If you're weighing traffic, sure. I figured they were weighing connectivity - an analogous question might be, "how much does your corporate network weigh?" Being part of a network doesn't require actually using it

Of course, you'd still have to decide whether/how to amortize time spent off the network (e.g. computer is off, phone is outside of data plan area, etc).

Meant to say *tracker* - heh. Maybe I shouldn't slashdot without my green tea :)

Anecdotally, it seems to be blocked for some people and not for others, and the blocking itself seems to be in flux. The last time I saw a post on Slashdot saying it had been closed, I tried accessing it then and could not. This time around, I can access the website. Don't know about the torrent though, haven't tried.

So...who else is wondering what was wrong with the old name?

I guess I'll come around eventually. The new name isn't so terrible, it's just..."SourceForge" conjures up images of an awesome factory somewhere churning out code, while "GeekNet" just...sounds like another attempt at social networking. Oh well... yay for branding...

...or of it just being poorly articulated.

I'm not a Wave hater, but a lot of the coverage I read initially was really vague about what it actually is. Even after the .com bubble, it seems a lot of people are willing to make the assumption that vague vibes of goodness and a lack of details makes for something revolutionary - if it can't be explained well, then it must be cool.

In this case though it turns out Wave actually is cool. It just needs to be explained better, and we're beginning to see some of that implementation now.

Meow.

Great... turn my back on that crazy cat for just a minute and he's already posting AC on Slashdot. Next thing we know it'll be first meows and Soviet Veterinarian jokes.

Just try getting between a cat and a plate of tuna. They are fiendishly inventive... I have a cat that, while not necessarily socially intelligent, was quite clever at solving problems. He might fit in here at Slashdot ;) - One day when I was in my last year of high school, the cat, while wondering why in the world he was not getting petted and catered to, decided it was time to take matters into his own paws. Having carefully observed me using the computer over a long period of time, he figured out how to reset my computer - never mind the fact that the front panel had been completely removed and the reset "switch" consisted of a button deeply recessed into a 7mm opening in the grating, of which there were dozens to choose from. He had to stick his claw in that specific hole, and *bam* - there goes an hour of work. He seemed to think that without that pesky English paper on my screen, I'd have more time to pay attention to him. He got a lot more attention than he bargained for that day...

gahhhh it's 0.05% coverage per tower, not 0.0005%. Got mixed up between percent and decimal...these errors are infectious!

Eh... the 1/10 of 1 percent figure applies only to one tower. Your guesstimate has the number of towers being almost 300. So actually, 0.167656546 % coverage per tower (we're not counting for the inevitable overlap between towers) * 296 towers = 49.6263 % - almost half of the nation. We're also ignoring the already existing towers, of course, but these would be a welcome supplement in any case.

However, suppose we were to assume a 25 mile radius, instead...given that 40/45 seems optimistic, as you noted. 1,963.49541 sq. miles, divided into America's size would give us 1,932.3 towers needed to blanket the nation, at 0.0005% coverage per tower, ignoring overlap and ignoring existing towers. Of which, the executive contribution would cover 15.360% of the nation.

Sorry for OT. I wanted to send a private message but I couldn't find out how to do that on Slashdot.

Plastbox, your website is spewing out errors as fast as available bandwidth will let it, and I don't think you want to get billed for all that bandwidth. Here's a sample:
.

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to 81.191.94.248:10000 (Connection refused) in /var/www/org/plastbox/root/index.php on line 24 Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/org/plastbox/root/index.php on line 25 Warning: feof(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/org/plastbox/root/index.php on line 26 Warning: fread(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/org/plastbox/root/index.php on line 28 Warning: feof(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/org/plastbox/root/index.php on line 26 ...ad infinitum