> All my WiFi gear still uses the 802.11b range

Yeah? Well, I'm still using 100BaseT for everything. I'd tell you to get off my lawn, but I'm pretty sure there's a mean old geezer dozing off around here somewhere who still uses 10Base5 or maybe even token ring, and if I yell at you too loudly he'll probably wake up and kick us both off the grass.

> From Rome to Berlin... Maybe you should open
> a map of Europe and see what's in between
> these two cities : Huge mountains

So?

We didn't let mountains stop us from building the interstate system in the US. Fifty feet to the left or right of the road, there may be a seventy-degree incline. One minute you look out past the guard rail and see a deep valley with what looks like tiny little houses at the bottom. Two minutes later there's an enormous wall of rock over there (or in extreme cases you go through a tunnel). Nonetheless, you just keep right on doing 65mph in the slow lane, never facing much more than a five-degree slope.

Now, the interstates are an automobile highway system, but there's no fundamental reason the same thing couldn't be done for a railroad track.

> People should ride Amtrak. Its an enjoyable way to travel.

I wouldn't know. I live in Ohio. If Amtrak even has a presence in my state, I am not aware of it.

We have a "railroad depot" in my town. I put the term in quotation marks because the building was historically used as such at one time, but that was in, like, the nineteenth century or some jazz, well before my time in any case, so at this point people call it the "railroad depot" purely because that's what the building in question has always been called. In the 1990s it was remodeled, at some significant cost I gather, and an attempt was made to use it as a sort of miniature mall, with various little specialty shops inside selling, I don't know, arts and crafts and novelties and sundry. That worked out about as well as you might guess (people were sufficiently excited about it to go visit the thing approximately once each, except for the majority of people, who weren't sufficiently excited to bother), so currently the building is sitting empty. It probably won't be torn down, because it's now owned by the city. Since it's arguably the most historically significant building in town but does not appear to have any objectively measurable commercial value beyond its raw materials and the land it sits on, this is probably a good thing.

The thing is, even if Amtrak had a station in every city, and even if their trains were given priority over freight trains (so that the freight trains had to stop to let the passenger trains past, rather than vice versa), I have difficulty imagining that a passenger rail service could gain any real traction in this part of the country. The logistics and economics just don't work out. People don't want to arrive at a station and then have to walk halfway across town to their actual destination. People don't go from Galion to Mansfield to see the Mansfield train station (if there even still is a train station there). People go to Mansfield to go to Wal-Mart or Meijer or Target or the Bookery or the mall or Hobby Lobby or Lowe's or Sam's Club or one of a thousand other places, so even if you could build the train station in the ideal most perfect place, it would in practice be able to accommodate only a rather small percentage of the traffic.

Optimistically, if you located the Mansfield station right beside either Wal-Mart or Meijer, it could accommodate perhaps 15% of the traffic from Galion to Mansfield, *if* you could convince people to park their car at the Galion station and ride the train over there; the cost of a round-trip ticket would have to be *significantly* lower than the cost of enough gas to drive over and back, *and* people would have to be able to easily load their shopping bags and groceries and whatnot onto the train for the trip back and return their shopping cart right there on the train loading platform, or it would never fly. The thing is, Mansfield is one of the *easiest* scenarios, because although there are a lot of stores, nonetheless almost everyone goes to Mansfield for essentially the same basic purpose. Trying to figure out where to put the train station in most cities would be much harder. Furthermore, for every *one* destination station, like Mansfield, you'd need somewhere between twenty and fifty small-town "park your car and hop on the train here" stations, none of which would be significant as destinations, but you still have to pay overhead to maintain them.

We used to have passenger rail here. There were multiple competing railroads. They all went out of business. The reasons for this aren't just cultural. The distribution of both population and also commerce in this part of the world is just fundamentally horribly wrong for passenger railroads. Everything is spread too evenly over too much geographical area.

> British Rail Time ... The only timezone in the world defined in pseudocode.

Actually, we have something kind of similar in the town where I live, which I like to call Galion Standard Time, defined as "no two clocks can ever quite match each other".

