Since broadcasting is pretty much a Federal power in Canada, I'm not sure, whatever the other flaws in Ontario's plans, whether they even have the constitutional right to do it.

The site in question is actually in the US, north-central Washington State. The surrounding terrain is extremely rugged and federal wilderness. We've looked at fixed microwave, but that would require two self-powered mountain-top repeater sites (never mind the fact that one of them would actually have to be built in the Wilderness area, which would require an act of congress to approve). Also, conservative estimates put the price tag on the system at about $250k, and ongoing maintenance wouldn't be cheap either.

6mbps is about as good as it gets. That's what Youtube and Netflix use for 1080p stuff. So that is the standard you need to worry about for streaming in general. Yes, I know that Blu-ray is higher bitrate, but little if anything streams at that rate. For the web, 6mbps is "high quality". You might not care for that definition, but it is what it is.

Heh, I operate one site that has ~60 people connected to 1.2Mbps/300kbps satellite, which also carries up to a dozen phone calls in the evening. Would we like more? sure, but the current system already costs $5000 a month (which is a pretty good deal for raw satellite capacity). Does it suck to use? sure, but once you give up on things like Youtube and put some strong QoS in place, it's remarkably useable assuming a little patience.

The biggest killer? sites like Facebook going https by default. Facebook used to cache really well. As soon as they went https by default, my cache hit rate dropped 50% or more. (It's also a BYOD environment, so I'm not doing SSL MITM etc...)

If you asked them not to change the definition because "broadband" technically refers to how data is transferred (10gbit ethernet is not broadband, despite the speed, it is baseband) then ok, you can be cpt pedantic.

However this is just you lying. 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet. Currently I find the breakpoint to be about 20mbps. That is the point after which normal users won't notice much, if any, improvement. As such, that is my baseline for recommendation to people. 10mbps is serviceable I guess, but is a pain for video streaming. 4mbps would be a real issue, even low bandwidth streams wouldn't work well.

The minimum needs to keep rising. We keep finding more to do with our net connections. These companies are just whiny because they don't want to have to roll out FTTH, they want to keep doing DSL and pretending like that works.

In modern operating systems, the differences are in optimizations. A desktop might want to have more ticks dedicated towards foreground GUI apps (though I'm not even sure that matters is the age of multicore processors with gigs of RAM), whereas a server might want to dedicate more resources to I/O. But in most cases, at least with any software and Linux distro I've seen in the last decade, much of that can be accomplished by altering kernel and daemon parameters.

Windows does the same thing. The base kernel for Windows 8 and Server 2012 is the same; and it's licensing-triggered settings that determine specific behaviors. In an age of cheap storage costs, cheap RAM and fast processors, why in the hell would you want to ship multiple kernels/ What possible advantage would it gain, when you can just simply determine, either as an administrator, or based on licensing, the fine tuning of kernel parameters?

So many of the kernel's functions and optimizations can be altered now, there strikes me as no reason to ship entirely different kernels. Who does that any more? Even Windows kernels are largely the same, with optimizations triggered either by the registry or by the edition.

That's the problem there, can you spot it?

The way they design their CPUs it is easy to have pretty much any number that is divisible by 2. It isn't a big deal to have something that is any particular amount more or less. So then it comes down to power, thermal, and die size limits.

Apparently 18 cores is what they cap out at, this time around. I'm sure you'll be able to get 16 core, and less, chips, that is just the most they could stuff in there before exceeding whatever design limitations they'd set.

And your understanding is based exactly on what?

Christ, your position is little better than nilihism. Accepting, for instance, that several languages spoken in Eurasia are descended from a proto-Indo European language is not an article of faith, even if I don't have the linguistics skills to evaluate every single language that sits within that grouping.

You have any citations that aren't from lunatics?

What's needed is moving away from energy produced by fossil fuels. I'm asking all you who seem to reject AGW because the solutions, in your view, are "authoritarian", how you will deal with it? So, what tools would you bring to bear?

Because climatologists have never thought of looking at climate history...

The ignorance and arrogance in your poster is awe-inspiring. It's as if you have no fucking idea what climatologists base their theories on, and yet have decided they are wrong.

There wasn't a learned man in Europe who believed the Earth was flat. It may have persisted much longer in China, but in Europe and among Arab geographers, there was no one who seriously believed in the flat Earth. The Greeks had figured that out nearly 2000 years before Columbus ever accidentally ran into the Americas on his way to China.