Of course politicians make sure that the public doesn't understand such things with demagoguery.

Politicians make sure stupid people don't understand. There isn't much they can do to take away understanding from people who have brains.

Name one that actually boots the Linux kernel, and doesn't just run in user space. (Yes, I am a fan of ZFS, but not the Linux implementation.)

You really should get out more. ZFS on Linux is not to be confused with the ZFS Fuse project. You can boot from a ZoL filesystem. In general ZoL is about as stable, complete, and reliable as any ZFS.

If it's 30,000 ft at 3/4 ton per 1000 ft, don't you mean 22.5 tons? Not 20,000 tons?

Parent and grandparent - tell that to the Marines. An Osprey had a "hard landing" (hah!) in Hawaii May 18. One Marine was killed and 21 hospitalized. There was a pall of black smoke rising from the "hard landing".

Speed of light in fibre is about two-thirds that of vacuum.

Direct-line distance from New York to Los Angeles: 3940 km
Speed of light in vacuo (= approximate speed of electromagnetic radiation in air): 300,000 km/s
Travel time: 13 ms

If speed in fiber is approximately 67%, then travel time is approximate 150%
Travel time: 20 mS
The route on the surface is very unlikely to be an exactly straight line, so figure maybe 25 ms

Half of the (round-trip) ping time is maybe 80 ms for a good fast end-to-end connection in practice. So we're talking less than 10% of that for difference between fiber and wireless, not taking into account the comparative number of repeaters in each case. Doesn't sound like this hare-brain idea would do anything significant for latency.

NASA had nothing to do with the microwave oven. Diathermy (therapeatic heating of human tissue by radio waves) was being used in 1930. Westinghouse demonstrated cooking food using short waves in the 1933 Worlds Fair. The cavity magnetron was perfected early in WW2. Percy Spencer noticed a candy bar in his pocket melting when he was working close to an operating radar in 1945. He experimented with heating food in a metal box fed from a magnetron the same year; Raytheon filing a patent for it. Raytheon built he first "Radarange" in 1947. A public vending machine was producing hot dogs in Grand Central Terminal in 1947.

So I'm still confused here, does fed overrule state or state overrule fed? Or is it just "both, as needed" per usual?

If California can legalize pot yet the law still supports the feds arresting anyone possessing it, seems to me that means the FCC can force states to allow ISPs to operate irregardless of the states wishes.

If the state does have power to tell the FCC to go away, why can't California do the same exact thing under the same exact laws to the DEA?

Your fuel filter is so piss poor that it won't trap iron filings?

I use a money clip instead of a wallet. It matches my sunglasses. And I always carry a harmonica. Other than that, boring stuff... keys, fob, phone, earbuds, bank card, credit card, identification, lighter, cigarettes, and sometimes a cigar cutter.

The DE3815TYKHE is also substantially bigger than the NUC. Roughly twice the size. Increased size confers better passive cooling.

The i3, i5, and i7 all require fans. Anything that size that takes more than a watt or two requires a fan.

I share those kind of concerns in general. The AOpen MP945 was an example of using an excellently engineered cooling system. There basically was nothing else in the box besides the CPU that made any appreciable heat. Mine was very quiet and never degraded. The NUC from what I've heard has similarly great thermal engineering. But when the cooling system on anything like this degrades or fails, you're going to have to try to find and pay for the expensive custom part. You can't just slap a new commodity fan in there.

Interestingly, my AOpens have held up better than anything else I've had. An endless train of motherboards have succumbed to capacitor failure, but none of my AOpens.

Without a dBa @ distance measurement, with comparisons to other equipment using the same measuring equipment, "quite loud" is not really a useful characterization. Even then the dBa level alone doesn't tell you all you need to know about the acousic objectionability factor. My good old AOpen MP945 with GMA950 graphics (exactly the same size as the good, original Mac Mini) idles and even does useful light work in silence in a quiet residential room with nobody else in the house to make any noise, and without any radio or TV or air conditioner running. Even all out, it is plenty tame, on the good side of laptop noise. The cooling system in a dynamite design.

But my AOpen GP7A with the power hogging NVidia graphics, even sitting idle, periodically roars like a bastard as some random daemon makes a quick tiny demand. When it is really working it sounds like a freight train or jet plane taking off, and oven-like air is rushing out of it.

The NUC takes even less power than the MP945. Certainly the 5i3 is damn quiet. I expect the 5i7 isn't all that noisy. I'm pretty certain it is a damn sight quieter than that GP7A.

And a million times the power drain and heat.

I don't disagree in the main, except that the NUC cooling system is not "whiney".