And this is a problem ... why?

Imagine if we actually required the sort of test that some old farts seem to advocate for. Very few people would pass, new licenses would dry up, and eventually the cellcos and the other usual greedy suspects would steamroll whatever was left of the ARRL and have the spectrum reallocated. End of story.

Those "appliance operators" you speak so disparagingly of are, just by virtue of using the spectrum allocated to the Amateur service and perhaps being active in a local club or sending a few bucks to the ARRL, what keeps the hobby possible.

Frankly, I'm all for lowering the bar further, down to a nominal fee and a test that only covers the legal aspects and RF safety. Not because I don't think the electronics are important, but it's a hell of a lot easier to interest people in the electronics once they've already started to play around a bit and see the applied side of things, and we need the warm bodies if we want to hang onto the spectrum.

Also, there are valid aspects of Amateur Radio that really don't rely on or require much electronics knowledge. For some people, Amateur Radio is more of a means to some other end, or an accompaniment to some other interest/hobby. There are a significant number of people in my local club who are Red Cross volunteers or paid employees, and maintain Ham licenses in order to do EmComm stuff. That's a totally valid use of Amateur Radio, but it doesn't require much theoretical knowledge of radio, just the actual practical radio-operation skills to get the messages across.

The ARRL is slowly taking more of a "big tent" philosophy, and it's time for the rest of the community to be a bit more welcoming if we want to have any hope of surviving for a few more decades.

Also, I doubt that exterior paint is a fraction of the paint sold; most is probably interior paint.

In my house, based just on the layers of paint on windowsills and baseboards, there have been at least 4-5 complete interior paint jobs. (Corresponding to each time the house has been sold.) There's been only one done outside in the same period. It may be a slightly more extreme than usual case, but I suspect most houses are similar. I'd bet the interior of a house has more paintable surface area, too (think about ceilings!).

It's a whole lot easier to just have someone come in and blow fiberglass insulation into the attic than change the pitch of the roof. Engineer the roof for the snow/wind load, then insulate the living spaces below.

In a modern, well-insulated house, the attic isn't part of the heated living space anyway. If you're heating or cooling your attic, you're doing a lot of things wrong.

They're talking about flat roofs, which you normally find in cities, on large buildings, and can't see from the street, not pitched roofs like you find on SFHs in the sub/exurbs.

For houses there are "high albedo" shingles in traditional colors that you can buy. They look fairly normal but reflect back a larger percentage of infrared insolation than a traditional asphalt shingle. Light grey also works better than black.

Nobody is really suggesting that you go painting a shingled roof white.

and have not been produced in mass since the 80's

You wanna provide a cite for that? No? I kinda doubt it, because I have an alarm clock sitting right next to me which I know from experience drifts like crazy when it's not connected to AC power, kinda indicative that it's not using the same timebase all the time, and it's only a few years old. Lots of clocks (alarm clocks especially) only use internal oscillators as a backup when running on battery, and they often don't do a very good job. And this is a Sony; the cheap ones like you'll find in millions of hotel rooms are probably even cheaper -- it wouldn't surprise me if they have no battery or internal oscillator at all.

I don't doubt that the circuits inside most of them were designed in the 80s, but that doesn't mean much.

Says the person who has never tried to run a Mr Coffee off of a shitty generator. Let me tell you, it won't work. Freaked the fuck out. (Only the timer/clock part -- luckily the heater part still ran OK, or we all would have been doomed.)

Lots of people in this discussion are seriously underestimating the number of things that use line frequency as a reference, and overestimating the number that use quartz crystals in anything except a backup. Many alarm clocks do have crystals, but use them only when running on batteries. My alarm clock that's sitting right next to me -- a Sony that you can buy at WalMart right now if you want -- is like this. When the power goes out it runs on the battery (if you have one installed and it actually has any juice), but in this mode it will lose time like crazy. After an all-night power outage this winter it was off by a good 10 minutes or so. I've noticed the same behavior with other clocks, too. (My oven does the same thing except I never have the backup battery in it anyway.)

Yeah I don't really see this catching on in the short term; there aren't that many use cases where you need the the anonymity of cash, but where you can't just use cash. Buying grey- or black-market stuff online seems to be the major one, and if that's the only market you can be sure the regulators are going to come after them.

Eventually -- maybe in my lifetime, maybe not -- I think governments are going to try and get rid of cash. We think of cash as being a frictionless medium for exchange, and it's certainly better than barter or carrying around large amounts of metallic coinage, but it's not that easy to manage. Cash has to be physically moved from one place to another (e.g. a merchant has to physically make a deposit at the end of the business day, banks have to physically return worn bills to the Federal Reserve and get new ones, etc.) and that involves a lot of trouble and expense.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of system that allowed banks -- and eventually, merchants -- to deposit bills into the Federal Reserve by scanning them and then shredding the paper. You'd probably have to add additional information onto the bills on top of the serial numbers that are there right now, maybe some sort of electronic signature in 2D barcode form, but I don't think it's totally impractical. From there you could start phasing out cash in favor of some sort of debit system.

Like I said, I don't think it's imminent, but it wouldn't surprise me if it started to happen in my lifetime.

Erm, what? Gold is pretty useful stuff. At the end of the day, aside from just looking pretty, it's useful as an electrical conductor, in many chemical processes, and you can hammer it out into a sheet only a few atoms thick if you're really motivated. Pretty neat stuff really.

By using it as currency we probably keep the price several times higher than it would otherwise be as a purely industrial metal, but the value would not be zero. Same with silver, platinum, iridium, and other metals that are used both industrially and traded as currency or as investments. Part of the reason they're used as currency is because their value is backstopped by their industrial uses. (Especially true of platinum-group metals.)

