An IP Address For Every Light Bulb 457
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday NXP and Green Wave Reality announced to the world that they plan to give every lightbulb an IPV6 address. Hot on the heels of Google's 900 mhz announcement, Green Wave Reality already has iPhone / Android / and Web-based support. Looks like the lighting wars have started."
Wrong place (Score:5, Insightful)
Architecturally, this is the wrong place to put uniquely addressed devices. The addresses should be in the fixtures, to avoid the maintenance headache of readdressing bulbs every time they are replaced. If I want the lights in the room to dim, I don't want to tell the bulbs, I want to tell the room that I'm sitting in. The room contains the fixtures. The fixtures contain the bulbs. How the room talks to the fixtures and the fixtures talk to the bulbs are different questions, but individually addressable bulbs is a maintenance disaster waiting to happen.
Just because they're conveniently end-user replaceable doesn't make it a correct choice, just slightly more practical. X-10, Z-Wave and Insteon are all also equally incorrect in that they generally put the control at the point of the switch, instead of the fixture. Again, the user's ultimate goal is not to control the switch but to control the room's lighting, which is defined by the fixtures and their locations within the room.
Re:Wrong place (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wrong place (Score:5, Interesting)
Pervasive and ubiquitous surveillance, disguised as an assisting technology for energy efficiency.
How many gift Trojan horses must we look in the mouth, on a daily basis?
Re:Wrong place (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm...wonder what it would cost to make a few of these on the side?
Re:Wrong place (Score:4, Interesting)
You've just conceived of the scenario where the possession of a simple incandescent light bulb could be grounds for a charge of treason and punishable by death.
The incandescent light bulb ban might have a secondary benefit; it might increase border security with Mexico.
If "contraband" incandescent bulbs are being smuggled in at the Mexico/US border, the EPA and Progressives will have anti-personnel landmines laid, missile-equipped Predator drones patrolling, and automated gun turrets installed at the border before you can say "mass graves".
Strat
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I assume he's thinking it will be possible to see how many bulbs are in your house and their on/off state, so it might be possible to see if the house is occupied or if you're running a grow op (as "smart grid" tech already does with large appliances). But I'd only use well-secured OpenBulbs myself.
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Re:Wrong place (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if I want every lightbulb to have a consistent IP address when my ISP decides to give me a new prefix, I'd rather not want to renumber everything inside it. Or adjust all the settings.
Can you imagine? Your ISP decides to give you a new prefix and you'd have to program it into your switches so they can talk to the right lightbulbs again.
One of the benefits of NAT was the internal network was separated from the external - changes to the external IP addresses didn't influence the internal ones - simplifying management and administration. Some places don't mind going through the rigamarole, but I'm sure most homes have better things to do than manage their networks (if they even know how).
Sure you can assign more IPv6 addresses to ensure that your home server is always FC00::100, but having to know all the IP addresses of each machine when diagnosing things just gets to be a pain. Yes, you can use DHCPv6 to staticly assign addresses, but given how badly most devices handle DHCP IP address changes, it'll be a reboot fest.
Re:Wrong place (Score:5, Informative)
"Can you imagine? Your ISP decides to give you a new prefix and you'd have to program it into your switches so they can talk to the right lightbulbs again."
You probably wouldn't want each light/fixture to have a public IP, just private. Let the control unit in your house have a public IP.
"One of the benefits of NAT was the internal network was separated from the external - changes to the external IP addresses didn't influence the internal ones"
At least with Vista/7, each machine gets 3 IPs by default. A private IP, a static Public IP, and a random public IP that changes avery few minutes and refuses incoming connections. You don't need to worry about your private IPs changing, just your public IPs. No biggie.
"Sure you can assign more IPv6 addresses to ensure that your home server is always FC00::100, but having to know all the IP addresses of each machine when diagnosing things just gets to be a pain"
Thank god for name-to-IP protocols that have been standard for the past 2 decades.
The transition will be annoying, but once we get use to IPv6, it will be easier.
