3.995 million of them are currently collecting dust in the desk drawers of neckbeards.

Leaving 5,000 of them doing something interesting and useful - and probably something that couldn't be done affordably with a brain that cost $800 or more.

If the computer costs just chump change, who CARES if most of them end up gathering dust? The cost of that is trivial, which the benefit of those that DO get used is substantial.

It's like pencil sharpeners (back before cheap automatic pencils): They spend almost all of their time idle. But they're so cheap that it makes more financial sense to have one in every office than to have one for the company and a department scheduling its time-sharing.

(That analogy was acutally used, to get executives to rent a clue, during the transition from central timesharing systems to ubiquitus desktop machines. When a computer costs several million and needs a clean room and dedicated hierarchy, it makes sense to have one and spend a lot of effort rationing it out. When one costs a thousand bucks it's far cheaper to put them on every desk and leave most of them horribly under-utilized. Such a price drop creates a qualitative change to resource allocation strategies.)

I'm using BeagleBone Black. Not wedded to it - it was just handy. Any of several others would have worked, but this was available and had the right stuff available, too.

$55, half a gig of RAM, four gig of flash filesystem (plus a socket for adding more).

Runs Linux (and several other OSes with ARM support.). Comes stock with Agngstrom but I installed a port of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and an upgrade to the corresponding kernel version. (The stock Ubuntu port to BBB uses an older kernel, but there's another project that ports later kernels as drop-in replacements.)

The kind of capabilities you are looking for are out there.

Holy crap, I can hardly believe this topic. Who in their right mind would want FM opinion on anything? This is really puzzling to me.

There's a saying that applies: Know your enemy.

I doubt anyone will be fooled into thinking his arguments are unbiased, or correct, and adopt the mindset he's pushing. (If nothing else, there will be PLENTY of warnings from posters in the discussions. B-) ) So this is a chance to do a little research: Find out what arguments are being brought into court and congressional cloakrooms by those opposed to innovation and competition from outside of established corporate monoliths, so we can get ready with counter arguments.

As an independent software developer, how can I avoid getting dragged into a patent lawsuit? How can I leverage my rights to ensure others aren't exploiting my patents?

You can't.

A patent is just a license to sue.

It licenses others to sue you if they think you might be infringing their stuff (or they can get you to pay them to go away even if you aren't). It licenses you to sue others who are infringing your patents. That's all it is.

If you want protection for your creations, you have to be ready to put on the armor and walk into the arena to defend them.

I'm pretty sure that Battlefield is a UDP not TCP protocol so does UDP have the 'intelligence' to discard duplicate packets?

No it doesn't. UDP is just minimalist port-number-multiplexed, checksummed, access to the underlying IP protocol. It delivers the packets as they arrive, with no sorting out at all. (The underlying IP layer handles fragmentation and reassembly, but that's about it.)

That is why the SERVER and CLIENT that USE UDP have to, themselves, handle the dropping, reordering, and duplication of packets.

Data structure might be...

Of course, with only two links, you only have to track the packets that have come in on one link but not yet on the other. That makes it even easler.

Similarly, but not quite as simply, with more than two links, with situations where you throw things down some but not all of them, etc.

This isn't possible, nor should it be.

Actually, it's almost trivial.

I don't know if there's something already available and free, so here's how I'd build it.

It'd startt with OpenVPN. (Mosly because it's the only hackable VPN I'm familiar with that's currently supported.)

I'd first take advantage of the fact that servers and clients are SUPPOSED to be able to handle duplicated and reordered packets and do it the simple way: Just hack it to throw each packet down both pipes, and at the receiving end just forward both copies.

Then, if the server and/or the client DON'T handle the duplication gracefully, I'd add sequence numbering to the VPN wrapping (if it isn't there already) and a mechanism at the receiving end to keep a small amount of history of what has gone out and drop the slower copy (if it arrives before the history of its other copy has timed out).

