Hadn't seen, read big chunks thru carefully and scanned the rest. Looks like it has potential to stand alongside the old bell labs star performers study/doc. Thank you 1e6.

Yeah, that comment brings to mind folks that insist they are arbiters of funny, and that they *have* a sense of humor.

Except this time people are trying to nail something inchoate down and they're back behind everyone's shoulder saying 'no, you're all wrong.'

Both are good. Interestingly, Asimov's contrived sinecure/forum resembles the BBC comedy writing teams decades ago: a paycheck, a roomful of brilliance, a target (funny but broadcastable) and free reign to be as ludicrous as is needed. Doug Adams, Monty Python, Laurie & Fry, The Young Ones -- all describe their BBC time very warmly. Ditto friends from

Oh, and you most remind me of someone who says '... and I *have* a sense of humor.'

I agree, but net traffic peak isn't suited for well-engineered designs. Maximums become absurd. When building a bridge, design is for maximum load x a safety factor (10, often). You put weight points equalling a fleet of big heavy trucks (65,000lbs GVW) on the bridge model, bumper to bumper, and do static/dynamic loading. You model 120-mph winds, or 150 or whatever.

The archtype here is 'slashdotting'. Peak load isn't a value you look up in a handy reference. It isn't an estimate or '10x what you've seen for a peak so far'. In the internet age, peak is whatever the fuck the internet is willing to throw at you. I run a tiny site with a few hundred hits per day. When we've published something that got MASSIVE attention, our little '$6/month' shared-hosting drupal site got half a million hits in the first 12 hours one time, 120k the other.

If my blog was a bridge, it'd be some rural span that sees a car every 4 minutes. A 1-sigma peak is 20 in a minute (wooo!). My site can handle that. At 500k hits in 12 hours, or the local peak moment of 200k hits in an hour, that's 3000 cars per minute. The car analogy is big trucks stacked fifteen deep vertically, creating a third lane up the middle, carrying 25 tons of rocks apiece...

Frankly, I'm amazed my little shared-hosting ISP (A Small Orange) still puts up with us after 3 such nuisances (resisting a bogus copyright takedown, forwarding the issue to me).

Short of Amazon/Rackspace cloud designs, it SUCKS to buy hardware that sits idle. Good engineering in frugal organizations for stuff like this is to build conservatively, track load, have a departmental fund for scaling up when load is consistently too high, and if you're lucky having a proxy or dynamic-content-shedding plan in place to deliver key static content, etc. It's not a rack of pizzaboxes for today, when a single app/db pair can dish out the content the other thousand days of the project's production life.

Well put. As long as we insist that the most viable metrics are economic, things won't improve. Quality can be shaved, paychecks can be squeezed, headcounts can be reduced, pollution can be diluted, teachers can be dissed... all introduce hidden costs.

The only great teachers I had that stuck with their crappy paychecks were second incomes into households (a working spouse), retired military (so they also had a pension), and a couple of magnificent lunatics that knew they were getting screwed but cared too much about teaching to step away. Kudos to every one of them, but like that bad 'Karma' remark by Microsoft CEO Nadella, they deserve better.

Look online (ebay, etc). Vendors are refurbing ipods just this way. 250 gig refurb gen5's are going Buy-it-now for $400. Smaller ones with prices on down to $150.

Why all this silliness on a moving target. Much like USB 1, 2, and 3, network 'Category' notation and in a human-oriented alternative to the acronym soups for SCSI, PCI and other communication protocols WHY THE HELL AREN'T WE PUSHING FOR a standard that can keep pace and inform users trivially/ steadily:

• B1 - roadband 1 - More than 250Kbps down, 150Kbps up.
• B2 - Broadband 2 - More than 4Mbps down, 500Kbps up
• B3 - Broadband 3 - More than 10Mbps down, 2Mbps up
• ... etc, as time dictates.

Or some other ranges. I don't care about these specific numbers. I just hate that an ISP thinks they deserve to control the definition.

• A system at 77 degrees kelvin would need a massive, elaborate heat-exchange system to maintain that temperature throughout everything. If this were a design aspect, it would need even more elaborate systems to prevent failure due to heat/fire. Energy consumption for cooling is one of the most inefficient mechanisms, so this would also bump up their magical-power-generator demands a few notches. But hey, what's impossible times ten instead of merely impossible energy storage and heat exchange.
• More importantly, every time the robot had steady/sustained contact with other mechanical devices / systems, they'd have extreme-cold failure modes. The throttle and brake grips on the motorcycle. His 'not-really-boots' on anything they touched (foot pedals). Firearms (especially the automatic actions) get sluggish and failure-prone around 20-below F, which is about 150 degrees kelvin hotter than you're suggesting. Anything that didn't have specialized extreme-cold lubricants, or (worse) did have residual-water, would start to seize up. Rubber would become brittle. Explosive activity would cause cracking: guns might crack more with each gunshot (at areas in contact with the T-1000) until they rather explosively failed.