Now if you want an example of something that's almost totally worthless ... large diamonds. Small diamonds are handy, mostly as abrasives, but large ones? Nothing to them but "teh shiny" and a lot of advertising. Diamonds, when you get right down to it, are basically a sort of voluntary fiat currency where people agree that they're valuable not because any government says they're valuable, but because other people think so. If everyone decided at once that they weren't, and that they weren't willing to pay lots of money to put them on jewelry, they'd be good for nothing but crushing up to make tile-saw blades.

There are many people who would argue that we'd be better off going to half or even a tenth of that resolution (nickel or dime resolution, respectively). I think it might cause some issues when doing transactions that involve multiplying a unit price across many units, e.g., imagine a data connection priced in kB or MB, but you could always do the computation at some higher resolution and then round using a standard algorithm to nickels or dimes for payment. We already do that at the gas pump (where the price is calculated to the tenth of a cent but rounded to the nearest cent for payment) so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch.

Only argument against this tends to be that retailers would do shady things with the rounding if the amount became even remotely significant. You could probably fix that legislatively, though.

Not sure about the Nook but it is trivial to strip Amazon's DRM right now. So the easy solution to all your problems is just to download and strip the DRM from your purchased books, then store them away somewhere. No worries about Amazon getting retroactively grabby or changing the rules of the game later on.

People tend to forget that the e-readers, although in some respects tied to a "store", can also get content from other places, including just copying it directly over USB. You could buy a Kindle and never buy a book from Amazon, if you don't want to (of course, it's really convenient to get books from AMZ...). And once the DRM has been removed from an Amazon purchase you can use it the same as just about any other Mobipocket-format book.

I would never purchase a device that could only obtain content through a store, or where the content wasn't able to be freed into an archivable, widely-accepted format. Thankfully the Kindle, at least in its current incarnation, is neither of those things.

I use Callcentric as well, but I think the reason people are excited is because lots of people use Google Voice (for the follow-me services and voicemail-as-text, mostly), so the userbase is a lot larger than anything Callcentric is likely to have in the near future. And when you are talking about communications technology, "network effects" that depend on having a large number of users are very important.

But the upshot for people who already have a SIP provider like Callcentric handling their home phone is that we can now make calls to Google Voice users for free -- not even the $0.02c/min that Callcentric charges for an outgoing PSTN call. The only problem is that dialing a SIP 'number' is a bit of a bear if you have an old analog phone connected to an ATA ... the easiest way I have found to call SIP 'numbers' is to use Callcentric's click-to-dial ringback service. (You put the address into their website, it will ring your phone and then connect you through.) Alternately you can put SIP addresses into the phonebook, I think.

Android 2.3 can make SIP calls over the phone's data connection, right from the built-in phonebook. My old Nokia E61 could do it too.

That's too bad.

I think there's a perception that the ISPs have been dragging their feet on IPv6, and to a certain extent that may be true, but the ISPs I've used recently -- Comcast and Cox in Northern VA -- have both been taking steps towards IPv6. The big one that they have both done is deployed 6to4 gateways that are quite close, in network terms, to the edges. I can hit a 6to4 gateway from my house within 10ms and 3 hops on Cox, last time I checked, and on Comcast it was similar (maybe a little bit more).

So the infrastructure to start taking advantage of IPv6 is out there for many users. Sure, 6to4 isn't as good as "real" IPv6, in that it still causes your address to change obnoxiously whenever the underlying IPv4 one does, but it still lets you start playing with it on your LAN in a routable way.

The problem IMHO is almost totally on the manufacturers (and related developers) of home edge routers. It wouldn't be hard to set them up to send a test packet out to the 6to4 gateway address and, if the response is below some threshold, automatically enable 6to4 and radvd. Enough ISPs have set up gateways now that the lack of support can't really be blamed on them anymore.

There will -- assuming the slow pace of the IPv6 deployment doesn't totally fuck it up -- probably be devices that consumers will want to use that will depend on IPv6, for things like multihoming.

If you don't have IPv6, it may become more difficult for your mobile device to roam seamlessly from the cellular WAN to the home LAN when you walk in the door, meaning that the video call or whatever it is you're doing (watching porn, more likely) will drop.

I frequently hear people basically claiming that "nobody needs IPv6" or "nobody needs end-to-end connectivity," and it has a certain "640k is good enough..." ring to it. Of course people don't need IPv6 now, because they don't have IPv6 now -- ergo they can't depend on it yet. But once we have a critical mass of users with true IPv6, so that developers can begin to take advantage of it, then we're going to start to see services that depend on it, and users will start to depend on them.

Has DD-WRT gotten any easier to configure IPv6 via 6to4?

The last version that I played with -- which, admittedly, is now more than a year or two old -- didn't make it easy. You had to explicitly enable "IPv6" and "radvd", and then you had to configure radvd (which most users aren't going to be able to do except by blindly pasting some stuff from the Internet into a text box), and then you had to go through a whole bunch of steps that involved writing (or again blindly copying/pasting) a shellscript that would try and keep the IPv6 side of 6to4 in sync with the IPv4 address when it changed.

It just struck me as offensively poor design in a product that's otherwise pretty neat. I hope they've fixed it, because if aftermarket firmware developers can't even get IPv6 support right, there's no way that the manufacturers are ever going to do it.

The only router I've run across that does IPv6 right (in the sense of automatically setting up native transport if it's available or 6to4 if it isn't) is the Apple Airport Extreme, and it's pretty expensive for a router.