Data structure might be a small tree or heap of ranges-of-packets-that-have-left (pruned to drop older stuff when getting too nodefull or near sequence-number-wrap-around due to good packet weather), or maybe a rotation of three hash tables - "now", "recent", and "being cleared / cleared and waiting for rotation" - with the first two in use.

I find it hard to imagine that it would (at least routinely) be faster than using his current wireless setup to route his traffic from his desktop ... through his cable modem ... through his ISP ... through a remote datacenter (somewhere) ... to the Battlefield servers

I have no problem at all believing that. The OP says he is using two MOBILE access devices from two (wireless) carriers and is (if I read him right) experiencing substantial intermittent (but separate) delay and/or drop events in both of them. If he throws each packet down both of them and the first one to arrive at the data center gets to the game server, the packets that are lost or delayed on BOTH paths will be very much rarer and his gaming experience will be substantially improved.

Yes, he'll get a little extra latency on the fast packets - which is most of them. But server farms generally have fat and blazingly fast backbone connections, so it shouldn't be a lot added. A small price to pay to make almost ALL packets arrive reasonably quickly and almost NONE experience big delays or loss.

Doesn't TCP require it come back on the path too?

Absolutely not. Nor does it expect that to usually happen. The routes in opposite directions are often different. (For starters, they're based on the local knowledge of the routers at opposite ends of the path, which are typically familiar with their neighborhood and may have no clue about what things are like near the other end.)

The routes of diffetrent packets in the same direction are often different, too (like for load-balancing by throwing alternate packets down two slower links to get an effectively faster link). Every packet is potentially routed differently (though routing protocols like label switchingmay often set up connection-like shortcuts that make consecitve packets take the same path - to speed things up).

What matters is just that they get to the same ENDPOINT. Some may be silently lost. Some may be duplicated. Some may arrive out of order (like when a route changes and later packets get there faster).

It's been like this since IP, UDP, and TCP were invented. It was a core principle of their invention.

= = = =

Having said that:

Deviation (other than packet drops) from simple first-in-first-out packet flow tend to be rare. So not all servers and/or clients handle them well. (TCP will sort out missing and misordered packets on the receiving end - sometimes at substantial cost in buffering and latency. UDP will not - for simplicity, speed, and for when occasional lost packets are less of a problem than high latency and occasional long delays. So if the server and/or client can't handle transmission problems well, performance may suffer or functionality simply fail.)

Many networking company customers of high-speed router makers make the additional requirement that a stream of packets coming in one particluar interface from one particular source and going out another particular interface to a particular destination are not reordered. That's a pain when the router's guts are a sea of little processors each handling packets individually, so additional special purpose hardware may be added to track packet order and insure things don't get reordered between input and output queues.

The situation in the American South is totally different though, right?

Nice rhetorical scoring, but, yes, it *is* totally different. Comparing the poverty, lack of trust in government workers and dysfunctional healthcare system in the US South to those factors in Africa is like comparing the neighborhood pool to Lake Erie.

How about the situation at the US southern border for illegal immigrants?

The US takes them into custody. It puts them in crowded rooms - standing room only - for hours to days, with lots of others recently apprehended or who turned themselves in, and inadequate sanitary facilities (and inadequate instruction for those who don't know how to use the ones that ARE there). That looks to me like an ideal way to insure that if ONE of them has Ebola, dozens or hundreds will be exposed.

Then, after carefully NOT taking any information like fingerprints (which might be used to identify and collect them later), it busses them (in crowded vehicles) all over the country and resettles them - typically with alleged "family" who often living in crowded conditions and with incentives to avoid authorities - especially any that come looking for them.

[Hospital sent home the ebola patient in Dallas, though he had classic ebola symptoms and had traveled to Liberia.]

Yep, especially when they deny all of the screening questions.. That's helpful.

He denied the screening questions at the airport. ('Let's see. If I answer yes you won't let me fly and will throw me in with everybody else who answered yes. Of COURSE I didn't have contact with Ebola!)