Speed doesn't matter very much for most of the stuff we use railroads for in the US. Well, to be more specific, *latency* doesn't matter as long as the *throughput* is high. This is perfectly acceptable for shipping enormous quantities of the same thing from the same source to the same destination, like coal from a coal mine to a power station, iron from an iron mine to a steel mill, etc. Who cares if a given load is on the track for a day and a half just to get from western Pennsylvania to central Ohio? Pile it up out back, right next to the previous load, and our updated inventory schedule now indicates that we have enough to last through the end of next week, which is fine because there's another whole trainload due the day after tomorrow. If we start running low we'll tell the company to add a few more cars to each train. It doesn't matter how long it takes them to get here, as long as they bring a big enough load. That's what trains are *for*.

When latency is the critical issue (the specific load leaving now needs to arrive in as few hours as possible), trains are never going to effectively compete with trucks for short-to-medium distances or planes for long distances. If you're shipping fresh fruit up from Orlando to Indianapolis, you load it on a refrigerated truck and hop on the interstate, and fifteen hours later it's unloaded and sitting out on the produce shelf and people are buying it.

> I'm baffled how this information can be worth that much.

I suspect that depends rather heavily on the person.

*My* personal information is worth approximately nothing to marketing departments, because the last time I bought anything I'd previously seen in an advertisement was probably before the wall came down. (No, wait, that's not entirely true: I once recommended purchase of hosting from Pair, which I'd seen advertised on Perlmonks several years previously. But it is worth noting that the Pair advertising on Perlmonks is targeted based on a close match in subject matter (there's a lot of overlap between people who use Perl extensively and people who buy hosting) entirely without regard for anything particular about the individual user.) Even for very small purchases, like food, I practically never buy anything based on advertising. Actually, I'm pretty sure the last time I wanted to buy a small item like food or clothing because of advertising was when I was in lower elementary school, in the eighties. This may be partly because I see fewer advertisements than average (I don't watch television, and my visual cortex skips right over banner advertisements on the web without reading them), but I think it's mostly because when I do see advertisements (e.g., prepended to roughly every third YouTube video I ever watch) they are pretty much always for junk I cannot possibly imagine ever wanting even if it were free.

However, I know a number of people who see advertisements and immediately want to buy the advertised product, whether it's anything they could actually use or not. Sometimes people see the advertisement and immediately go buy the product the very same day. Sometimes they even do so *on credit*. This weirds me out, but apparently it's a perfectly natural reaction for a substantial percentage of the population.

These are the same people who want to use templates (or, worse, PrintShopesque all-wizards-all-the-time software) for all their desktop publishing needs. I personally cannot imagine ever being willing to put up with that. There isn't enough money in the world to compensate me for the intense frustration of having to endure through using software like that. Give me a blank page and let me put whatever I want on it, or I will summarily consign your software to /dev/null. Apparently I am in the minority.

Some people don't want what they actually want. They want to be *told* what they want and spoonfed it and told that they like it. This makes them happy. Consequently, they actually enjoy spending money on the things they've been told they should want. Lo, these people's personal information is a veritable gold mine for marketing departments, because once you have it you can systematically milk them for pretty much their entire credit limit, at your leisure, and they will be *pleased* with you for doing so and happily come running back for more if their credit limit should happy to be raised at any point in the future.

It's like the animal Arther encountered (in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe) that wants to be killed and cooked and eaten. It's only really offensive if you make the mistake of thinking about it.

The current government of North Korea, you mean?

I believe it will last at least one more generation for sure, likely two generations, but beyond that point all bets are off.

My reasons for believing this have almost nothing to do with anything internal to North Korea. Rather, I am basing my assertion on the assumption that the current generation of Chinese leadership is not ready to stop propping up the government of North Korea, and it is somewhat doubtful that the next generation will be either. Beyond that is much harder to predict.

China is such a major political power that nobody can make them back down on this until they are ready. (Among other things, China has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, complete with veto power, so no resolutions can be passed that they do not allow.)

