Competition

I agree this is not much of a surprise. I gotta ask, though. If not the government, exactly who has enough power to get the telecom industry to actually behave?

Thanks!

Where's my "depressing but informative" mod option when I need it?

Actually, as I read it, he's saying "do not make pid1 more complex than it has to be. It can invoke as much complexity as you want, but put it in a different pid." Which does not seem unreasonable to me.

Interesting. I'd like to see it. Citation?

That's the point. If the simulation differs, then something about actual natural law hasn't been properly translated into code. The interesting part is, if what we think we know _has_ been properly translated, then what we think we know may be wrong. The more common case, of course, is that the code has a glitch.

Gotta get that Alludium Phosdex. :)

An entirely different meaning for "the goggles - they do nothing"

Agreed, but note that parent said "in a naive form". A poorly phrased neutrality law that doesn't consider the difference between "all packets are equal" and "all sources/destinations are equal" could in fact screw up QOS.

sounds like he's trying to be a practical mathematician (I made that term up, so if it's supposed to mean something else, my bad) by finding actual numbers for things instead of saying "impractically countable" :)

Seems like we could probably stop at about 187 digits, really. The radius of the observable universe in planck lengths (call it X) is about 2.7*10^61, which makes the observable volume (4*pi*X^3) about (8*10^184)*pi cubic planck units. The value of the 186th digit of pi (after the decimal) should only affect the final volume by about 0.7 units; going much beyond that seems unnecessary :)

With frickin' lasers! You really mustn't forget the frickin' lasers; they totally pull the concept together.

And a truly free society wouldn't require you to do anything. Unfortunately real anarchy is unstable; all societies have some form of "you are not allowed to hurt others", and there goes freedom!