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Comment Re:Intractable issue (Score 2) 56

You're making the (perhaps flawed) assumption that the purpose of such a mesh network is to access the greater Internet.

The summary kind of implies that people want to use a mesh to connect to the greater Internet.
After reading your post, I'm not really sure what other use you have for a mesh network, other than to connect to it.

Comment Intractable issue (Score 4, Insightful) 56

The most intractable issue, even once the routing problem is solved, is that huge amounts of traffic are all going to a few places, and those places require a lot of bandwidth. For example, it would really suck to live next to Google's data centers, or even Slashdot's data centers, because a lot of traffic would be going through your wifi to get to Google.

IF traffic were spread evenly across the network, there wouldn't be a problem, but it's not. So you kind of need a backbone of some sort. (maybe someone solved this? Solution is unknown to me, though)

Comment Re:$50 billion is not Huge, anymore (Score 2) 58

No, it is not a myth at all. Tax forms are public information and you can review them from the very first tax form. Up until Nixon it was not uncommon for people to pay 90% tax. Average wages may have been around 20K/yr at the time, and if you made a million a year you would still have 5 times the average salary. There were some fluctuations, and certain investments could be taken out of wages.. but not that many especially early in our income tax history.

Do yourself a favor, and actually do the work you claim other people failed to do before dishing out false information.

Comment Re:The 30 and 40-somethings wrote the code... (Score 1) 553

You and your fancy schmancy Papyrus. Back in my day, we took a wad of clay and some black ash from the fire in the center of the cave, swished it in our mouths and spat it over our hands onto the cave wall to make some hand prints.

It tasted like shit and my hand prints looked just like any other and what was the use if it anyway? Face-book? Hand-wall motherfucker. In fact we had a game we called facesmash but that was more just smashing peoples faces with sticks.
But we liked it and we didn't complain.

Comment You're right it's a myth (Score 4, Interesting) 58

it was 90% after the first $2 million, and that was in 1960. Adjusted for inflation that's something like $14 million today.

It was never really a tax per se. It was a check on out of control wealth concentration and the scary, scary power that comes with it. Plus it had the added bonus of encouraging real investment because hey, it was use it or lose it when it came to money. Now the rich can sit on a Scrooge McDuck style cash horde. But unlike the cartoon there are real consequences to that. Our economy grinds to a halt because all our capital is tied up in excesses like private jets & Mergers and acquisitions. No real value is added.

I saw the best quote ever in a news story a few weeks ago (I'm paraphrasing here): Finance is no longer a tool for getting money into productive businesses but for getting it out.

Comment Re:$50 billion is not Huge, anymore (Score 3, Interesting) 58

That's mostly because we've cut taxes on corps so much that they've got more cash than they know what to do with. I miss the 90% tax bracket. It kept corporate power in check and made them think about where they were investing their money. Now they can just casually toss $50 billion here and there and it's no skin off anyone's back.

Comment Re:Ah, 18 cores (Score 2) 46

Why would anyone use a Xeon with that many cores in a desktop?

I can think of quite a few specialised but realistic applications: CAD/CAM/CAE, rendering/pre-viz, high-end audio or video mixing work, simulation, and running modern web apps as fast as their traditional desktop equivalents used to run on a Pentium II.

Comment Re:I know a better headline I'd like to see ... (Score 1) 227

Do you consider giving schools enough money to do their jobs properly a "weird experiment"? I think of it more as an eminently sensible policy...

You want know what I'm saying? I'm saying you're an argumentative git who can come up with something deeper and more relevant to say than that, but you didn't. What exactly do you think 'weird experiment' refers to here?

Comment Design Life is not Expected Life (Score 3, Insightful) 136

I mean with all the technical miracles NASA pulled off on that mission, they somehow managed to underestimate the longevity of the mission by 45x.

To be fair, 90 days was not, in fact, the estimated lifetime of the mission. It was the design specification of the mission. That is, each of the subsystems was designed with the specification "design a system that will operate for a minimum of 90 (Martian) days, even under worst-case conditions."

Think of it as a 90-day warranty-- after 90 days, it wasn't expected to be dead, it was just out of warranty.

(and note that since the engineering specification was validated by testing the subsystems to either three times design life, or testing to design life under three-sigma worst-case conditions, it would have been very difficult to design for 4000 days...)

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