North Korea as it exists today has no *practical* value to China (or to anyone), but practical value is only one of several major considerations in Chinese politics, and it is not the one held in highest esteem. Politically, maintaining the situation in North Korea is important.

First, the current government in North Korea is a Communist government, and while China is in practice no longer the same kind of blindly-anti-capitalist regime that we think of in the West when we hear the word "Communist", the government of China still holds very strongly to the *word* "Communist" as an important political position. This will gradually fade with time, but currently it remains essentially a third rail political issue in China, because a large percentage of the current leadership actually grew up under Mao's regime. I won't bore you with all the details here, but if you are genuinely interested, see the following Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_of_Chinese_leadership
The upshot of all that is, right now it is still dangerous in China to speak out against any of Mao's stated principles. Now, the Chinese government has very much moved away from what Mao *would have wanted*, especially in economic terms. That's all well and good, because what Mao *would have wanted* is, in the absence of official statements, a matter of opinion and speculation and interpretation. Moving away from what he actually *said* is more dangerous, for now, because everyone currently in a major position of leadership actually remembers him. Mao's importance in Chinese politics cannot increase; it can only decrease over time -- but that decrease in import is only going to happen rather gradually, as other important figures find their way into the limelight.

Second, North Korea's major neighbors are all enemies of China, at least on paper. The nation that has the most of all to gain from a change in the North Korean government is South Korea, and the other major ones are Japan and Russia. South Korea and Japan are both fairly open, representative-government countries with notions like freedom of speech and so forth, allied with the US and Western Europe. Regarding Russia, see the Wikipedia article on the Sino-Soviet Split; the rift is only partially healed, and China definitely does not _trust_ Russia. Thus, propping up the North Korean government provides a buffer -- a dead zone if you will -- between China and some nations that they're not too keen on. The importance of this issue is very gradually fading, because as China's economic interests become more and more integrated into the global free-trade community and interdependent with various first-world nations, it is gradually becoming clear that outright conflict between China and the various Western powers is a rather unlikely eventuality. (We put diplomatic pressure on one another over various issues, because we'd like to talk one another into things, but nobody gets hurt.) This change however is happening very *gradually*, in part because China's economic development has been very gradual in nature (because the PROC government planned it that way -- no sudden shocks, just keep moving slowly in the desired direction and eventually you get there). Thus, while the day will probably come when China no longer feels a political need to continue to prop up North Korea, that day has not yet arrived.

Chinese politics is really *weird*, and I'm not an expert on it, and it's possible that I'm missing something; but from what I can see, China is not ready to let the Communist government of North Korea fail yet. And China has more than enough resources to keep it propped up, at least for the time being. But that situation will not last forever.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan either. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'll be giving this product a miss. Salmon always has those nasty little pieces of ostensibly-edible bone in it, plus the meat isn't that tasty in the first place.

Now, if they were to do chicken or maybe pork...

Actually, I think the two most important things to simulate would be the extremely low atmospheric pressure outside your complex (the atmosphere on Mars is closer to vacuum than a standard physics-classroom vacuum pump can produce in a jar; simulating this outside the complex on Earth would mean putting your exterior environment under a big dome with HUGE vacuum pumps) and year-and-a-half travel time to and from Earth (which can be simulated easily: any new supplies you import must go into a waiting bin for a year and a half after you order them before they can actually be delivered to the complex). Also, they should keep track to the last ounce of every single thing they deliver to the complex, so they can realistically calculate the cost of all that interplanetary shipping.

Indeed. I though Microsoft's offerings in this regard consisted of Paint (and maybe Visual Studio, for those special few who are not mentally blocking out all memory of its existence).

Not only have I never heard of this suite before, I've never heard of any of its component programs before, either. Also, from their names, I can't tell which one is supposed to compete with which of Adobe's components.

Not that it matters. People who can't afford Photoshop can just download Gimp. Gimp doesn't have as wide a range of commercial third-party plug-in modules available as Photoshop, but that only matters to people who are willing to spend a lot of money, and besides, I'd be highly surprised if Microsoft's offering had all that stuff either.