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First, your ISP probably won't randomly give you a new prefix. There's no need. You'll probably have a static one assigned. Because there are enough prefixes for every one of their customers to just have on assigned.
Second, manual configuration of IPv6 addresses is almost completely unnecessary, since addresses can be statically assigned within a prefix based on the hardware address of the device. The router gives out the prefix, the device will always have a predictable address underneath it.
Second, you'd
Re:Wrong place (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong place (Score:4, Interesting)
ipv6 provides 2^128 addresses.
that's 340282366920938463463374607431768211456.
that's 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456
that absolutely dwarfs the number of stars in the entire observable universe (one septillion is a high estimate.)
i think we'll be okay (at least for a little while~)
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If you don't NAT the NATed NAT then an evil 5 year old hacker in Russia might turn your reading lamp off just as you are about to find out who done it!
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There also isn't DHCP with IPv6, hence the sarcastic comment...
Yes there is, defined as RFC 3315 [ietf.org]. Do your homework next time.
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If you had an LED light bulb it might last long enough to be functionally equivalent to the fixture. I think it is pretty silly either way. This feature will consume additional electricity, and if you want to turn the light bulb on remotely the circuit has to be always on even when the bulb is off. This does not seem to be a good way to save energy.
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Depends.
Do you want to pay a lot of money for this LED bulb that will save power and last a long time or do you want the cheap bulb.
vs
Do you want this cool bulb that will save you money and allow you to control the lights from anywhere in the house.
I tend to leave a light on in the morning if I will not be back until late so I can see when I get home. Timers are a pain. If I could turn them on remotely when I got home it would be great.
Over all a net savings in power.
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There are a number of options other than this though, that don't need the addressing/network connection.
For example, light/motion sensor lights. Set your porch light to come on only if it's dark and somebody approaches.
For a room, perhaps a reed switch in the door or just tie it to a timer. Or have it do both - something like 'turn light on for 5 minutes whenever switch activates'. Then again, perhaps an infrared sensor that lights the room when it thinks a human is inside.
As danlip mentions, the network
Re:Wrong place (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, motion sensor lights are just great.
A few weeks ago I was sitting on the toilet in a stall in the church bathroom. I was taking longer than usual; After about 10 minutes the lights shut off. So there I am sitting in complete pitch black. I called out lightly, but no one heard. I was too embarrassed to yell. I reached my hand under the stall door and waved it around trying to activate the motion sensor, to no avail. I reached up and took my light jacket off the hook on the door and started whipping my jacket over the top of the stall door, again to no avail. Then I was getting pissed. I partially stood, wiped as well as possible in pitch darkness, and pushed the stall door open, but still nothing. Then I waddled a couple of steps forward and started waving my jacket around towards the entry door hoping it would break into the motion sensor's area of view.
That's when the door opened, the lights snapped on instantly, and a little boy stood staring in shock at the nut case waddling like a penguin with his pants around his ankles waving his jacket in a circle over his head.
Yep. Love motion sensors.
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That's because the wanna-be electrician the church had volunteer to help for that installed it wrong. If your church did not cheap out and use real occupancy sensor for the task you would not have had the problem.
But they wanted instead to use free labor and use a $29.00 home depo motion switch instead of a $150.00 proper occupancy sensor from wattstopper and an electrician that knew what he was doing to install it.
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no its a good way to easily slip in cameras, mikes, speakers, everywhere... electricity increase, at least at first, could be tiny... a few milliwatts...
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Since when has all this automatic stuff ever been done with energy efficiency in mind?
One look at all the craze over "wireless everything" shows you that people aren't serious about energy efficiency.
Then again, there was a time we had to get up off the couch to change the channel, too. Imagine the lazy people of today even thinking of such a thing or knowing where the controls were on the damn TV.
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That's why you should be talking to the house, not the room, fixtures, or appliances. One always on circuit that can power up downstream only circuits as needed. There are times when distributed systems are the hammer you need, but this isn't one of them.
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They will, and the light will just communicate with that. The advantage of giving one to the lightbulb is that you acn follow it if it's moved.
