If I understand what you're saying, each destination IP is behind a NAT, and so from the point of view of the laptop, there are, say, 16 IP addresses that are all NATted to the individual pumps, that all happen to have the same IP on the other side of the NAT.

The question for the submitter then, is seeing that every pump has the same IP, is this IP hard-coded into the software, or can you specify the IP that you push the firmware update to?

If the software is hard-coded to assume every pump it connects to has the same IP, then you're in trouble.

I don't know where you live, but here that's not the case. The last rental car I had was clean, 100% undamaged and had a full tank of fuel. They inspect rental cars quite thoroughly when you hand them back and you pay for any damage that wasn't noted when you picked up the vehicle, whether you caused it or not.
The last rental property I lived in was also clean and tidy. I had to pay a huge amount of money for bond and once again, unless the property was in a good state when I moved out, they would have been able to keep some or all of the bond to make it good. Public toilets, well I wouldn't exactly eat off the floor or anything like that, but they're bearable...

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

The Howard gun laws didn't do anything? How many mass shootings have there been in Australia since those laws were passed in 1996?

That's right. Zero.

I was going to type up a long and detailed rebuttal to your fantasy scenario outlined above, but Jim Jeffries said it better than I ever could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In Australia, we had the biggest massacre on earth, and the Australian government went: "That's it! NO MORE GUNS." And we all went, "Yeah, all right then, that seems fair enough, really."
Now in America, you had the Sandy Hook massacre, where little tiny children died. And your government went, "Maybe ... we'll get rid of the big guns?" And 50 percent of you went, "FUCK YOU, DON'T TAKE MY GUNS." ...
You have guns because you like guns! That's why you go to gun conventions; that's why you read gun magazines! None of you give a shit about home security. None of you go to home security conventions. None of you read Padlock Monthly. None of you have a Facebook picture of you behind a secure door. ...
By the way. Most people who are breaking into your house just want your fucking TV! You think that people are coming to murder your family? How many fucking enemies do you have?

From what I understand of it (which is very little) it's relatively easy to coax a crucible of pure, molten Si to grow into a single crystal - those long grey sausage-like boules are a single crystal of silicon, so are incredibly pure with a consistent crystalline structure. It's a lot harder to get gallium arsenide to do the same thing.

No, whilst rendering engines may not use GPUs, everything else that goes along with 3D modelling and rendering does - if you're designing a 3D workstation, you want a serious graphics card or three.
If you're designing a render node however, then CPU and RAM are your main requirements.

Pros use fast workstations for modelling and rough/low-res rendering. Even those machines have lots of cores and RAM and fast storage.

All the heavy-lifting however then gets handed off to a render farm - which is generally a stack of computers, also with lots of cores and ram and fast storage, and they do all the number crunching.

They can be connected in a more traditional cluster style configuration, or they can be largely independent nodes all rendering individual frames.

Rendering like this is embarrassingly parallel - you get close to a linear increase in speed with more cores thrown at the problem - i.e. 256 cores will render a job roughly twice as fast as 128 cores, all other things being equal.

For anyone hoping to jump straight in with the same tools that the pros use, note that this RenderMan is just the rendering engine, not a GUI for modelling.
You'll still need something like Maya or Katana to do the modelling in and then you use RenderMan for the final renders of your scene.

You want as many cores as you can get and as much RAM as you can fit in the system. That, and a very fast graphics card.
Whilst this makes for a very expensive machine, it can pale in comparison to the licensing costs of some commercial software!

Well, colour me surprised! Oracle inherits an Open Source project from Sun and as they're not making any money off it, they stop spending money on developing it. Film at 11.

I'm not sure what you've driven, but in my car (with a DSG and paddle shifters) coming into a corner and downshifting is as smooth, if not smoother, than in a manual.

In a manual, I would have to heel-toe to rev-match on the downshift, and this is tricky to get spot-on, so there'd be a jerk as the lower gear engaged and the engine was brought up to speed by the car. I'd have to take one hand off the wheel to shift and slide my foot over to in-between the accelerator and brake pedals.

In a DSG, the ECU knows how fast the engine needs to be turning for the road speed in the lower gear. When I hit the paddle, the ECU blips the throttle and gets the engine to exactly the right rpm for my forward speed and then engages the gear. This happens in around half a second, quicker than I could do it myself and I get to leave both hands on the wheel so I'm in full control of the car.

I was a die-hard manual fan until I had a car with DSG and paddle shifters. Now, I get the best of both worlds. I can drive as an auto in city traffic and I'm not rowing on the gear shifter and then with the press of a paddle, I can take control of the gear shifts when I'm on a twisty road, or want to accelerate quickly.
The one thing I miss is launching a manual car - in a manual, when you get it right, an AWD launch with just the right RPMs and just the right amount of slipping the clutch is simply sublime. Even with launch control on a DSG it doesn't quite get there.

There are two types of faking it that are currently used, as outlined in the summary.

Noise pipes, that take engine noise through a hollow pipe into the interior of the car are quite different to playing a synthetic soundtrack through the car's speakers. Modern cars have significantly more noise insulation than older vehicles, so cutting through some of this insulation so that the real engine noise can reach the cabin isn't necessarily cheating. You need an engine that sounds good to begin with here and you're hearing the actual sounds that the engine is making.

Having an engine that makes unpleasant sounds, or is too quiet, and supplementing this with a soundtrack played through the car's speakers - well, it may sound really good inside the car, but outside the car, you're not going to be hearing much of note...

Whilst a non https download can totally include drive-by malware, what's even worse is Oracle insistence on bundling the Ask toolbar with the PC version of the JRE, with it selected by default in the installer .

Whilst I'll be one of the first to step up and say that I've been bitten by bugs in Apple software, some (most?) that Apple know about and stubbornly refuse to fix (their Radar system is broken. You submit a bug, it's closed as a duplicate and they helpfully give you the Radar ID for the dupe - which you have no way of accessing) - you can not complain about bugs, even show-stopping-my-computer-won't-boot bugs in developer preview software. A Developer Preview, by it's very definition, has known bugs, otherwise it'd be GM or Release.

Now, a bug that have annoyed me in 10.9 - Apple broke subscriptions to IMAP public folders in Mail - well, they didn't break subscribing to a public folder, they removed the functionality that allows you to unsubscribe from them. I had a heap of users with small SSDs in their laptops suddenly trying to sync around 1 TB of email from folders they didn't want nor need. This worked perfectly in 10.8, was broken and logged as a bug in the 10.9 betas and as of 10.10 is still broken. Every time a bug is logged, it's closed as a dupe and a useless bug ID provided for the duplicate bug that no-one except for the original submitter can see.