The gerbil or hand crank sound's like a good idea.

I was running with the $1000/kW idea. A 4mW reactor would cost .4c but then I thought the telcos would probably be involved at some point and we would be charged 40c blowing the budget and making it way to hard.

Building a pussy to stroke his organ?

Photons don't have mass but they do have momentum. This leads to a photon or radiation pressure that is part of the idea behind solar sails.

Unfortunately the amount of momentum for the energy is pretty small. E^2 = p^2.c^2 + m^2.c^4 m=0 big factor of divide by c. Most laser propultion strategies use solar panels + ion drives or ablation or something to accelerate a local mass to provide the change in momentum.

Actually in Australia they work for four letter agencies.

Like DSD and AFP :-)

(OK OK Maybe ASIO)

A better analogy.

Your walking down the street in the business district (it was a com domain). Your wearing your press hat (your coming from a press computer). One of you friends says you should check out the transport planning office. You walk up to the building labeled "transport planning office" and the automatic doors open in a welcoming way. You look around the foyer and there are posters saying all sorts of interesting stuff about plans for buses, trains and cycling etc. There are no posters saying bugger off this is still draft and private.

I wouldn't feel like I'd done anything immoral by reading them. If I was a reporter I'd report on what I'd read as well.

If you put something in a public place and don't provide a mechanism to keep people out like locking the doors or putting a keep out sign up then it is public.

Apple computers had their logo first so I don't think they would be trying to grab marketing value from Woolworths. If you mean woolies was trying to take marketing off Apple then I don't think that would work. Woolworths is much more "famous" than Apple in their marketing area.

Woolies haven't really had a logo previously. They've been trying to consolidate their image over the last while (i.e. I believed they've ditched the safeway branding). Their jingle is "The fresh food people" so a logo that looks like an apple, mellon, pumpkin or something matches there existing marketing. They also have the "Big W" brand so this is probably a move to consolidate them as well.

If apple wanted a strong logo that was defendable outside the area where it was registered (computing) then they should have picked something a but more unique. Apple logos are and have been used as part of fruit, education (give your teacher an apple) and health (an apple a day keeps the doctor away) markets for longer than apple computers have been around. I don't think the Apple logo is distinctive enough to survive registration as a generic logo where as a green stylised W that give the feeling of fruit or vegetables is much friendlier logo for the registration purpose.

On a side note it wouldn't surprise me if Woolworths is the biggest apple computer reseller in Australia through DSE, Tandy and BigW brands. My MBP was brought through one of their stores.

I don't understand the desire to go faster than light. Currently its only energy budget (and our physical limits of acceleration) that is limiting the travel time.

Basically I could spend heaps of energy and get to the nearest star in 100years say.... Bugger. To long I'm dead (unless the immortality thing is sorted). Plan B I increase the energy budget and get there in 50 years. Lots more expensive but a more reasonable time scale? If I had the energy I could get as close to 0 time as I want as I get the velocity up near c.

If we managed to get faster than light then I'd get there before I left. If I was already there then why would I leave? What does it really mean to be somewhere before you've left?

I guess the thing people want is to go somewhere really quickly and return really quickly and be back in a local time where their friends and family are still young enough to be told about the other end.. I think to achieve this they are really after a short cut. Some sort of worm hole that lets you travel a short distance through spacetime. I'm not sure that wormholes can exist in that sort of scale. The universe seems to iron out the little inconsistencies like that on pretty small scales.

We've always joked that the squeaky pigeons needed their wings oiled.

My personal favourite technical solution is to use some sort of IP hash based token bucket filter. Protocol and service agnostic which is good because any weird protocol based definition of fair would be outdated soon in this world. Doesn't rely on the client/server to behave in a fair way.

Basically everybody gets the same share of the available bandwidth. Since it is based on IP rather than tcp backing off it is relatively immune to P2Ps many connections causing it to unfairly back off. Also immune to short lived http connections not having enough time to settle. The heavy down loaders get their fair share of the bandwidth which is not necessarily true at the moment with the way P2P opens many connections and the way Naggle backs off tcp.

Most implementations have a concept of bursting so that if your link is quiet then you can get a burst for a few packets. Good for the interactive feel for normal browsing.

