It's startling when you look at a chart of frequency allocation and see how much is allocated to DOD, maritime, and obselete tech. Meanwhile you have everyone and their neighbor competing over 11 channels for Wifi.

When jammed you can get super-strong 4 bars signal. It's just that the signal is all noise.

This guy never found a search he didn't like.

Will this update install the Google toobar, Yahoo toolbar, Bing toolbar, or Ask.com toolbar?

Biggest complaint I have about modern watches is the thickness. Watches today are no thinner than watches were forty years ago. Even 6mm thick still qualifies as a thin digital watch. The reason I don't wear watches anymore is because they're so bulky.

Other complaint is that every dress watch on the market still has buttons/knobs on the side which scratch up your wrist. It should be straightforward to eliminate the crown, and set the time using an optical sensor you hold up to a computer, like the old Datalink watches from the 1990's.

I recall an article from the 1990's lamenting how technological progress for American consumers had stalled. It argued the life of the average American in the 1950's was fundamentally the same as life in the 1990's. People in the 1950's wrote letters and talked on the phone. They listened to the radio and watched TV and went to the movies. They had cars and drove everywhere and could also travel by bus or train or airplane.

I wish I had a copy of that article, because there's been a big change between the 1990's and today and what we expect in the near future.

Someone makes a free speech issue out of it when their application for an "FU OBAMA" plates gets rejected.

My DNS provider was planning to deploy DNSSEC signing several years ago, but they still haven't.

They claim the reason is that since DNSSEC responses are 75x the size of vanilla DNS responses, this makes DNSSEC providers more vulnerable to DDOS attacks.

Troublist!

The French messed it up in the 1800's. When setting up the metric system, they had to come up with a distance for the meter. Their approach? Take a measurement of the longitude of the earth and divide by 10,000.

This single, idiotic, lazy-ass decision made life hellish for people around the world. How? For units of weight, volume, or even long distances, it really doesn't matter if a kilogram is 2.2 pounds or 2.3 pounds. It also doesn't matter if Pepsi comes in 2 litre bottles or 1.9 liter bottles. It also doesn't matter if you buy fuel by the litre or by the gallon. You buy all this stuff essentially in bulk, and the quantities are arbitrary.

What does matter is small distances, specifically for machine tools. The French made the inch equal to 25.4 mm. If instead they made the inch 24.0 mm or 25 mm, then everything would be okay today. But with 25.4 mm, you end up with 1/4-screws and M6 nut. They look the same to the naked eye but they don't fit together and need different wrenches to drive them. This is where distance is critical; for small distances, you have a lot of fixtures and hardware out there which is designed to match specific distances at close tolerances. Since the metric and SAE units are off by just a little bit, you end up with a world where everyone needs duplicate sets of tools and stuff that's incompatible with each other because they were fabricated to different units.

Sure, when everyone is on metric the whole problem goes away, but the laissez-faire, overromanticized decision of the French will continue to be a pain in the neck for years to come.

Iomega's blunder with Zip was that for too long Iomega only sold them with external parallel-port and SCSI interfaces. By the time they started offering internal drives, PC's were shipping with 4GB hard drives and 720MB CD burners so 100MB and 250MB zip media was already obselete. I don't understand what took Iomega so long to make an internal version. Internal drives would probably be cheaper to manufacture and support, and Iomega probably could have made even more money with internal drives sold through system builders. Companies would have had them preinstalled in every computer, instead of having one or two drives shared around the office.

I remember spending a lot of time messing around with Centronics extension cables and EPP/ECP settings on Windows 3.1 and 95 boxes to manage external Zip drives. What a waste.

Discussion of the bully issue usually avoids the fact that some kids are more prone to being bullied because they're sensitive, easily offended, or cannot handle self-deprecating humor.

It all starts when you're five years old and a kid at school yells at you "I see your underpants. Ha ha!" If you react or protest or cry or run away, then the other kids will smell your fear and attack you like a pack of wolves. If you keep your cool or joke at it, then other kids show you respect. It all comes down to how you handle yourself in those moments.

Anti-bullying crusaders dismiss anything that sounds like "blaming the victim". Instead they consider bullied kids as innocent bystanders, and focus only on the mean, misguided nature bullies, and how parents and teachers should to control them. But to fix the problem you really should look at each kid who gets bullied and show them what they're doing wrong.

USPS needs to greatly improve its online services. USPS still does not let you go on the web and print out a friggin first class stamp or envelope. You still have to wait in line at the post office to do registered mail, certified mail, proof of mailing, or to make a claim for lost/late mail. Clearly the USPS has never made it a mandate to make all services available on usps.com, so that people never have to visit their post office except in rare circumstances.

Maybe USPS should just buy stamps.com for a billion dollars and turn it into a free service.

Check out the attitude of the vice president of the USA. http://youtube.com/watch?v=D1j0FS0Z6ho