Is that seriously your characterization of the war in the Pacific in WWII? Japan bombed Pearl Harbor then the US dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? There was a lot more to it than that.

I believe the parent meant it was "funny" in the same sense that sour milk tastes "funny".

So much for the "intrinsic collision avoidance"

Not necessarily. Since the surrounding laser pulses should spread in a more or less uniform way, the central channel of denser air should still occur as distance from the emitter increases and remain centralized in the channel. It sounds like it will make air work a little like graded index multimode fiber. The difference in density between the central channel and the surrounding air will likely fall off with distance, making the air channel less efficient, but still present out to some distance. It's not like this would allow perfect single-mode propagation to infinity in a coherent beam, but it could improve bandwidth and/or distance capability for point-to-point laser communications.

Server 2012 R2 has and improved interface for remote manageability. The start button is there for pulling up the Metro screen and the metro screen has clickable icons for logging out and restarting or shutting down. From the Metro screen I just type the name of whatever program or configuration utility I need, and that works as well as the windows 7 start menu. The interface has improved to be merely annoying and cumbersome rather than obstructive and rage-inducing.

In many states it is also legal to turn left on red when turning from a one-way street to a one-way street.

Except, according to Verizon's own published chart those links are at 48% peak utilization. It seems is some headroom there. http://publicpolicy.verizon.co....

Up above, you posted that the problem is that Level 3 charges, "300% higher than any other provider out there..."
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Which means: You are talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Exactly right, and that's because local caches and peering to content providers saves money. Buying capacity and data transfer from a tier-1 is expensive. Peering with content providers is cheap.

Nah, it's worse than that. Wall-mart will let you shop wherever you want, but Target and Costco have to pay up if they want the exit ramps to stay open.

Turn? Maybe not, but I bet it can rotate!

I do set up networks. I'm not being lazy, I'm being pragmatic. IP4 is easy to work because most people can look at an ip address and break it down to 4 numbers; 4 tokens to remember for the few moments when it needs to be remembered. I'm sure there are people practiced with hexidecimal that will find it very easy to work with, but for most techs a 4 character string of hexidecimal is not an instantly recognizable number, it's a quazi-random string of characters. This is mostly an issue of practice and language skills. The number 746, for example, in hex is 2A1. 746 is easy to remember by saying seven hundred and fourty six. Mentally it is one number. 2A1 does not have any ingrained meaning to most people because most people have not been practicing with hex their entire lives.

I wager that the decision to use Hex will cause a great number of mistakes that would not have happened with a decimal-based notation system. I also wager that this will cause a measurable increase in the amount of time it takes to set up networks because it will flat out take longer to transpose numbers, triple check them, and correct the increased number of errors. In manufacturing, when a large number of errors or accidents happen at one stage of the line, it is because the process is flawed. I believe this will go down in history a significant flaw that causes many errors and waste a lot of time.

Or better yet - keep quite and use it to spread disinformation. A little corporate counter-espionage goes a long way.

This response always pisses me off. What do you do when DNS is broken? What do you do when you are the guy setting up DNS services? With IP 4 it is pretty easy to remember a 4 number string long enough to transpose some addresses. It is easy enough to remember a small handful of well known DNS servers' addresses so that you can get a machine talking on the Internet or on your local network. IP 6 has a short-hand notation, but it's still a pain. Looking at the example given, when transposing that address one has to hold in mind 5 sets of variable-length numbers (in Hexidecimal, no less) and remember the location for the double-colons. The IP 6 designers only answer to this complaint is to suck it up - and use DNS. It is a flippant and arrogant answer.

Cisco will get the money either way.

No QoS - ISPs will have to drastically upgrade bandwidth capacity so that VOIP and video traffic don't get choked out, and Cisco sells more equipment.

Yes QoS - ISPs will need to drastically upgrade network processing capacity so that VOIP and video traffic don't get choked out, and Cisco sells more equipment.

I'd wager that the problem lies in Time Warner's links to the tier 1 backbones, and not traffic shaping. If those links are saturated, as Level 3 and Cogent have complained about, then any traffic routed through those tier 1's will suffer. But the Time Warner hosted speed test will work perfectly. Technically, Time Warner is right, they are meeting requirements for the link form the customer's home to Time Warner. It's too bad they don't make any promises about usability.

Have you trace routed to popular sites or tried an independent speed test?