Ever wondered how much the internet physically weighs?

No.

And, oddly, even after someone else has asked the question, I still don't.

It's even worse than that. You really need the entire 9-digit zip code. I live in a place where the vast majority of people in my 5-digit zip code are in city A, which has a high sales tax. My address is served out of a post office also in city A, so the "city" line in my address is and the 5-digit zip code both make it look like I should pay those municipal taxes. But I don't live in the city. Try explaining that to some robot form, or even to a human being on a phone. I gave up long ago; the number of mail-order places that understand how to handle this situation properly is vanishingly small (even though it's quite a common situation around here). What's particularly ironic is that this is exactly the sort of thing at which a computerized system should excel.

The BBC did have an interview with someone from google on this issue on the World Service a couple of days ago. The google spokesman did make the point (without going into the details of robots.txt) that Mr. Murdoch is completely at liberty to stop Google from indexing his sites. Actually, I got the distinct impression that the google person thought that this was all somewhat of an unbelievable joke, since the solution was so simple, and rested entirely in Mr. Murdoch's hands.

I'll try to explain a bit. But the real answer about the way traffic is handled in DOCSIS is so complicated that you probably don't really want to know the details.

Basically, first, the difference between traffic that is best effort and traffic that has a quality-of-service "guarantee" (which you didn't ask about, but I think needs to be summarized first) is that traffic with QoS is tagged and treated separately (read, preferentially [usually]), so that it has limited latency and jitter, and any given packet is very unlikely to get dropped.

Generic "best-effort" traffic has no such guarantees, and if the CMTS or the upstream or downstream you are using gets too congested, each BE packet has a non-zero probability of getting dropped in order to ease the congestion.

Priority-based best-effort traffic basically means that there are a series of queues of different priority (eight in DOCSIS), and the way in which traffic gets dropped when congestion occurs depends on which of the eight priority queues your traffic is in. (It's also a complicated function of various queues inside the CMTS, which differ from manufacturer to manufacturer.)

Typically, a cable ISP will change your priority queue in real time as a function of your traffic pattern over the last few minutes or even seconds (the way this is done depends on the individual ISP and also the manufacturer of the CMTS). In this way, when things get congested, the chance of your traffic getting dropped depends on your recent behaviour.

If you want to know more, you should look at the DOCSIS specs. But I really doubt that you want to do that :-) Unless you have trouble sleeping.

I run the 64-bit Kubuntu variant. My conclusions over the past few days:

1. Roughly 90% of the bugs and inconveniences in Kubuntu jaunty are unchanged.

2. Something like 10% of the Kubuntu jaunty problems have been fixed, to be replaced essentially one-for-one by new problems.

I have not seen any of the specific problems mentioned in the summary. It did take several reboots following the upgrade before the system became stable (don't ask me to explain that, because I can't).

I don't understand the rental world either, but the case that confounds me is somewhat the flip side of the same question. It's puzzled me frequently that on Netflix DVDs there is sometimes that idiotic blurb at the front that says words to the effect of "this disc is not to be rented out"... and yet that's exactly how I'm watching it. One time I stopped and read the blurb quite carefully, in case I was missing something, but I could see no way that my rental of the DVD from Netflix was allowed by the limitations I was reading. My only conclusion was that the limitations have as much standing in the real world as those crazy "do not steal movies" adverts that they put on the front of some DVDs (perhaps the first sale doctrine somehow nullifies the written limitations?). But I would love to see some closely-reasoned legal argument on the subject, instead of having to guess how Netflix can ignore the limitations.

Why would they pay? Either there is prior art or there is not. Paying off one person -- even the person who "invented" the prior art -- doesn't in the slightest change that. Their patent would still be invalid.

I read it but I didn't notice that I should have put "speed" in quotes and stated that I was using it in the same sense as AT&T (i.e., to mean "throughput"). I was sloppy not to do that. Sorry.

I too find it confusing (and/or annoying) the way terms like "speed" and "bandwidth" are typically used as synonyms for "throughput" when they are applied to the Internet (or, I suppose, nowadays networking in general). But unfortunately those terms seem to have entered the vernacular.

AT&T said regulators should keep in mind that not all applications like voice over internet protocol (VoIP) or streaming video, that require faster speeds,

So AT&T says that VoIP requires "faster speeds". Even using G.711 (i.e., uncompressed toll-quality), and including the overhead of the other layers, VoIP requires only ~120kbps. The thing about VoIP is not that it requires high speed, but that it requires low latency.

Once upon a time the string "AT&T" stood for some kind of technical excellence. So, for that matter, did the string "FCC". Now I just want to go hide in a cave while they play their various spin games.

I beg to differ.

From http://tortoisesvn.net/node/58:
TortoiseSVN is only available on Windows.

That page lists clients similar to tortoise for other OSes, but the real, genuine tortoiseSVN is Windows-only.

Thanks very much; that's a much better source of information than TFA.

I haven't been able to find a reference that states the precise radial location of this object. Does anyone here have that information?

The Voyager 2 photopolarimeter data from 1981 suggested the presence of a small object in Saturn's B ring at a radial distance of around 109,000 km.

It would be interesting to know whether this is confirmation of that object, 28 years later.

(I have a vested interest: I was the principal author on the Voyager paper: Icarus 54, 267 (1983).)

I tried them for about two weeks, then returned them and got bifocals.

They were hideous. I truly felt like ripping them off my face and doing without glasses entirely. And yet I know people who can wear them quite happily (like you).

I have a theory about this -- it's to do with how much one moves one's eyeballs compared to moving one's head. People seem to vary tremendously in whether they move their head or their eyeball to view something not on the focal axis. I think that people who habitually move their head have relatively little difficulty adapting to progressive lenses, but those (like me) who don't move their head much suddenly have to re-train their entire way of viewing things so as to move their head instead of their eyes.

Anyway, I do find it interesting that people seem to fall quite definitely into one of two camps: either they adapt quite quickly to progressives, or they hate the things with a passion.

To me, bifocals are an inconvenience when going downstairs and when looking at prices when shopping, but otherwise I don't notice I'm wearing them.

Nope. It's "cytherean". Of course, you could believe Tony Randall over someone who has worked on PVO (Pioneer Venus Orbiter) data. I admit that it's probably more fun that way.