I got the impression from the (sketchy) article that repeater AMPLIFIERS were still needed but repeater REGENERATORS were not.

Then again - another part of the article makes it look like an additional result was that they could boost this less-subject-to-degradation-by-nonlinear-distortions signal at the start until the fibre itself was acting non-linearly, in order to get a signal strong enough to survive a much longer hop.

So it's not clear to me whether the distance was achieved by:
  - long hops enabled by strong signals, and NO amplifiers
  - longer propagation without regenaration using JUST amplifers
  - a combination of the two: Both getting long total length without regeneration AND being able to use stronger signals and thus use larger space between the amplifier-type repeaters.

Since the diameter of the earth is 7 926.3352 miles, this could conceivably remove any need for repeaters.

I got the impression from the (sketchy) article that repeater AMPLIFIERS were still needed but repeater REGENERATORS were not.

I.e. you still needed to boost the strength of the signal to make up for the losses. But the progressive degradation of the quality of the signal - with data from different frequency bands bleeding into other bands (especially in the amplifiers themselves) due to nonlinear "mixing" processes - had been headed off, by synchronizing the frequencies of all the carriers to exact multiples of a common basic difference-between-the-carriers frequency.

This apparently sets up a situation where the distortion products of each carrier's interaction with nonlinear processes cancel out with respect to trying to recover the signals on another carrier - much the way the modulation products do in OFDM modulation schemes. In OFDM it allows you to make essentially total use of the bandwidth. In this system it lets you use simple, cheap, amplifiers to get your signal boost, rather than ending the fibre before things get too intertwingled, demodulating all the signals back to data streams and recovered clocking, then generating a fresh set of modulated light streams for the next hop - MUCH more expensive and power hungry.

... government regulators couldn't possibly find financial irregularities by grabbing you documents from the cloud service provider, ...

The courts said you have no expectation of privacy one you put your data in the hands of a third party. Great! Let's convince all those "evil corporations" to store all their data in the cloud. Then the government can go after them any time they want. B-b

IMHO Romney could have won it if his supporters hadn't cheated the Ron Paul supporters so blatantly, publicly, and sometimes violently, that they alienated, not just them, but many of the other factions of the Republican Party as well.

Many Paulites (and others) will never again vote for Romney, or any candidate supported by the Neocon machine (alias the "GOP Power Structure) or at least by a number of major figures who were involved in the corruption. The thinking is "If that's the way they treat their own party members in a primary/caucus, they can NOT be allowed to control the mechanisms of the Federal Government."

There are five states that Romney lost by substantially less than the number of people who actually voted for Paul in the primaries/caucuses, with an aggregate number of electoral votes to give him the win. If you assume that these Paul people would have voted for Romney if he'd won the nomination without massive cheating (as he probably would have) and instead sat it out (or enough other Republicans behaved that way to make up for Paulites who didn't) it would have been President Romney.

On the other hand, if Paul had managed to win the primary he'd likely have trounced Obama. He can pull support from much of the Democratic Party's base and enough of the typical Republican voters to make up for any that might have sat out HIS run.

Because "High Fructose Corn Syrup" rolls off the tongue slightly better than "a 50%:50% ±10% homogeneous mixture of fructose and glucose with >0.5% residual corn proteins and cellulose."

Not to mention bacteria enzymes.

My personal problem with HFCS is that I'm allergic to corn, and food-grade purification processes don't clean out enough of what I'm allergic to for ANY corn-sourced food ingredient to be safe for me. (As I understand it, antibodies are THE most sensitive detectors of particular molecules / molecular sites known to man, and it only takes four molecules to trigger an allergic reaction.) Fry it (ALL!) brown and it's safe, else forget it.

But I hear that HFCS is an obesity issue because it doesn't trip the appetite regulation as strongly as sucrose, so people tend to eat more of it.

$100+/bulb is VERY pricey. (Lots of LED bulbs already have TI radio/processor chips - usually the otherwise-identical ones with zigbee rather than BLE - for substantially less.

Adding a battery and related circuitry to do operate-over-power-failure is nice but not that much of a cost. Adding a speaker/microphone, a suitable processor to drive it, and some network and security software, may justify a substantial boost. But software amortizes to "almost free" over large numbers of units. So it seems to me the price point is too high. I expect this will die from competition.

It has been banned for all but the very rich, thanks to a wave of new regulations. 90 percent, yes 90 percent of my industry is gone and we are paring back.

Capitalism used to be a fun game to play in America.

... apparently you managed to find your way here in order to post this so it cannot have been much of a problem for you.

But how many people didn't figure it out. And how many valuable comments were lost as a result?

A lot of this hit the fan about 10 years ago when a crash was partially blamed on the pilot working two jobs, being overtired and overstressed, and then crashing with a load of passengers. People were shocked at an airline pilot would have trouble feeding himself on just one job. I don't think much has changed since then.

There have been changes. Standards for pilots of the tiny airlines have been raised a bit, extra restrictions were put on their schedules, and loopholes that allowed reducing pilot pay have been closed.

But most importantly, the big airlines are now held responsible for those tiny regional/commuter airlines they're contracting with. The big guys no longer get to take your money and book you on a tiny turboprop (with their logo on the side) while washing their hands of the poor safety record of those "regional" airlines. Their own big pockets will be the target of any future lawsuits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

However, the practice has continued:

"A government study recently found 61% of all advertised flights for American, Delta, United and US Airways (now merging with American) were operated by regionals in 2011, up from 40% in 2000." http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

If you're smart, you avoid regional airlines. The accident rates are dramatically higher, and you're saving little, if any, money booking flights on them.

