> it can't possibly cost them anything.

A server in New York wants to stream data to a user in California. Someone has to pay for a nationwide fiber network to move the traffic. Both Cogent and Verizon have presence in New York and California. Who carries the packets from New York to California? Very often, that's what peering disputes come down to.

  In general, neither party wants to carry the traffic across the country. Cogent wants to instantly hand the traffic to Verizon right there in the same building where they got the traffic from Netflix, so they don't have to carry the packets more than 100 meters. That's reasonable to them - they are delivering the packets to the company they are addressed to. Verizon would want to receive California packets in California. When Cogent is charging Netflix for transit, it's reasonable for Verizon to ask Cogent to provide that transit to California. Both have reasonable positions. They'll negotiate a mutually acceptable arrangement after first staking out their starting positions.

> You have no idea what you're talking about.

Then you're trying so hard to defend stupid that you've made yourself dense.
According to your link, US citizens send $2.9 trillion to Washington, who sends $500 billion to states, who send $100 billion back to the same localities it came from.

If that seems like a good idea to you, I've got something you'll love. I'm sure you'll get excited about this. You send me$1,000 and I'll send $250 of it to my wife, who will send $100 to you! Yay, you get $100! I'll pm my address to you.

They SELL connections to their customers. Cogent isn't paying Verizon. The peering they're talking about is an even trade with neither company paying the other. When it ceases to be an even trade, it's time for negotiations.

How did you reheat the fly to 220C while casting? And why?

You're not referring to just softening the plastic to shape it, are you? That's not what the article is talking about. The article is talking about setting it up so that it moves back and forth based on temperature. You heat it up, it shortens. When you stop applying heat it lengthens.

School lunches are a big part, yes. Also her proposals include things like having the FCC limit advertising of foods that the government considers to be suboptimal choices. There's a lot of food related stuff, more food related than exercise related.

Personally , I think the local school should serve healthy food. I'm glad that decades ago the FDA started putting out guidance, suggestions, that assist local school districts with healthy menu planning. I don't see any need for local citizens to pay $10,000 in taxes to Washington, who takes their cut before sending $7,000 to the state, who takes their cut before sending $5,000 back to the local area. Federal bureaucracy to buy lunch is just silly.

It's also the local dieticians who are best able to work with local needs and tastes. Here in Texas, kids will eat burritos, they won't eat fish and chips. I bet in Massachusetts it's the other way around. Federal bureaucrats making more menu decisions for local schools isn't going to work too well, I don't think.

I was joking obviously, but no, that's simply incorrect. She outlines her agenda in a document about 20 pages long entitled "summary of recommendations". You'll notice the word "food" appears four times as often as the word "exercise". In fact, she mentions "screen time" as often as she mentions exercise.

Her agenda items include "the federal government should pursue actionable items [to create] food boards ... set food policy". Whether you agree with her or not, her stated mission is to have the federal government decide what you eat and what you don't, see to it that you eat healthly food. Maybe that's what Washington should be doing, maybe it's not. It's absolutely what Mrs. Obama is seeking to have Washington do. Go read her web site.

Three hundred euro? The contest sparks my interest, but 300 is about what it would take to get me to fill out the entry form. To develop an effective NEW algorithm, code it, and test it in HOPES of winning the prize? Maybe for 300,000, maybe. 3,000,000 would be more like it.

I've developed exactly two truly innovative products. One I sold over $1 million worth, the other still provides $3,000 / month in net income . Why would I, or anyone skilled and innovative, touch this for 300 euro?

I can't decide if that's a great point or off the mark.

The patent office bureaucracy has approved a bunch of bad patents.Improving
  that bureaucratic process may well improve the results. On the other hand:

We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.
Albert Einstein

Perhaps a bold, strong new leader at the patent office who did a lot of new things, including soliciting public comment, could make a big difference. Someone like Robert Gates, for example, could probably greatly improve things without any fundamental changes to the underlying law. Just ACTUALLY deny patents where there is prior art, etc.

That would be rather inconsistent. Isn't the first lady's big thing getting sweets banned?

I meant to say, something like that, a SuperMicro chassis with SAS expander backplane, does of course cost a lot more if you don't buy on eBay. A new one from Provantage is around $700 or so. Still, compared to a $3,500 tape library ...

That's not say tapes don't have their place. Tape was good enough to back up my grandpa's data in 1954 and it's still good enough, sometimes. Other times, large capacity disks really do make more sense.

It's one of the SGI units. Used, they sell for half that, so I misspoke. The storage SERVERS, with motherboard and processor, are $350. So for $700 you can get the backup controller server with 16 bays plus two more 16 bay jbods to daisy chain to it. Not bad for backup. That's not what I'd use for my main enterprise storage SAN, but for backup yeah it works real well.

That is without the disks themselves, of course. Starting with four or six 3TB drives in RAID 10, you get 150-200 MB/s actual for several hundred dollars, then add spindles as needed.

> This is impossible to flatly guarantee ... no RTOS is going to assure that.

Does that include a "trivial" RTOS, or are you speaking only of an RTOS of significantly complexity? It would seem that on an MCU, the very simplest OS, the "HelloWorld.asm" of operating systems, would absolutely run each of its functions in the exact same number of cycles, every single time. On a Z80, for example, INC always takes exactly one cycle, and ADD take two cycles, every time.

On a Core processor it would be much less consistent due to pipelining, out-of-order execution, etc., but these little MCUs don't do any of that, do they?
Some of the little bit of MCU code I've written has been fairly sensitive to timing and I've figured that 4 cycles is 4 cycles, every time. Have I been doing it wrong?

Also, those pro sports salaries in the headlines create some misconceptions. You see a headline about a $30 million contract and think pro athletes are fabulously wealthy. In reality, that $30 million is the maximum that the best player is eligible to earn over three years, which is half of their career.

Taking the NFL as an example, players work very hard for several years trying to get into the pros. For the few who make it, the average salary is $1.9 million, but the average career is only six years. That's $5.4 million for their career. A lot of tech workers will make a lot more than that in their career. Especially so if they worked as hard during high school and college as the kids who become pro athletes do, waking up two hours early to work out (or study) and then staying after school for practice, etc.

It's a good job, don't get me wrong, but it's not as obscenely lucrative as a glance at the headlines might make it appear. Hollywood, on the other hand, is incredibly lucrative for the very top talent, if they stay on top for many years. If 20 million people are entertained enough by having you on a show that it's worth 5 cents per week for them, that's $1 million per week of entertainment value.

And the NHL ... is 95+% white dudes

Hockey is the national sport of Canada. Canada is 95+% white.

Well duh. When black kids want to play sports they go outside outside and play - basketball, football, whatever they just play. If they want to dunk, they dunk.

There's one Asian guy who can dunk. The rest have to dunk from the couch. Is it not obvious why little Asian high school kids aren't on the high school football team? There's a safety issue there. Look at the NFL and NFA - thousands of black guys, 34 white, and two Asian. The white guys who want to play do so via Madden 2013.