I mean, from an Architecturally stand point. When the fuck someone will move a light is another story.
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Imagine how much fun pranksters would have if they found the addresses of your light fixtures. But it could also lead to some awesome light shows.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9FbjjkKo4 [youtube.com]
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"An ultra-low-power standby supply controller with 10mW no-load capability"
So we want to go from having the switch disconnect power to the lights, to adding 10mW for EVERY lightbulb in existence...how the HELL is this part of a 'Green Wave' in helping me manage power consumption in my house?
Presume I have 50 bulbs in my house. At 10mW, we're talking 2.5W of always-on baseload draw. Multiply that times 75 million (rounded down from the 75.11 million Wolfram Alpha gave me): 2.5 * 75,000,000 = 187,000,000W o
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50 bulbs? really? big house.
Anyways, let say your bulbs are 10- Watts.
That means if you use 1 of your 50 bulbs for 15 minutes less per day, you break even. Everything else is a gain.
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Not really, I've got a 900sq ft place and I have 6 bulbs in my garage (opener + illumination), 6 tubes and 3 bulbs in my kitchen (overhead + stove hood + oven), 2 bulbs in the fridge (freezer + fridge), 7 bulbs in my living room (5 rarely used in the ceiling + 2 niche lamps), 2 in the laundry closet, 1 in the hall, 2 in the bedroom closet, 2 tubes and a bulb in the bedroom, and 4 tubes in the bathroom. That's 35 bulbs and tubes for an apartment, though at the moment I rarely use more than 2 of those for any
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Presume I have 50 bulbs in my house. At 10mW, we're talking 2.5W of always-on baseload draw.
Uh, no, 50 bulbs * 10 mW/bulb = 500 mW, or 0.5 Watts for the SI challenged.
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X-10, Z-Wave and Insteon are all also equally incorrect in that they generally put the control at the point of the switch, instead of the fixture.
"Insteon", more or less a modernized competitor of X10 and friends, does three-way switch emulation by having remote switches remotely switch the switch that switches the load. Yeah, I know, confused the heck out of me the first time.
Putting the PoC at the switch is apparently necessary for 3way switches, or you need to extend the protocol to add a "toggle" function.
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generally put the control at the point of the switch
This actually makes the most sense to me. You are gonna want the physical switch to be in sync with the light fixture, and want to have the physical point of shut off for safety (changing a light bulb comes to mind). You can't use a traditional switch because if the traditional switch is turned off, your fixture isn't getting power and can't toggle itself on.. so you are going to need a special switch anyway. Having no inline switch (that is, the fixture always has power and the "switch" just communicates t
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Each IPv6 address consists of a local segment and a global segment. The first 64-bits are the address assigned to the house or service customer. The second 64-bits are generated locally, optionally from the 32-bit MAC address. You could have billions of lightbulbs addressed in this manner, and still only consume a billionth of the usable address space. IPv6 is the very definition of overkill. Even with foolish use of it, we're not going to run into problems until we become a large interstellar society.
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A more practical solution for existing fixtures would be an attachment that screws into the socket, and then the bulb screws into that.
Of course it doesn't negate the general silliness of the entire thing, but it is a little bit more sane.
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Not many people I know lick their fingers and jam them in the socket when they change the bulb. IF you cant avoid that temptation when you change your light bulbs, I suggest hiring a helper to make sure you can keep your fingers away from the contacts.
Will this finally shut up (Score:2)
all the people who say that the desire for NAT in a native IPv6 environment is broken, and surely you can't want that, much less will we give it to you?
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if the earth was a ball made of only sand particles 1x1x1mm (no mantle, crust, oceans or core, just sand), 2^128 is the number of sand grains in 300 earths.
why do we need nat? explain. i'd like to know.
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It's not *always* about address space conservation.
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NAT is *always* about address space conservation. That is all NAT does. Any other function you believe NAT implies can be provided with a stateful firewall and no address translation.
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That's what DNS is for.
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Simple. IBM and whatever's left of AT&T Bell Labs will claim the first earth, the DoD and military will claim the second one (for national security!), leaving 99% of the third to be divied up between DEC, Xerox, and Ford.
