ajosh

It sounds like you are describing different communities with different problems (i.e. Flint, MI doesn't have problems with frequent Brown outside - that was California 15 years ago) as though they are the same one. Also, most of those examples are things from state governments rather than the federal government. Of course, people don't talk much about state tax reform. State tax revenue sources can vary from property taxes to income tax to sales tax. Some states don't have an income tax and reply mainly on sales tax.

One other reason is that counties have the land rights. They negotiate with the big Telco's like Comcast, Verizon, Cox, Charter, etc and then issue a monopoly or duopoly in the county for a fixed period of time - usually 10 years at once.

The Telco can offer a few things like fiber connectivity between county buildings, tax payments, etc. By doing that, they secure the rights to the area. Given the federal system of the United States, this is a difficult thing to stop.

This makes true market-based competition within most areas very difficult to achieve.

I think that's the point - the e-mail is using up all of the IOPs. There would be a small amount of IOPs left over that could deal with streaming data. The data is unlikely to be accessed on a regular basis. The data not used by e-mail would then be used for the archive - data that's pretty much write-only.

X2Go is a remote access program which is based on nx3. It worked pretty well when I was messing with it. I've never been on to do a lot of day-to-day work on rdp/vnc/nx but if I wanted to using an x11 system, it would be my choice.

There is actually such a protocol - UFTP. It was designed for high-latency connections such as satellite links. It can use multicast to allow multiple recipients over such a link. If memory serves, it was designed by Gannet to help transfer news content nationally for USA Today.

I've tested it on "long fat pipes" when evaluating it for a project a number of years ago. The numbers don't sound that impressive now. I was able to saturate the 100Mbps NIC of the slower server in the transfer. The transfer was from Northern VA to LA over the Internet. This was from data center to data center and the network capacity was such that I knew that the transfer rate would not cause any serious packet loss.

Using simple TCP over the same link, same computers was limited to around 40Mbps. More modern TCP implementations have a larger window and are able to better saturate high-throughput, high-latency links.

The US is actually very strict with a variety of penalties for companies that violate the law regarding overtime. The amount of overtime pay and the hours at which it starts are clearly defined.

There are, however, some exemptions for some occupations. Computer professionals, farmers workers, artists, professions (i.e. doctors and lawyers) and managers are all exempt.

It's debatable which professions should remain on this list but the law is reasonably strict with respect to over time pay.

Maybe not where you live but I have definitely seen people in that game range use headphone brands as a status symbol in the same way they use cell phone brands as a status symbol.

I think he is contrasting VPS service to shared hosting services like Go Daddy or one of the many cPanel providers. Unless a VPS is using OpenVZ, the box isn't over provisioned. A cPanel host is usually very over provisioned. 500 customers per server wss not uncommon 10 years ago.

This was a fun read for sure. It's always inspiring to see someone take on a new domain, learn something and produce something functional.

First of all, calling the US a third world country us a but much. It has its problems but so does everywhere else.

In the US, I've never had trouble calling to get a taxi. Radio dispatched taxis have been available as long as I can remember everywhere I've lived. Uber is somewhat more convenient because GPS gives my exact location and it lets the driver contact me easily. It's not something crazy innovation but it is easier.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with electricity. The grid is generally reliable though it could stand to be put underground in many areas.

We are behind in banking to be sure but a lot of that has to do with demand and consumer protection laws. No one is screaming for a more secure card when fraud liability is limited to $50 by law and is $0 in practice at most banks.

Healthcare could use an overhaul to be sure. Outcomes and costs are not in line with where they should be. That isn't to say that it us terrible, just that the system needs improvement.

Most of these companies aren't truing to overcome bad. They are trying to overcome good enough.

Disqus is the comments section for a lot of sites so this one is probably no different.

For what it's worth, I got an MBP from work and it's power supply has an annoying coil whine/hum. I've looked online and it is common enough I haven't bothered to ask for a replacement. Quality issues like that exist among all manufacturers. Likewise with the software side. OSX still has bugs and I still waste time working around behaviors like in Windows or Linux.

There are definitely benefits to it but there are drawbacks too.

CWDM doee actually use with lasers in some contexts. The big difference is that CWDM uses frequencies that are all far apart, with just a few frequencies. DWDM uses frequency channels that are very close. DWDM performs better because it focuses the energy in the band's that have the best properties in terms of absorption, distortion and group delay.

Broadcast FM radio has a wavelength of around 3m which is much larger than cell frequencies. Broadcast AM actually is much much longer than FM due to its low frequencies. If you take 800khz near the center of the dial, the wave length is about 375 meters.

AM antennas are smaller because they are generally not very good. Most I gave see in cheap radios are wire wound around a ferrite core. That matches the impedance but the loss is high. It's usually ok for AM broadcast though because the power levels are HIGH and there is minimal multipath distortion.

Like I said, I don't know where the line of fair pricing should lay. Clearly, it could be cheaper if they are making $1 Billion. I just don't think it could be a few cents per domain.

