "experts" spouting off utter nonsense as if it was fact.

Not doubting you, but could you provide a link or two to these early reports? I've been trying to follow this pretty closely, but I don't recall hearing anything like this.

When I heard that exchange at an airport, I wanted to reach through the TV screen and strangle both of those idiots.

Look, not everyone's a scientist or engineer, but don't just start spouting off shit like you know what you're talking about. Lemon's question was inane, but Schiavo's answer was so absurd, my fourth-grade daughter, who's recently learned /of/ black holes, tilted her head in a "WTF?!?!" kind of way when I replayed that video for her the next day.

When I heard that exchange at an airport, I wanted to reach through the TV screen and strangle both of those idiots.

Look, not everyone's a scientist or engineer, but don't just start spouting off shit like you know what you're talking about. Lemon's question was inane, but Schiavo's answer was so absurd, my fourth-grade daughter, who's recently learned /of/ black holes, tilted her head in a "WTF?!?!" kind of way when I replayed that video for her the next day.

Sparkfun got caught with its hand in the cookie jar. Look, they're no longer 2 guys working out of their basement, it's a rather decent-sized operation that's capitalizing on the "Maker" wave. Good for them. But that doesn't let them play dirty pool. I'm not saying they commissioned the counterfeit design, I'd bet almost anything that some sweatshop in Shinzen has been stamping these things out for years.

It's clear that SparkFun over-reached on this one, the resemblance to Fluke meters goes way, way beyond the color. Others here have provided links and comparisons, they'll all correct.

One of my oldest & most durable meters, an HP 971A, is essentially the same yellow color, but no one is going to mistake it for a fluke: http://www.mytestsignal.com/wp...

Fluke isn't concerned about a legitimate competitor, they're worried about the typical cheap "10 cents on the dollar" Chinese knock offs that confuse consumers and de-value the Fluke brand.

Well, that's certainly one of the bigger "Fuck You!" I've seen the studios hand out, and they've got a track record of some pretty big middle fingers to the "other 99%" of us. But my question is, "When is this going to stop?" Not as long as people are paying $25 to park their asses in a theater seat to watch Brad Pitt mumble around, or $19.99 for a DVD they'll watch once or twice.

Are you talking about something like the Artemis pCell system?

Their claim is that every device essentially gets its own 5/10/20 MHz of spectrum. Will be interesting to see if it actually works as well as it's being hyped.

My first thought was, "OK, great, but can I export to other tool formats (or even XML)?". Answer appears to be nope.