We'll all have to use the last 1% of sand grain earth 3, so NAT will be an absolute necessity.
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what about the other 297 earths? I said 300, not 3.
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Because God can't even afford a router that can keep 2^128 routes in it's memory.
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That's why ipv6 is more efficient at routing. Also, your comment is stupid.
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Because some people think NAT=Firewall. They don't seem to realize, even with IPv4, you can put internet routable IP's behind a firewall, and block access to them. They seem to think NAT is some sort of magical seperation between the networks, when it is not.
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I wouldn't, if you knew how to properly set up a firewall. You obviously don't know. Hint: NAT is not for hiding things, firewalls and internal addressing are.
In ten years. (Score:2)
Ten years from now we will have a push to IPv8 addresses as there will be a shortage of IPv6 addresses.
Everyone will want an IPv6 address for the lights on their Christmas trees and house displays.
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There are over 10^28 IPv6 addresses for every person. So even if you individually address every Christmas tree light you won't run out.
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The number is almost 5x10^28 actually. 5 times more.
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Thanks, that makes a big difference :)
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2^128: think a planet, the size of earth, made of only sand, 1 cubic mm grains. now think 300 planets. that's 2^128 grains of sand.
do you get the picture now?
wanna calculate? calculate the volume of a 40.000km circunference sphere, in cubic milimeters. divide 2^128 in that. result? roughly 300.
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Damn right! We should have everything with IP addresses: I want my shoe laces to have IP addresses, and my shoes should be wireless routers, so that I can be alerted on my cell phone when my shoe laces are untied, or when I've stepped in dog shit, or the soles are starting to wear thin. But why stop there, I want IP addresses in each slice of cheese, too, so that I can monitor its nutritional value as it slowly decays in my refrigerator. And my soap dispenser needs to alert me when the soap is running low.
Please give one to every LED in my OLED screen (Score:2)
It's 480x800 pixels. Does it use 3 LEDs per pixel for colors? That'll be 1152000 IPv6 addresses please. Thank you.
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we could. However they wouldn't give them to you, but to the manufacturer.
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So should I be blowing glass bulbs and putting metal wires in it to receive them myself then?
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That's a weird way to make an OLED screen.
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And we have enough IPv6 to make 2.95x10^32 screens.
How many sysadmins (Score:5, Funny)
does it take a change a lightbulb?
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Zero, it's a hardware problem.
Unless it's a router table error, in which case, 7. /. because the ;stupid user' doesn't know even the most rudimentary ways to use some obscure design.
1 to do it and 6 others to grumble about it on
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In 10 years this will appear on a list (Score:2)
And I don't mean a list of great ideas. This will be on one of those "top 10 stupid Internet ideas" lists.
There is no upside here. We take something that is simple and works, and make it complicated. We make it FAR more expensive to build. We open it up to attack where it previously wasn't. We use more energy in the process. And we get nothing of value out of it.
The only way this has any hope of succeeding as an idea is if they can convince the government to make a law requiring it in the name of "green ene
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On the upside, if the lights go out you'll have to hire an electrician and a network administrator to fix it.
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Well, that'll be one way to get some job security.
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If you have a desire to control your lights remotely, then buy them, otherwise don't and don't make shit up.
I It would be kind of neat to get an alert telling which lights are on at different times of the day.
Like when my daughter gets up a 2AM to read for 3 hours.
G
Bring in the law makers (Score:2)
FFS, this idea is so bad it boggles all comprehension. Perhaps these "greenies" didn't take into considering that running the required hardware to support an internet accessible service on every light bulb would dramatically INCREASE power consumption world wide? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
If they want to track light bulbs, then a simple RFD and a cheap USB wand-reader device to be used by interested parties is enough.
900 mhz (Score:2)
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OMG, he has villain hair.
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So you know a way to get your answer, instead took the more labor intensive way and posted the question in /. in hopes someone would give you some summary?
