As someone who lives in San Francisco and has many openly gay friends and coworkers, I can honestly say that I've never heard that definition of "logjam", and I wonder if anyone out of middle school uses the term.

Lots of devices still use TFTP for firmware updates, so the pumps could be using UDP/IP rather than TCP/IP.

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/...

I'm already getting cross country ping times of 65ms (round trip), so to be compliant with ITU-T G.114, my codec has 235 ms to do its work. I regularly talk on the phone with colleagues on the other side of the country using a VOIP system hosted here, and haven't noticed any latency problem. Even video calls using our Polycom have good latency (but not great, there's still a noticable lag, even when connected to local users)

I find voice latency on cell phones (even local calls) to be far more noticable and annoying than with cross country VOIP calls. I suspect the lag you're seeing is due to client side buffering and codec compression more than network latency.

The wildlife that is increasingly pushed out of its habitat as humans expand into former rural/wilderness area?

But you'll note that I didn't say roads should not be subsidized, but that it's not fair point to a transportation service operating on subsidized roads burning subsidized oil and claiming "Hey look, that service runs at a profit with no subsidy at all!", when in reality, it is subsidized.

Does anyone besides gamers and high frequency traders care about latency? I manage a server farm on the other side of the country, and latency is not an issue at all for interactive use whether typing at the command line using ssh or using RDP to connect to a Windows server. For the general internet user, I don't see much utility in cutting round-trip latency in half from the current 60ms I'm getting now to the 30 ms a speed of light connection would give. (though there'd be additional latency from all of the microwave repeaters along the way). The current "fix" of using anycast DNS servers, CDN's to bring content closer to you, and protocols that minimize the need to make multiple round-trips for content seem like a far better solution since they provide redundancy, reduce long-distance bandwidth needs, and reduce the load on the network and servers.

That's actually a hard problem to solve -- and one that airlines are running into - so much is automated that it's hard to keep pilots focused on flying the plane -- by the time the autopilot decides it can't control the plane, the pilots are thrust into the middle of a bad situation and if they haven't been paying attention, they have little awareness of what led to it. This "startle effect" contributed to the Air France Flight 447 crash.

As you say, much of operating a train (at least between stations/terminals) is controlling speed and watching for obstructions -- the kind of monotonous task that humans aren't well suited for, but computers are *very* well suited for.

It's only a fair comparison if Uber were paying the full unsubsidized cost of roads. Fuel taxes and registration fees pay only a portion of road costs, and there are hidden subsidies in the oil that fuels most cars,

It's no big deal when it happens once a month, but if you live under a busy flight path and have to hear the rumbling of sonic boom hundreds of times a day (and night) then you may not be so understanding.

I was surprised too and wondered why they just didn't contract out to buy time on someone else's satellite since a billion dollars over the 15 year projected lifetime of the satellites will buy a lot of satellite time. Turns out it's for "National Security Needs", which I guess means they don't trust anyone else to provide service, though if the USA reneges on a deal to provide national security satellite services to them, Mexico has far bigger problems to worry about.

The NSA is going to intercept their data whether they have their own satellite or not -- it was bought from Boeing, so the NSA will certainly have full access to the Satellite during construction.

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_...

Given that they have to reverse engineer every platform they support, there aren't a whole lot of new MP3 players on the market these days, and more modern devices that have a single SoC that does everything are a lot harder to reverse engineer than older systems where there were more discrete components, it's not really surprising that they don't support more modern devices.

But even a 7 year old device still makes a fine mp3 player.

I use the same player -- it works great with Rockbox

I used to play through my phone and/or computer and then would sometimes forget I was tethered by the headphone cord and walk away and either end up pulling my phone off the desk onto the floor, or dragging my laptop across the desk, knocking stuff off on the floor. The Sansa battery only lasts a couple hours now, so I keep it plugged in with a short USB cable, if yank it with the headphone cord, the USB plug slips out.

I used a bluetooth headset for a while, but got tired of keeping it charged (since keeping it plugged in while in-use doesn't work), with regular headphones I know that every time I plug them in, they are ready to go all day long.

Can you point to the studies showing the levels of these hormones and pharmaceuticals that are present in wastewater treated for reuse as drinking water? Can you point to any regulations that require that water agencies even test for them, and studies showing what a safe level of pharmaceutical ingestion is?

People have lived off of groundwater for many thousands of years and we have a good handle on the effects of consuming minerals (even radioactive elements like radon) in water, but consuming low levels of pharmaceuticals in their water is a relatively new phenomena that as far as I can tell, has not been well studied.

I don't think it's window failure that kills people in a crash, it's the delta-V of being slowed so suddenly -- the windshield is probably stronger than the lightweight sheet metal that would replace it. Replacing lass with metal might help make a car maginally safer, but I wouldn't expect it to dramatically increase survivability of a crash -- turning the seats around to face backwards would probably contribute far more to survivability (though I doubt that will happen, people don't like to travel backwards, in the train I ride to work the forward facing seats fill up before the backwards facing ones)

Either the infrastructure will need to allow for fallback to human control or not, but it can't be both ways -- you can't expect a human who has let his car drive him around for years to find his way home without street signs, or drive safely without traffic control devices. So if you want to allow for human control, you'll need to provide street signs and traffic signals.

Airplanes and cruise ships don't *need* windows, yet they are installed at great expense. It'd be a lot easier to build an airliner without having to cut a hundred holes in the fuselage then cover and seal the holes with windows.... yet no one wants to fly in a windowless tube, just like no one will want to ride in a windowless car -- LCD panels and cameras aren't quite the same as a live view through a window.