The CPU is also fast because it's made of small components close together. It's built using current large-chip fabrication technology. re-optimized for low leakage, of course.

When a substantial fraction of the target applications are intended to run for years on a fractional amp-hour lithium button or harvested ambient energy, power saving is critical.

If the CPU in the IoT Device is powerful enough to make offloading actually worthwhile, isn't that CPU way overkill for the IoT Device's primary function?

Not at all. The CPU is fast to reduce latency. This not only meets response targets, but it also means the CPU can shut down after a very short time, saving power.

This is especially important on battery powered devices. If the CPU is off except for a couple of milliseconds every few seconds, a battery can last for years.

The CPU is also fast because it's made of small components close together. It's built using current large-chip fabrication technology. Making it physically small means many chips per die, which means low cost per chip. If that makes it fast, so much the better .

As long as you're not using extra power to increase the speed further, there's no problem with a processor being "too fast". That just means it can go to sleep sooner. In fact, slowing it down can be expensive: Slower means not only that the power is on longer, but it also usually means bigger components which require more electrons to change their voltage. The more electrons delivered by the battery, the more if it is used up. Oops!

Granted that the processors are powerful and cheap, and have a lot of computation potential. But there are other downsides to trying to use IoT devices for a computing resource.

One is that the volatile memory, which uses scarce power just holding its state is very small, and the permanent memory, though it may be moderately large, is flash: VERY slow, VERY power consuming to do a write (and the processor stops while you're writing flash, screwing things up for its primary purpose).

Much of the current generation IoT devices run on either the Texas Instruments CC2541 (8051 processor, 8kB RAM, 256kB flash) and its relatives, or the Nordic nRF51822 (32-bit ARM® Cortexâ M0 CPU, 32kB/16kB RAM, 256kB/128kB flash) and its family, and the next generation is an incremental improvement rather than a breakthrough. You can do a lot in a quarter megabyte of code space (if you're willing to work at it a bit like we did in the early days of computing). But there's not a lot of elbow room there.

The tiny memories mean you don't have a lot of resource to throw at operating systems and extra work. In fact, though the communication stacks are pretty substantial (and use up a LOT of the flash!), the OSes are pretty rudimentary: Mostly custom event loop abstraction layers, talking to applications that are mostly event and callback handlers. Development environments encourage custom loads that don't have any pieces of libraries or system services that aren't actually used by the applications.

Another downside is the lack of bandwidth for communicating between them. (Bluetooth Low Energy, for example, runs at one megaBIT per second, has a lot of overhead and tiny packets, and divides three "advertising" (connection establishment) channels, in the cracks between 2.4GHz WiFI chnnels, among ALL the machines in radio "earshot".) Maybe they can do a lot of deep thought - but getting the work to, and the results from, all those little guys will be a bottleneck.

Maybe Moore's Law and the economic advantage of saving programmer time may make this change in the future. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for "smart" lightbulbs to have large, standardized, OSes making that "wasted" CPU power available to parasitic worms.

if you have any sense whatsoever, you'll have a suite of regression tests to run on your software already. You can use that to validate the new environment when you compile a baseline. I've been involved with several projects that migrated from one platform to another.

Such tests might convince YOU (the developer). But would they convince REGULATORS? If not, you have to go through a whole, horribly-expensive, regulatory approval every time you migrate tool versions.

Regulators don't get dinged for insisting on more costly work by the regulated and withholding their approval. They DO get dinged if they approve something that then does harm.

That's why the FDA caused something like 400,000 extra deaths by delaying the approval of beta blockers for prevention of secondary heart attacks until the European research had been repeated in the US under US rules, rather than accepting the data and allowing the use. After the Thalidomide mess they're not going to approve ANYTHING quickly or easily. The same principle applies to other fields.

[Spys] won't blackmail you to the intelligence companies, they will blackmail you by threatening to tell your wife, or creditors, etc.

Your reading comprehension leaves a bit to be desired. That's exactly what I was talking about.

1) To get the clearance you need to tell the US government everything the foreign spooks could use to blackmail you - by threatening to tell wife, creditors, media, etc. Then you need to convince the US spooks you don't care - even if you do.
2) If you left anything out, the US is likely to revoke your clearance. So your confession form has all the juicy stuff about you.
3) Now ALL the confession forms were stolen by the foreign spies. Oops!
4) Next step: The foreign spies get to test ANY of the people with clearances they want to test, to see if they REALLY don't care whether these things are revealed to their wife, creditors, ...

The clearance process includes finding out if you're blackmailable into turning over secrets. So of course they question you about everything enemy spies may use as blackmail material. They're often willing to approve you if you confess all your sins to them - because the spies can no longer use the threat of revealing them to the intelligence agencies to pressure you.

It behoves you to confess ALL of it, because if you leave anything out they'll pull your clearance when they discover it. On the other hand, if YOU don't care if its revealed, THEY don't care either. So to get the clearance you tell them everything and claim you don't care.

Of course that means the intelligence agency files includes pretty much all the juicy blackmail material there IS on you. So if there's something you really DO care about, and you were bluffing the agencies, you ARE subject to blackmail threats.

Of course you also expose your life history, to prove you're not a mole. And THAT is everything an identity thief needs to completely replace you. SS number and mother's maiden name are a drop in the bathtub compared to this info.

The agencies should have guarded this MORE TIGHTLY than they do nuclear secrets. It's the key to ALL the people who know ALL the secrets.

There will always be poor countries. Those are the ones without all the shiny planes and nuclear bombs. We know ways to create our own.