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Comment Re:I've been thinking about this for a while (Score 1) 334

This is fascinating. I've long wanted to set up something like this, but couldn't wrap my head around how to do it, or how it could be made sufficiently open or community-based (if that was even possible).

Do you make an attempt to tag changes with common names (Changeset 187591734 = "PATRIOT Act")? What about laws under consideration?

Here's what I envision:

* A master repository containing the base code (like you have).

* Browseable changesets (or branches, or tags) containing specific laws, bills, proposed changes, etc.

* Committed changesets == passed laws

* Automatic (or community-based if necessary) conversion from bill text to changet

* Fine-grained commentability (individual lines, phrases)

Comment Re:The pico satellites sound interesting (Score 1) 73

They're doing different things, is the reason.

Most commercial sats these days are for broadcast, which need to be in GEO. It's no use putting something small into GEO, since it costs so much to get there anyway. They put something big that can last a while and serve a lot of customers (lots of transponders).

Government users (NASA and academic) are doing science, like remote sensing and atmospheric sampling and things. They don't care about having 100% coverage over the US, so they can put up tiny sats that fly over every few hours, or collections of 10s or 100s or small sats that can talk to each other.

This doesn't take into account spy sats of course, those apparently need to be both big and close.

They're different means to different ends, really.

Comment Re:We already have faster-than-light communication (Score 1) 627

I'm not a physicist, so bear with me here.

So why can't you have a protocol agreement and a clock?

We both agree that electrons 0-15 are for sending, electrons 16-31 are for receiving (for a single message only), on the x-axis. All electrons must be set to + or - to eliminate any default state.

Then you say that at clock time t, we assume the message has been sent.

Comment Re:And... the electric car is still not quite ther (Score 1) 378

Well, since the GP was talking about NYC, there's a rail option that feeds the city from up to 90 miles out (to the north):
http://www.mta.info/mnr/html/mnrmap.htm

And on a northeast-southwest line, there's Acela:
http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/am2Route/Vertical_Route_Page&c=am2Route&cid=1080772074490&ssid=134

These might not be the most convenient options, and may be more expensive than a fuel-efficient car, but it looks to me like if you can't find public transport within a 100-mile radius of NYC, you're not trying very hard.

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