There used to be other competitors (Paint Shop Pro, and back in the nineties there was something called Correll Draw), but I haven't heard much about them lately.

Actually, there are different kinds of magnetic materials.

First, most famously, there's ferromagnetism, named thusly because iron famously exhibits it. So does steel and I think nickel. Rare earth magnets are also this kind. A ferromagnetic material will stick to a magnet and can be used to make permanent magnets (e.g., by melting it and then allowing it to harden while exposed to a magnetic field).

Second, also well known even among gradeschool children, materials such as copper won't (normally) stick to a magnet, but they do interact with magnetic fields in other ways. For example, if you pass an electric current through them they generate a temporary magnetic field ("electromagnet"). Conversely, if you expose them to a magnetic field, you can cause them to generate a current. Most conductors exhibit this property.

Third, less well known but very well documented on the internet, some materials are not ferromagnetic but will nonetheless do physically weird things in the presence of magnetic fields when motion is involved. Aluminum is the most common example of such a material. (Aluminum also does what copper does, described above, but the two kinds of magnetism are distinct. Dropping a permanent magnet through a copper tube does not cause the interesting magnetic slowing effect that it does with an aluminum tube.)

There may be others, but those are the ones I'm aware of off the top of my head.

Well, yes, the rights and royalties would've been a pain.

But it would've been an AWESOME game, if done well.

Python is one of the languages I tried to learn after Perl. It didn't take. The examples in the documentation were all like, okay, so here's this programming "problem" that could obviously be solved with about four lines of Perl, which you could write in your sleep. So, taking the mandatory object-oriented approach, we've analyzed the problem and broken it down into six major objects, A, B, C, D, E, and F, some of which will require minor auxiliary objects, but we'll get to that later. Now, object C is the simplest, so we're going to write that part first. Here's a half-page of code that almost, but not quite, implements object C. Setting that to one side for a moment, let's have a look at A...

My mind is probably exaggerating this experience, because it's been a few years. But this is basically the impression I got.

It also doesn't help that every single program I've ever had occasion to work with that was written in Python has a seriously bad case of what I call Guido's Way Syndrome: "There's exactly one way to do everything, the very first way WE thought of when we implemented it, so if you had in mind to try to configure the software to do anything _different_ from that, you are obviously wrong and must change your mind and decide to do things our way. What do you MEAN some of your mailing list users would like to get both the individual messages and the digests? They should use separate email accounts for that, so they can keep it all separate. What do you MEAN they want to get it all in one account? That's not how WE would do it. Tell them they're WRONG. We will NOT allow a feature to be added to the software to support such HERESY."

We had a wrestling unit in junior high phys ed. They weighed us for that (I came in at 110 lbs), in order to determine weight class, so that they could put me in a group with guys who had about fifty times my level of physical strength and coordination. Each. We're talking about guys who could easily lift their own weight (or, by extension, since we were in the same weight class, mine), swing it around their head, then toss it in a precision arc and have it land exactly where they wanted; whereas, I could just about mange to carry my textbooks and only drop them roughly ten times a day, and if I tried to throw or kick a playground ball it would land more in front of me than behind me almost 70% of the time.

I managed to get a B in that class, probably because I resigned myself to my fate and did (well, attempted) pretty much whatever I was told. If they'd graded by ability or performance, on a scale where A+ is the best student and F is the worst (no, wait, E was the worst, because this was in Michigan), I'd have had about a Q.

But anyway, I weighed about 110 then. I imagine I must I weigh at least double that now, but I haven't seen a scale (large enough to weigh a human adult) in decades.

> Do you remember those large TI-8X line of calculators with a BW
> display from when you were growing up and learning all about math?

Umm, no, I do not "remember" graphing calculators from when I was growing up.

The calculator my parents had when I was growing up ran on a nine-volt battery, was advertised as having a _floating_ decimal point (a state-of-the-art feature at the time), had a grand total of sixteen buttons (seventeen if you count the on/off slider switch), and could not add and multiply at the same time. Seriously, if you keyed in 2 + 3 x 4 =, it would tell you 20, no fooling.