When copy says, “the X of the future will have Y,” it’s often laughable how wrong they get it — but in this case, remarkably true.

Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).

That’s…not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

Yes, but you’re not alone (my partner tends this way).

The CW folks would presumably be sending QTH instead — I wonder if this graph captures that/if it would make an appreciable difference?

Grass is ugly no matter the state it is in

I think bamboo can be pretty though 🤷

So the irony is

I see what you did there…

“Can you hold it” was meant as “abstain from pooping for just a little longer,” but was instead interpreted as, “poop, and then hold the poop in your hands.”

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

I grew up with a hand-cranked popcorn maker. Then, in grad school, I realized that you don’t actually need any of that, just a pot with oil.

I heat up (medium) a tiny bit of neutral oil with a few kernels until they pop. Then I add ~1/4C neutral oil and ~1/3C popcorn kernels. When I can count to ten between pops I turn it off, empty in bowl, drizzle with olive oil and add salt and nutritional yeast (and MSG if you have it).

If you lose power, you can use one of these cables to power your house (or at least, the part of your house on that phase).

This is not how you should do this, but it can work. It is not a good idea (possibly illegal?).

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

You said that no one…

I don’t think that was the parent commenter though…

You experience the passage of time as ever increasing in speed, and before long the universe has died, leaving you — immortal and sentient — alone in the cold, dead cosmos, for eternity.

Bonus points: use non-qwerty keyboard for added obfuscation (but keep the qwerty key caps of course).

It’s nerf or and nuttin’

FTFY

It is really powerful per watt, and has a built-in UPS. Any homelab type things you could do with that? macOS+homebrew will give you a nice *NIX feel, very familiar if you’re a Linux user.

I’m a fan of having a remote homelab computer+disk for off-site storage. This would be a good candidate in that it wouldn’t use excessive power at a friend/family’s place, but may be overkill (I use a pi3 for that).

I hope I’m wrong! I’d definitely consider buying some — hopefully you can report back with results. If they’re slower than advertised but have the actual capacity that’d still be awesome!

Most of the time that leads to them dying.

Well, squishing has a 100% chance of them dying. With a toddler and a baby, having them run loose sadly isn’t an option.

We live in a very mild climate, and there’s under-deck and fence space around our house, in addition to bushes, trees, and underbrush — fairly suitable for a variety of arachnids. It’s not the same as indoors, and survival rate certainly isn’t 100%, but it’s not the death sentence of going from a climate controlled house to below-freezing outdoors.