The worst naming was a company that used rocks for their product names.

Granite, Amethyst, Quartz, Topaz. These were video encoders, transport stream processors, video servers, etc., but I was never able to remember which was which.

Strawberry picking robot. "The robot can harvest strawberries every 8 seconds and works while farmers sleep."

Look, WWW is all nice and stuff, but frankly before NCSA Mosaic was released you could not really tell the difference between Gopher and WWW, and while they were interesting to play with, it was just play (unlike USENET News which had real value :). Somehow Viola never had much impact either.

NCSA Mosaic was originally released January 23, 1993. I gasped when I first saw it, because I had been dreaming of a global hypermedia network, and it showed that was possible. That day changed my life from someone who was an electrical engineer to someone who designed early commercial web sites.

Version 1.0 for Windows was released on November 11, 1993, and of course that is when "normal human beings" had any chance of getting on the Web.

Not only are there a lot of fruits/vegetables that still have to be hand picked

See Robotic Fruit Picking

The advantage of silicon photonics is to integrate the optical elements (lasers & PIN diodes) into the silicion drivers and amplifiers, theoretically reducing cost.

There are already 100 Gbps CWDM4 QSFP28 (4 wavelengths of 25 Gbps on 2 fibers) and 100 Gbps PSM4 QSFP28 (single 25 Gbps wavelength on 8 parallel fibers) transceivers out there, but they need discrete lasers & PIN diodes in InP or GaAs, not silicon.

So we will see how Intel's silicon photonics 100 Gbps CWDM4 QSFP28 and 100 Gbps PSM4 QSFP28 transceivers end up being priced.

My impression is that 50 Gbps wavelengths are coming soon (using 4-level PAM), so two of those will be 100 Gbps. But the holy grail is the one wavelength 100 Gbps, likely some kind of high-order modulation (HOM). AppliedMicro has demonstrated a 100 Gbps single-wavelength PAM4, but no word on distance.

However in the rest of the OECD countries DSL outsells cable by a large margin with very few exceptions.

American Telcos have screwed up, that's not the technology's fault, it's the companies' fault for how they implemented it.

My theory is that in the US, earlier adoption of digital telephony switching allowed earlier consolidation of telephone central offices, thus longer local loops (which didn't matter for telephony).

In other countries, the consolidation of central offices was delayed for some reason, which kept local loops shorter, which is great for DSL.

It isn't a just a density issue either - Australia has lower average local loop lengths than the US as well.

Those talking about how cable is a superior technology to DSL don't know what they're talking about. What makes either technology superior or inferior is the implementation, both technologies are capable of good solid high speeds if implemented right.

There is an inherent problem with twisted pair. If your local DSL loop is over 2.5 km, you will never get over 5 Mbps. The average US local loop is 4+ km.

It is true that if your DSL loop is shorter, say 600m, VDSL2 can get you 100 Mbps, and if it is crazy short like 150m you can get 500 Mbps with G.fast. But we are now talking about fiber-to-the-node like UVerse with a DSL last couple of feet.

The issue is that coax has less loss and greater bandwidth than twisted pair, and in general cable coax loops are shorter because there are already nodes in your neighborhood instead of a DSLAM at the central office.

I keep writing about Presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who is neither Trump nor Clinton, and he is coming close to being at 15% in the polls and should be in the Presidential debates...

The Virgin "Upper Class" section across the Atlantic has a bar you can sit at. Pretty cool.

But flying on these little airlines freak me out because a bad weather delay can really mess you up if there are just a few flights per day.

Japan's is heavily unionised, and they are making the most popular cars in America

Yes but the two most popular cars sold in the US that are manufactured by Japanese-based companies are actually made in the US.

Toyota Camry is assembled for U.S. customers at factories in Georgetown, Ky., or Lafayette, Ind.

Honda Accord comes from Marysville, Ohio.

I was having some problems in my graduate school class on Digital Signal Processing, so I went to the professor with some questions. He started out by saying, "Yes, many of the American students are finding this class tough..."

If you are on DSL and live more than 3.5 km of loop from the DSLAM, you will never get faster than 5 Mbps.

The average local loop length in the US is 4.25 km...

DSL has sped up incredibly for short loops, but for long loops there won't be much improvement. Either someone has to build DSLAMs closer to the houses, FTTx, etc.

The Akamai State of the Internet Q1 2016 has a US average Internet bandwidth of 15 Mbps, which is far more believable.

I agree that there are plenty of people in the US with 50 Mbps+ (I have that myself), but there are still a lot of people on the end of long DSL loops who will never get higher than 5 Mbps.

explain to me again why it's a good idea to provide twice the resolution that the human eye is capable of resolving.

At 1080 lines (HD) resolutions, your eye can resolve the smallest detail at 3 picture heights (assumes 20/20 vision, based on Snellen acuity). 3 picture heights is about the angle subtended by your hand of your outstretched arm if you hold up your thumb.

At 2160p (4K) resolutions, you need to be at 1.5 picture heights (screen height two outstretched hand+thumbs)

At 4320p (8K) resolutions, you need to be at 0.75 picture heights (screen height four outstretched hand+thumbs)

(You can "kinda tell" sub-Snellen resolution such as vernier acuity [if a line is straight, etc], but you can't really "resolve" anything like a letter of the alphabet without Snellen resolution).