Steven Wright (Score:3)
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it was some woman in germany. and she called him, she didn't write a letter /steven wright joke snob
WTF (Score:2)
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to run a beowolf cluster on them...
Overdesign (Score:2)
Remote lighting control has been around for decades. X10 has been available for a long time, it's inexpensive, and you can buy the gear at any Home Depot.
The next generation system after that was Echelon LONworks, which is a bidirectional power-line network for home control. That system really does give every device a unique address, set during manufacture, like Ethernet addresses. It's only 78kb/s, but that's enough for lighting control. It never caught on for home control, but it turned out to be usef
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I'm still not wanting to do business with X10 after their marketing campaign several years ago with pop-unders and "OMG SHOWER SPY CAM!!!1eleventy" ads.
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X10 sucks, and it doesn't do what this has the potential to do.
Imagine having a game that control the lights in the room.
Or gte a notice on your phone when an motion sensitive light turns on?
Or not. In which case don't buy them.
Expensive (Score:2)
control lights from your phone (Score:4, Interesting)
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Or if you're into being dark and mysterious, a constantly running app that dims all lights within 50' of your GPS location... people will know when you're coming...
There was a Space: 1999 episode something like this. But now I'm dating myself...
Just as well. If you're on slashdot, there's no chance of you dating another human being.
Tracert teh-overhead-light (Score:2)
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Users\windoz>tracert teh-overhead-light
Tracing route to teh-overhead-light [3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 6 ms 7 ms 8 ms microsoft.com [65.55.12.249]
3 11 ms 8 ms 9 ms google.com [216.239.51.99]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 17 ms 16 ms 16 ms facebook.com [69.63.189.16]
6 19 ms 16 ms 18 ms nsa.g
Hmmmm .... (Score:2)
So, is it going to cost more to make the individual bulbs addressable ... or to build in the home automation which makes it all go? The sheer amount of extra crap and infrastructure required to make sure I've got the wireless network of lightbulbs is staggering -- and, seems pointless. Why does everybody want every object I own to be internet enabled?
This seems to be a common condition of people who envision the "house of the future" -- we're going to plan for a tremendous amount of infrastructure which
Lightbulbs? (Score:2)
Probably should RTFA before spouting off but... (Score:2)
Why? This sounds like a horrible idea. This would require a network connection for every lightbulb (or fixture), and for what?
And if there is an actual good reason behind it, why use IPv6? Why not use a unique, lightbulb-specific addressing system? Why rely on Wi-Fi/Ethernet to do the job? Have you ever tried putting a square peg in a round hole before?
And finally, are you *trying* to exhaust the IPv6 space as quickly as possible? Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Okay, I'm going to
Oh Net neutrality! (Score:2)
I'm sorry, the new NN laws don't apply to your bathroom light bulbs since they provide peer-to-peer support for your whole family. As a result, we have decided to throttle their wattage to the candlelight equivalent until you switch to our new bulbs which allow for single-user compatibility.
Thanks for choosing Comcast.
distributed denial-of-lighting attack (Score:3)
DDoL
you heard it here first
Does this mean (Score:3)
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Does this mean you'll be able to hack someone's toaster, like in the movies?
No, but you will be able to make the lights overhead explode and emit showers of sparks at dramatic moments.
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Hello support? I think my lightbulb has a problem?
Have you tried turning it off, unscrewing it, waiting 30 seconds, screwing it back in and turning it on again?
Yes, but it won't turn on
Bypass the router and plug your lighting system directly into the cable modem
Surely you don't think it's the router?
If it's not the router I cannot verify it is a hardware problem. There must be a virus or some other software problem, which are not covered under your support warranty. Would you like me to transfer you
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What is a smart phone or tablet for if not to play games while you're on the toilet?
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Dude. No. Trillions are chump change. A trillion times a trillion is chump change compared to the number of IPv6 addresses. 2^128 is a very big number.
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Not saying it's a good idea or bad. Just saying, that yes, they are indeed talking about hooking your light bulbs to the Internet. Do they need there own IPv6? Could you have one device
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So screwing in a lightbulb will finally be patentable? Awesome!
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