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Comment Re:Yes it is a peering problem ... (Score 1) 243

Settlement free peering between tier 1 carriers only happens when the flow of traffic is roughly balanced between the contracting peers.

When one peer is pushing a lot more traffic onto the other network, then that usually goes out the window and the pusher is required to pay the receiving network.

So you're saying if Netflix downloaded more data from Comcast than they sent, that Comcast should pay them?

I have no problem uploading an amount equal to what I download from Netflix, or even more, if you really think that will solve the problem. I don't really control the software on my Roku box, but I don't mind if Netflix puts some P2P software on it for help carrying their own traffic.

Comment Two Rules (Score 1) 279

I've found two rules to be very helpful when dealing with this sort of problem;

1. Don't buy it until you need it.
        Electronics in general are going to be cheaper, faster, and smaller in the future, so put off all buying of stuff as long as it's reasonable to do so.

2. When you need it, buy it without hesitation.
        If the current best solution is X, then pay for X and don't worry about it. Yes, there's a better way, and yes, there's going to be an even better way in the future, and yes X is going to suck in 10 years. But there's no way to avoid that so don't sweat it.

You have Google fiber. You have a 600Mbps solution to connect to that fiber. Do you need more than that, right now?
If not then apply rule 1, and do nothing. If so, then apply rule 2 and wire your house with Cat6 (or pay someone else to do it.)

Comment Re:Time for some crapflooding. (Score 1) 150

Injection attacks or other unsanitized data.
Material that you (or Disney) hold the copyright to.
Anything illegal to export/import (nuclear secrets, cryptography)
Sensitive personal information of important people.
Any information Homeland has forbidden you from discussing.
Even just the simple volume of the material could be a problem. (Of course the list of my ebooks is 24 terabytes, why how big is yours?)

The list of things they can get into trouble just having a copy of is almost endless.

Comment Time for some crapflooding. (Score 4, Interesting) 150

If Digital Editions, or any other program, is sending meta-data about the contents of hard drives, then they deserve to what they get.

I picture a small program that creates millions of pseudo-random file names ending with .epub, .pdf, or whatever else D.E. is scanning for.
I'd certainly be willing to dedicate a few gig to the task, I'm sure there are several thousand others who feel the same.

Comment Re:Drop solar heat for direct conversion (Score 4, Informative) 521

Except you can not exceed the solar power that hits the surface of the planet from the sun.

There are actual, serious, plans to put solar in orbit. Solar isn't limited to the surface of the planet.

But let's ignore that power-in-sky thinking for a moment.
The amount of sunlight that hits the Earth is an astronomical 150,000,000,000,000,000 Watts.
That's around 1000 times man's total energy usage.

To put it in per capita terms;
At noon, 1 square meter on the surface receives about 1 kilowatt of energy.
The average over a day is 4 kilowatt hours per square meter.
A typical home is 100 square meters, and uses 24 kilowatt hours a day.
At 12% efficiency, you only need to cover half the roof with photovoltaics to supply 100% of that homes electric needs.

Comment Re:us other engineers matter, too (Score 4, Insightful) 371

Valuing people by their number of direct or indirect reports makes a lot of sense. If I am one of a group of ten people and I'm 20% more productive than the others, my extra contribution only adds about 2% to the total. If I am a good manager my staff might be 5% more productive than an average manager's.

If you're good you should be in charge of more people, but being in charge of more people doesn't make you good.
Or to put it another way, just because a position is important doesn't mean the person in the position is.

Comment Damned if you do. (Score 1) 560

"We know you did it, so until you confess, we're going to hold you in contempt of court."

The court is claiming that they really, truly, pinky swear know he did it, because they heard him say so, so that whole "can't force you to testify against yourself" thing doesn't apply.

I don't believe the spirit of the 5th is that it doesn't apply when we know you're guilty.

Comment Math is hard. (Score 2) 394

A typical set-top cable box with a digital recorder can consume as much as 35 watts of power, costing about $8 a month for a typical Southern California consumer.

A "typical Southern California consumer" pays less than 20 cents per kWh.

35 Watts * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month = 25,200 Watt hours or 25 Kilowatt hours.
25 Kilowatts * $0.20/Kilowatt hour = $5.00

Comment It won't help (enough) (Score 1) 125

Viruses in nature mutate randomly. Computer viruses don't.
Computer virus designers are intelligent, hostile, and evil in intent.
If there's a way around it, they'll find it and it's game over.

Besides, many if not most attack vectors wouldn't care a whit - tricking a user into executing code would still work, SQL injection, cross site scripting...

Comment Betteridge said it best: No. (Score 2) 304

First of all, 3440x1440 isn't better than 3840x2160.
If you really truly believe that a 21.5 aspect ratio is better than a 16:9, you could put a piece of tape over the bottom 500 lines of a "standard" 4k display and still end up with a higher res.

How about building a display panel that doesn't have edges?
Give me a dozen megapixel panels and a let me arrange them however I like.
Make them modular, interchangeable, cheap, and the whole display becomes expandable.
Or improve the power efficiency, or the cabling, or the weight, or the color depth, or... any of a dozen other things I care about more than the aspect ratio of a single panel.

If you absolutely must claim that one aspect ratio is superior to another, then why not go with the golden ratio?
At least that way you can put two together and still have the same ratio.

Comment Unless it doesn't. (Score 3) 310

Maybe the reason those kids aren't paying attention is because they are learning stuff elsewhere and feel you're just wasting their time.
Or maybe it is, as the union suggests, because they realize how lame school is by comparison.

Or maybe kids are paying better attention now then they have in the past, and the union is falling for the golden age fallacy.

From http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/10_02_05.pdf
The limited evidence available also indicates that home computer use is linked to slightly better academic performance.

I'll take that limited evidence over the "no evidence" supplied by the teachers union.

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