Shortest exit path routing.

It's pretty much what everyone's expected to do and makes technical sense: you don't know the topology of the other guy's network, so if you have a packet for one of his customers, you should hand it over to that network at the closest possible point, rather than hauling it over your backbone and possibly having the other guy haul it back if your assumptions about costs are wrong..

But this means people that are "push" heavy use a lot less backbone resources than the provider that is receiving the traffic. Historically that has resulted in payments when peering connections have significantly asymmetric traffic flows.

Yeah, that's still a thing, for a reason. They should seriously go the Akamai route... that way access ISPs can tout a "fully-Netflixed network!"

Consider this, if an electron were to transition from "really far" down to the first energy level of the hydrogen atom, then the photon emitted would have an energy of 13.6 eV, and the mass of the resulting hydrogen atom would be 13.6 eV less than the sum of the original masses.

Sorry, I meant to say 511 *keV* for the rest mass of the electron.

Actually, the mass of a hydrogen atom isn't equal to the sum mass of the proton and that of the electron. There's a 13.6 eV binding energy (good 'ol E-mc^2) that needs to be taken into account. Considering that the 511 eV rest mass of the electron and the fact that we're taking about measurements that are supposed to be accurate to less than 1 part per billion, then the binding energy is pretty significant. I suspect there are other effects that also need to be taken into account.

Cable companies don't compete with each other, they have their own territories. There's nothing stopping them from raising rates without hypothetically losing customers now.

Nothing in the GPL prohibits commercial redistribution. The GPL aims to prohibit proprietarization. Commercial redistribution and proprietarization are not the same thing. Ensuring software freedom for users of derivatives is a good thing.

Just what I needed to read on singles shaming day.

Any device's software can do things you don't want. If that device requires software which runs on your computer, then that software can do anything your OS lets it do.

This means a program running with your credentials (running as you) on a networked home computer can upload copies of files you can read, launch a program to spy on you as you work, or possibly install some software that does nasty things to any user of that computer. The possibilities are too numerous to list. And this program can be something that computer users might view as necessary or innocent like a device driver program, or some other program needed to let users control the added device.

So what users who value their privacy and software freedom want has little to do with 3D printing per se because these users make the same demand regardless of the purpose of the new device. One such user avoids devices that run non-free software, or require non-free software to be installed elsewhere to work. That way one can run a 100% free software system (right now that means a free BIOS, free software OS, and nothing but free software programs installed atop that) and use the new device fully.

Trashing some mod points to post this, but here's a side-by-side comparison.

Important differences: Classic shows me the text of 7 comments. Beta shows me the text of 2.

Classic uses about 85% of the horizontal width of the screen for comments. Beta uses about 50% or less.

Those are probably the most relevant differences for me. We all come here for the comments, since the stories are by definition published elsewhere first. If a redesign makes it harder to read comments, that's a problem.