abthomson

In the upper right there's a "login with password" link. I logged in successfully using my old number there just now.

It's called Fermi estimation for a reason!

For shorter distances, time-of-flight is not typically used. There's surprisingly little documentation about how these things work online though.

From http://ptd.leica-geosystems.com/en/Measuring-Techniques_4939...

"The laser diode emits light pulses with a defined wavelength and pulse repetition frequency. Due to the runtime difference between the internal reference path and the external measurement path, the light pulses, reflected on a target and received from the Leica DISTO™, have experienced a phase shift in relation to the light pulses received through the internal reference path. That phase difference between those two signals is proportional to the distance between instrument and target."

The Kwikset motorized deadbolts have tapered bolts to help compensate for poor alignment. I'm not sure why it's not more common with other locks.

Both "normal" automatic transmissions and the Prius use epicyclic gears. The main difference between the two would be that an automatic transmission in normal operation has one power input (the engine) and one output. As bprater alluded to, any variation in gearing is achieved through fixing different parts of the transmission.

The Prius has two electric motors and a gas engine. It's not a CVT in the traditional sense though, this simulator does a good job of demonstrating how it works(implemented in Flash, not D3...) http://eahart.com/prius/psd/

Very true, search for "server inlet temperature" if you want to learn more.

It's definitely not accepted that power and cooling are the dominant cost, in most cases it's the servers:

From James Hamilton (who just happens to work for Amazon) http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/18/OverallDataCente...

It's not clear why the author decided to compare a ZestCash loan with credit cart debt when they're clearly different products. And while ZestCash's rates of 242% to 462% are high, they are, under certain circumstances, competitive. For example, in Washington state, MoneyMart charges in the 300s.

Source:http://www.moneymart.com/MM/_includes/templates/StateRates.a...

http://thestartupdigest.com/ is useful for finding out about events like this in advance.

I don't know much about ISP DNS configurations, but the problem extends to clients as well. For example, until Java 1.6, the default TTL for DNS lookups was forever.

I'm only sure because I saw a bunch of RTMP and Flex messages going to the central servers (they all have similar IP addresses) and a lot of UDP traffic going to a pretty much random IP address that changed with every person I talked to.

Also, Fogbugz copilot does something similar. It's described at a high level here: https://www.copilot.com/tech/ which links to http://nutss.gforge.cis.cornell.edu/stunt.php

Yes, and this is what chatroulette does.

I did a TCP dump of the traffic and the data sent to the central servers is very minimal, mostly short plain-text messages containing little bits of information - your partner's camera status, number of users online, next button pressed, etc.

Furthermore, the flow in the two pipes is usually in opposite directions because it's more efficient that way.

If a child prodigy becomes famous in later life, it's probably not because they were a child prodigy but for some other reason.

One example I can think of would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram but I'm fairly certain there are many others.