Incidentally, liquid-metal self-modifying systems, like the monster in 'The Thing', are just far enough beyond science fiction to be called fantasy. Laws of information storage density pretty much make molecules capable of cataloging a myriad of design specs large and complex enough that they'll be brittle, and the resulting creature would likely be designed to be able to hemorrhage off damaged cells (and shrink) during emergencies and reacquire material slowly later. Under steady gunfire or in a fire, these things would either cruft up fast or steadily get smaller faster than they could assemble replacement molecules

(relevant cite: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bo... "Although single origins are sufficient to direct the replication of bacte-rial and viral genomes, multiple origins are needed to replicate the much larger genomes of eukaryotic cells within a reasonable period of time. For example, the entire genome of E. coli (4 Ã-- 106 base pairs) is replicated from a single origin in approximately 30 minutes. If mammalian genomes (3 Ã-- 109 base pairs) were replicated from a single origin at the same rate, DNA replication would require about 3 weeks (30,000 minutes). The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the rate of DNA replication in mammalian cells is actually about tenfold lower than in E. coli, possibly as a result of the packaging of eukaryotic DNA in chromatin. Nonetheless, the genomes of mammalian cells are typically replicated within a few hours, necessitating the use of thousands of replication origins.").

So, new material can't just be instantly assimilated, so the monsters in both should get smaller... and smaller... and smaller, if fought steadily. So... let's make the biophysics for this problem plausible: A few hits on T-1000 by gunfire and rocket launchers, he splatters everywhere, and a T-900 marches at you. Then a T-800, etc. At T-25 size, he jumps into an air duct and runs away. Two weeks later, he resurfaces full-size. Meanwhile, that splatter residue has a few working molecules that have slithered out of a crack between floor and wall to a nearby desk in the Precinct, been ingested as part of Officer Stadanko's jelly donut, and he's not answering phone calls. Yep: the Thing, but with a three-week infection period like Ebola. Much harder to hunt. So, if mechanical or biological generation WAS possible, and constrained to sane physics to where steady, sustained significant damage had an effect, you'd think either of those monsters would have had some guidance that nondetection and stealth were more important than speed. They didn't need to rush.

I pick **D** -- Any or all of the above, as deemed appropriate by a Public Utilities Commission and economists / engineers they supervise.

We do this. A LOT. Public Utility regulatory bodies have MORE THAN A CENTURY OF PRACTICE IN NEARLY EVERY STATE, in multiple similar infrastructure types. Stop pretending this is impossible. It's a shitty straw man invented by the same deregulatory wonks that got us into this mess in the first place.

I'm neither Socialist nor Libertarian. Both are false utopias with no shining example. I like REGULATED MARKETS. CUZ THAT SHIT JUST WORKS.

I get pretty close to there, especially during summer and christmas breaks. Teens, multiple netflix/hulu/youtube/etc streams, gaming and my telework via VPN. The perfect storm. Streaming 5G on a day off isn't incredibly hard. Three simultaneous feeds makes it trivial.

FWIW, my ISP briefly was selling a 50Mbps service with a 50G monthly cap.

Ad hominem from an AC. Priceless.

Incidentally, fuck you. Plenty of grownups are bored with Republican corruption and egoism: Corporate conservatives have had 30 years (1980-present) of steady control during which they've removed more and more regulations. In that time the economic situation has steadily worsened for most of us. IMHO, it's counterpoint to Soviet communism: your little experiment failed because it was undermined by one of two defining human traits: Greed and Laziness. In between, a regulated market mechanism exploits the tension between these to create wider prosperity and enough incentive to get ahead / get rich.

Thanks, was coming to say something about like this... somewhere along the last few decades, conservatives have managed to trick us into thinking that 'the government' is Them, not Us.

Yup, what this project needs is a good co-op. Plus an oversight board. And technical staff to maintain it. A consistent, balanced funding mechanism where everyone has to chip in. Oh, and a process for citizens to provide feedback and retain control. In short... town government.

Science is proper data collection, too. She did science.

Don't get me wrong, GP does seem to have a hate going for scientists -- Maybe there's an innocent reason; maybe they've got a bad case of the Mondays, or maybe they're just cromag antisci doofuses -- It sure seems like half the stuff that spins people up boils down to simple-minded people getting everything deconstructed and predigested down to shittily-written innacurate morality plays and 'ooga booga' sorts of us-vs-them scary narratives. One common narrative is jumping to a wrong "Yaaay, a girl proved science bad, scientists lazy!!" conclusion.

Very unscientific of them. Let's all take 5 seconds to be quietly shocked... ... but don't shit on either the girl (not named) or Doctors Heitman, Filler (or their unnamed and doubtless overworked/underpaid grad assistants). This is only getting press because nimrods like those tidy narratives. In a perfect world, it'd be a better article, linked to 'how you can do this, too' instructables etc.

We should get t-shirts and a secret handshake (how about SYN-ACK-ACKSYNACK).

Reminds me of years ago when a telephone surveyor asked me how much time I spent online. "Ahh... um... 15 hours" "Per week?" "Per day." "..(long silence)..."

A few moments googling confirms: Maury's Markowitz is up to his elbows in Solar Energy. Given his advocacy for solar, his head would explode if anyone talked about Solar with hyperbole and absolutely-nevers like he's done here.

Speaking as a degreed engineer and physicist, with childhood classmates, neighbors and professional colleagues now decades into their work in both next-gen fission and current fusion reactor design, I definitely get a bad vibe from all of Maury's hyperbole. They agree that fusion is challenging. But fusion isn't remotely analogous to vacuum tubes, nor is work and progress stalled. Maury's selling the impossibility of fusion, I doubt he's remotely qualified, and he's exaggerating to do so.

Nice Try, solar guy. IMHO, the worst kind of bad science is advocacy that overreaches your expertise, because it can smell true to other scientists. Next time, start with 'I'm __ with ____ (Solar), and here's why I've bet my career on solar:'