The idea that cell phones still have public addresses and no firewall seems insane to me. Of course that's why I went to VoIP with a toll-free number and screening/time-of-day/etc.controls years ago.

And if you don't add it you can have lower prices than your competitors, which will attract customers.

My DHCP is configured to hand out "public" addresses. Even over WiFi. Is there some reason it shouldn't be?

The idea that NAT is the way things should work is ridiculous -- it makes networking harder in about 25 different ways, makes the Internet a provider-consumer system instead of a peer-to-peer system, and it provides no "protection" beyond what you'd get from any other stateful firewall.

At the very least I suspect 4chan could pass some legislation. It might be to put pedobear posters in every post office, but simply by doing *something* they'd be way ahead of the last congress in terms of effective governance.

The inverse square law

It's trivial to produce 2x4s in metric too. You'd just call them 5.08x10.16s and you'd put them 40.64 cm apart on-center when building a wall.

Units are just the language of measurement; it's not that we can't produce things with measurements that form round numbers in metric units, it's that those things are physically different size than things that form round numbers in imperial units, and the cost of converting is non-trivial. If passing a law could make my 1/2" bolt 13mm it would be easy to convert, but as it turns out I'll still have a machine full of 1/2" bolts even if I relabel all my tools as 12.7mm, and I'll still need a separate set of tools to work on a machine full of 13mm bolts.

That's such a lie. Many industries use measurements that are not only non-metric, but industry-specific. They do so because it's convenient in their trade, and they'll continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Those industry-specific measures have SI (and ANSI) equivalents, and those standard units might appear on marketing material for reference by those outside the industry, but there are all sorts of perfectly valid reasons that people use their own local measures and will continue to do so no matter what the "standard" is declared to be.

This applies much more broadly; language, endian-ness, etc. all have local variants, and all have valid reasons for such variation. Standardization is useful but not without cost; it's much more valuable to be comfortable with conversion than to insist that everyone speaks your language.

But that same argument applies in the other direction -- converting to a new system is costly and creates possible points of failure when/if the conversion isn't done correctly.

It's great to say "we should all use the same system" -- there are certainly advantages to standardization. But there are also costs to conversion, and as in most things there are arguments to be made in favor of both system A and system B.

A more balanced approach might be "we should all be comfortable with conversion, and use whatever system suits us best locally", which is exactly the same approach we apply to language, laws, and 1000 other things.

That's a trick question. The temperature in Seattle is always 43F.

There are a number of solutions available to go from Ethernet (or Bluetooth) to IR. Or if you buy components designed for remote control, you can get Ethernet (and/or serial) ports that allow bi-directional control without any adapter.

There are probably devices with IR transmitters, but if you seriously want to control things you don't mean IR in the first place. Most of the usefulness of having a tablet/phone to control your devices is lost if that controller doesn't know what's happening in the real world -- it's just a giant, hard-to-hold remote with no hard buttons, an over-bright screen, and a form factor poorly suited to the line-of-sight necessary for IR transmission.

"Things the mother-in-law can figure out [on a tablet]" is a strict subset of "things the iPad can do".

High-end users don't do IR control. It's unidirectional, unreliable, requires line-of-sight, etc. There are already a number of more suitable radios available in a typical phone/tablet; most "high-end" equipment has a serial port and/or Ethernet (and sometimes Bluetooth these days) so you can actually communicate with the device and not just blindly send commands toward it. Plus it's trivial to convert from WiFi/Bluetooth/serial/etc. to IR at the destination if there's some component that does not support a more useful interface (which at least eliminates the LoS and reliability issues).

But no matter what the device interface looks like, the real challenge is programming the thing to be useful with the millions of different devices people want to control, without making them learn anything. The value in Harmony isn't the technology in their remotes, it's their huge database of IR codes and their consumer-friendly(ish) programming interface.

Exactly. Which is why you can't find RSS, VNC, email, maps or notes apps for iOS.

Either there's a way to get data in and out of these computers -- and therefore the potential for attack -- or the computers are just sitting their twiddling their thumbs. The idea that somehow disconnecting from the big scary Internet will keep you safe is ridiculous; there have been a number of high-profile attacks that did not require Internet access in recent years, and before Internet access was common most viruses spread via shared physical access, not network access.

You could also get a computer (or person) to block ads in a magazine on your behalf, so you never have to see them at all.