He DIDN'T deny the questions at the hospital. They knew he'd been to Liberia recently. But their bureaucracy didn't get that info to the person who made the release decision.

an educated population is one of the best defenses against mindless wars. That's why it's so important to the corrupt governments that want to wage those wars to have control of the education systems in their societies.

Because MISeducating their population is key. "Give them a light, and they'll follow it anywhere."

But this needs another caveat: If the population in general doesn't have any effective power over the goverenment, they can know exactly what's going on, be against it, but be utterly unable to change it. If some of them attempt to make such change, it just separates them out from those who will knuckle under, for easy removal from the herd.

This article led me to check what was up with the Navy's work on the Polywell concept, long kept under their hats. I discovered:

The navy just published their results last Sunday!

I haven't time to look into it for the next few hours, but this may be very interesting news on the "are we there yet?" front.

No. Current solar absorption (accounting for albedo) is on the order of 50PW. By comparison, current peak world wide energy production is a paltry few TW. We're several orders of magnitude away from the point where our civilization's thermal output becomes a concern.

Not to mention that we woudl stop putting carbon dioxide from energy production into the atmosphere (and could, if it became an issue, use some of that fusion power to freeze some of it OUT of the atmosphere and do things like turn it back into coal and bury it.)

If human industry generated CO2's contribution to the greenhouse effect IS significant, we could pull that "gift that keeps on giving captured solar heat" back out of the air and put it into the bottle - at least until we reach pre-industrial levels. (Beyond that we probably don't want to go, because of the detrimental effect of low CO2 levels on plants.)

In the atmosphere there's a situation: The weather all happens down near the surface, in a region called the troposphere. Here the density/temperature gradients can result in instabilities, where a parcel of air that is, say, lighter than its sourroundings can become MORE ligher-than-its surroundings as it moves up (and vice-versa). Above that is another (set of) layer(s) called the "stratosphere", where everything is most stable right where it is. Nothing very exciting happens there except when something coming up REALLY fast from below coasts up a bit before it stabilizes and moves back down.

The oceans do something similar, but upside down:

Water has an interesting property: Like most materials it gets more dense as it gtss colder - but only up to a point. As it approaches freezing the molecules start hanging out in larger groups, working their way toward being ice crystals. The hydrogens on one molecule attract the oxygens on another, and because of the angle between the hydrogens bondended to the oxygen in each molecule, the complexes are somewhat LESS dense than liquid. As a result, with progressively lower temperatures the density reaches a maximum, then the water begins to expand again. When it actually freezes it is so much less dense than near-freezing liquid that the ice floats. With fresh water the maximum density happens about 4 degrees C. Salt disrupts the crystalization somewhat so the maximum density is a tad cooler (and varies a bit with salt concentration - and thus depth), but the behavior is similar.

The result is that, when you have a mix of cooler and hotter blobs of fresh water, the water closer to 4 degrees sinks and that farther from it rises. The result is that, absent a heat or impurity source below, the bottom (and much of the volume) of a deep lake tends to be stable, stratified, water at about 4 degrees year around, while all the deviations from it and "weather" activity is in no more than about the top 300 feet: Wave action, ice, hot and cold currents, etc. are all above the reasonably abrupt "thermocline" boundary. Below that things are very slow, driven mostly by things like volcanic heat. (Diffusion is REALLY slow in calm water. It takes decades for, say, dissolved impurities to move a couple inches.)

The ocean is much like that, too, but a little cooler and with some temperature ramps spreading out the thermocline due to variations in salt concentration.

So global warming/cooling/weather, whatever would NOT be expected to affect deep water temperatures. This would all be happening in the top few hundred feet. If, say, the ocean were heating up without the surface water temperature changing, this would take the form of the thermocline gradually lowering near the equator and/or rising near the poles, rather than the deep water becoming warmer.