And as soon as they do, the rest of America will cancel the cable bundles they only pay out the nose for because of the live sports channels, where PPV fees are the straw that breaks the camel's back. The entire cable industry will collapse overnight, and the vacuum in the ISP market will be filled by startups and municipalities with gigabit fiber and competitive pricing. Then the under-served talent in America will finally be productive and solve global warming, and all the polar bears will have yachts and Whole Foods will solve world hunger by giving everyone veggie burgers.

Yup, sounds like the FCC made a good decision to me.

The latest models of the F9R boosters have retractable steering fins in addition to thrusters and engine gimbals for guidance control, and the ability to hover in place and translate to a precise landing spot. I'm sure they will have everything worked out by the time they try to actually land on a sea platform.

I meant to add, boy is it fun maxing out my 150Mbps connection, getting 15 Mega BYTES per second on a 1GB file.

One word: Bittorrent.

And have the benefit of only taking half the meeting to get working right, and if it's a really nice one then when it breaks in a month you can go back to using it as a regular whiteboard.

Good point, but it sounds like the OP deals with medical devices before they produce any medical information, so there there should only be industrial espionage to worry about...

We're talking about Verizon Fios home internet here, not wireless...

Only if you can fill them at all. If Toyota actually wants to sell these things, they're going to have to pony up the $1 billion for fueling stations the way Tesla has installed chargers.

I forgot to mention satellites and missile guidance systems, which experience extremes of temperature and vibration. All those problems are technically solvable. The main problem is, as you say, price: Making the perfect smart gun system will be expensive. Regulations would have to ensure that substandard smart guns are unavailable, or just as illegal as dumb guns, if that were the case. Of course, if cheap guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have cheap guns.

But fly-by-wire airliners, military radios, targeting systems, medical implants, even Internet backbone routers all have absurdly high reliability stats and are all based on electronics, sensors and firmware.

So don't buy your smart gun from a factory in China producing crap for Comcast or Sony. Buy it from someone who knows how to build high-reliability electronics for the military, like Siemens or ATK.

Would you leave your house unlocked all the time because you might lose the key while you were being chased by a mugger? No, because on the other 30,000 days of your life burglars will come and go as they please. It's the same with a gun, where it is easily stolen or grappled from you before you use it, or worse, found by a child.

Unfortunately, most of those that do would like to continue doing so. But nice try!

Sounds to me like Level 3 does peer with ISPs, but the ISPs are failing to upgrade their side of the pipes so the peering suffers, just like it did with Netflix. But unlike the Netflix case, the ISP has no "asymmetric traffic" argument as to why Level 3 should pay disproportionately for peering.

Troll fail:

(1) Entitlement spending doesn't make one bit of difference. These days, NASA gets less than 0.5% of the federal budget. The Pentagon wastes more money in a month than NASA spends in a year. The only reason Congress doesn't double or triple NASA's budget is that they see no political gain in it for themselves without earmarking the money for projects that will never be finished.

(2) Don't know how this is relevant. We knew all along that making ourselves beholden to Russia for manned spaceflight was a bad idea, but Bush and the last Congress did it anyways. If Ukraine hadn't happened, something else probably would have sooner or later.

(3) is flat-out wrong. If you hadn't noticed, the NASA Chief Administrator is a former astronaut himself--not some lawyer who was handed the job on a silver platter for ass-kissing. NASA managers are probably the most competent team in the whole federal government (not least because so many of them are actual rocket scientists), which is why we are able to do so many amazing projects in spite of the idiotic budget cuts that get thrown at us.

Thud's response was far more accurate:

(0) is an accurate characterization of the SLS-Orion project, the official successor to the shuttle and informally known as the "Senate Launch System". This is why we had to contract SpaceX to actually build a rocket, as opposed to pretend to build while distributing pork.

(-1) is really the same thing as (0).

To resolve your confusion: Time Warner won't throttle *your* bandwidth, they will throttle *Netflix's* bandwidth getting into their network. So even though you have 15Mbps from Time Warner, and they're only trying to push you 3Mbps, if 2 million Time Warner customers all try to get 3Mbps from Netflix through a single 10Gbps pipe, most of them will be sorely disappointed. Netflix would then have to pay Time Warner for a 100Gbps pipe.

And to be straight about this, none of it is about hardware cost. ISPs could perfectly well let Netflix co-locate at Netflix's (presumably smaller) expense and get faster speeds inside their networks without added interconnects. They just don't want to.

You're right. Tesla's legal team is just trying to keep the doors open wherever they can. There was a bill in Arizona to legalize them but it died. I don't think Musk is going to commit to building his factory until one of them goes through with it.