Good for the ISP in that while it consumes router resources they are limited by the number of hash buckets configured. It would be unfortunate if you were in a hash collision with somebody who was a heav user but normaly the hash is rotated every few seconds to limit this damage.

For the use of the real time protocols SIP/RTP etc then ISP could even honour packet tagging within your bucket. i.e. your voip wins over your P2P but somebody elses voip doesn't impact your P2P.. Currently packet tagging on the internet is pretty useless because the packets are competing against somebody elses definition of important.

My little brother's work has a no fly zone over it. Even the birds don't fly over a second time....

He showed me a photo of some wings with some carbon between them.

Not a solution for airports cause apparently they can do that to pilots as well (hence the NOTAM restricted area). >20kW of microwave energy and a very directional antenna could be an amusing toy. I wonder what the bit error rate is from cooking a bird?

If your planning a HA solution my first step is to decide what you are trying to protect against, what the cost/consequence of these events occurring and a method to test failure events.

I've seen projects where the HA configuration has contributed to more downtime than any specific failure. I've seen projects that were too "important" to schedule test failures so when it did fail it didn't fail over.

In a lot of cases if a specialist site is down then people would come back later. If your consequences are not that high for an outage then save your money for good backups and good support contracts and maybe a cold/warm spare. If slashdot crashed now I'd just check again next time I had a chance.

A HA solution has to be designed from end to end. This isn't easy and some of your components may not work in a compatible way(black box software). Static content can be pretty easy to load balance/failover but once you start getting into dynamic content things become more complicated and uncertain.

If you have to worry about session persistence an unexpected event might redistribute connections causing existing connections to break for something that was very transient. i.e. it amplifies a minor fault.

I've seen applications that didn't pass their status through to the web server. There was a significant back end failure and the web server was still returning "200 OK" responses to the requests. The other servers were still working correctly and due to session persistence the people diagnosing the issue initially didn't realise that 25% of sessions were empty pages. The developer should have provided checks in their code, the load balancer could have done a different check, the initial level 1 support didn't really understand the system. All these have costs and consequences. i.e. development time and skills, risk that a content change might cause a service check to fail, training costs.

Exactly. Its not the protocol that's the problem. Its the way that people think that their usage is more important that others and the way that ISPs (or TCP) enforce fairness.

There needs to be a good, neutral, technical definition of fair. Because you can't trust the end points to be fair it needs to be enforceable via the ISP. It would be reasonably easy to hack a tcp stack to not back off. All the well behaved TCP connections from other users would just get out of your way.

My proposal is some sort of hashed token bucket scheme. The hashing should be done on the basis of the local IP addresses. Maybe hash buckets could be different sizes due to different link/plan sizes. Number of buckets could be kept reasonably low to save router resources.

Maybe their could be a borrow feature. i.e. casual browsing gives a burst of performance for better interactive feel.

This way all users get an equal share of the available bandwidth. P2P users get what is available without being squeezed by some unfair throttling policy. HTTP users get the interactive performance they want or their fair share for a single download. Voip/Video users get a minimum bandwidth to keep them happy. Future protocols, hacks and attacks are handled in a fair, robust, limited way before they are invented.

The other problem is that there appears to be an assumption that ISP users are idiots and its too hard to market otherwise. This has lead to the situation where:

1) Links are sold based on the last mile pipe size. Big is better because its faster/less latency. This is often true but isn't the only one factor.
2) All you can eat plans exist because of the assumption that users don't understand concepts like shared back haul and shared upstream. They also tend to have vague acceptable use policies around impact to others etc.

My ISP tends to be pretty good on this. I'm on a wireless capped plan. The ISP is pretty clear that this is a shared medium. They use a technology that divides this fairly.(as much as they can on ISM band equipment)

Because I'm paying for the cap size there is a commercial incentive for the ISP to keep the upstream bandwidth unsaturated. i.e. I'd be paying for a cheaper plan if I couldn't use the bandwidth.

My ISP is also open about their status. Their mailing list tells about outage, capacity problems and planned upgrades. Running towers on tops of hills means that they occasionally loose capacity due to lightning etc. Being told about this makes it easier for me to plan around the issue.

Don't save the big one for last.

I guess that solves the x-ray problem. Lots of glue for next xmas.