I met someone involved in the .com registry. They have multiple data centers per continent with 200 racks of equipment. Those are the major sites. Each major city/peering point may also have a smaller presence of something like 10-20 racks.

It is more than just a few dns servers. I know some of the people at DNA Made Easy. They spend a lot of time and money building and maintaining infrastructure and peering/bandwidth agreements at major peering points around the globe.

They are obviously much smaller than a major registry but they are very performant and compete at the lower end of pricing. Their prices are probably a good indication of the cost per query($125/50 Million queries). I guess the question is the number of queries per domain and how different the level of DDoS is from a DNS provider.

I don't claim to know what the fair price for the .com registry. I will say this though the hosting isn't free. There are millions of requests per second across all networks from all across the world. They must respond with low latency. The major registries are nearly always under DDoS attack. There is a reason verisign has some of the best DDoS protection.

All the data centers across the world, the network connectivity, the DDoS hardware, servers, custom software and staff to run it all must be expensive.

It still requires you to setup an XMPP server and proper DNS for federation.

With hangouts, if someone has a google account, there isn't much else to setup which makes things much easier for non-technical friends & family.

Hangouts has other benefits:

- All users support the same call/video features

- Using GCM means that battery life is better than with long polling, in my experience

- Integration with Google Voice means you can add phone users to your video call

- Sending images is built in

- Single chat history that's synchronized[1]

- Works on Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and IOS with the standard clients[2]

I've setup an XMPP server before and it wasn't that hard. I have friends/family using Hangouts and Signal messenger. Hangouts provides a pretty smooth experience and is my generally preferred way to initiate a video call with my family who runs a variety of platforms (Andriod, iOS, Windows, macOS, etc)

[1] Of course this is possible because of Google being the hub with is the grandparent's concern

[2] XMPP also has this but some chat solutions are not as widely available. Of course the web app will work anywhere you can run a modern browser. I'm thinking of the official Chrome extension and I don't know if it works in BSD or other OS's.

Having the rear capsule become cloudy is pretty normal following cataract surgery. There is a YAG laser procedure called YAG capsulotomy where they put a hole in the area that is clouded up. The prosthetic lense stays in place and the cloudiness is gone. You can expect a floater that shifts around following the surgery.

I got cataract surgery in one eye a few years ago. I am much younger than the average patient. It's not as good as what you have naturally when you are young but it sure beats what you have with a cataract. In my case, the floater did become mostly unnoticeable within a year. It didn't really impede my daily life before that.

The first page I saw reminded me an awful lot of the time cube page.

Some screen modes[1] like screen 9 actually had page flipping as an option. You could write to the "back" screen buffer and then switch which buffer was shown. I used that to make a poor man's strobe light.

I really miss the simplicity of QBasic sometimes.

[1] http://www.qb64.net/wiki/index.php/SCREEN_(statement)

I've definitely seen this. The trick for me was keeping my calorie restrictions reasonable.

At first, I was able to compute what my body needed to live in a day and then would cut from there. A lot of the time, I was hungry, distracted, etc. When I got a fitbit, I connected it to MyFitnessPal. I used the same baseline and used my exercise (walking) to add calories. This would give me a daily goal which is basically base_calories - weight_loss_calories + walking_calories.

I found that by targeting the computed goal, I didn't suffer the same problems. Sometimes that meant that I had to eat a bit more to get up to the target. It also made me think about how to spend the calories that I had.

Part of what made it work for me is that I didn't go crazy trying to lose weight. I targeted one pound per week which is a significant amount of weight over the course of a few months. I didn't always go down by exactly one pound but I was happy with the results.

Of course, that was my experience and yours may be different. One thing that I think is key for anyone is to find foods that you like which are high in nutrition and low in calories. Get some set meals that you know you can order and stay on track. That could be some fruit and a sandwich, a particular bowl at chipotle or whatever. Use memoization - compute the amount of calories in something you're going to eat and keep using that information. It lowers the cognitive load a lot and you know you'll be getting something you like.

It sounds a lot like you are describing Asana. It is designed with teams in mind but the personal workspace can easily be used for personal stuff and allows delegating including to guest users. It has an inbound mail feature that works well. The only thing I don't know about from your list is the mailbox style app. Their app doesn't seem to use many swipe features.

I have messed wit trello. I live the way it looks but Asana fits how I think better. I think that is a big part of why people get wrapped up in the tools they like - it works with their way of thinking. If you process things differently, you'll have different feelings about it.

US Carriers used to have this and they may still. I have definitely seen signs to call 77 for roadside assistance. I also remember some radio station having a code(star number?) that related. To their frequency.

Edit: Here is a list of emergency numbers. 77 and *999 are on the list for different states. http://www.ou.edu/police/dpsinfo/state-by-state-cellphone-hi...

My experience is that you don't. Ecuador is a lot of fun.

That said, you should always be careful. In Ecuador, particularly in Guayaquil, be careful what taxi you take. Make sure it has a meter, and if possible use a radio dispatched taxi (i.e. call). Beyond that, it's like most places you're likley to visit: Stay away from "bad" areas late at night, be aware of your surroundings, etc.