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The person who wrote it is Stuart Cheshire, who invented Bonjour. I think he knows what he's talking about. For example: say you need to send a message from Ea

The person who wrote it is Stuart Cheshire, who invented Bonjour. I think he knows what he's talking about. For example: say you need to send a message from Earth to Mars, currently it is 0.794 AU away. This means it takes light 6.603 minutes to travel this distance. It doesn't matter how many routers or satellites to put along the path, it will take at least this amount of time. Having more routers is just going to make things worse. That's why he mentioned the speed of light in fiber and the actual latency. Of course you could wait for the distance between the planets to become closer since they are on different orbital paths around the sun but that's a different argument altogether. Or maybe until we get networking based on quantum entanglement but I don't know enough about the subject to make any comments on that.

Tyr42 12y ago
As for quantum entanglement, it's not going to help. Think of it like a pair of dice that always sum to 7 when they are independently rolled. Yes, that requires spooky action at a distance, but no, you can't transmit information faster than the speed of light using the dice to communicate.
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> The person who wrote it is Stuart Cheshire, who invented Bonjour. I think he knows what he's talking about. Appeal to authority. Having experience and being mistaken are not mutually exclusive. > For example: say you need to send a message from Earth to Mars, currently it is 0.794 AU away. This means it takes light 6.603 minutes to travel this distance. Now you're talking about the physical limit. That's something else. If you want to talk about physical limits then you have the same thing for bandwidth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_limit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_limit But the physical limit is not what causes a 56k modem to have a 100ms latency. And just as you can run more cables to mitigate the Shannon limit, you can move the endpoints closer together to mitigate the latency of the speed of light. Obviously moving planets closer together to reduce latency is not very practical, but neither is running fiber optic cables to Mars to allow more bandwidth than you can get out of radio.

Tyr42 12y ago

As for quantum entanglement, it's not going to help. Think of it like a pair of dice that always sum to 7 when they are independently rolled. Yes, that requires spooky action at a distance, but no, you can't transmit information faster than the speed of light using the dice to communicate.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago

> The person who wrote it is Stuart Cheshire, who invented Bonjour. I think he knows what he's talking about. Appeal to authority. Having experience and being mistaken are not mutually exclusive. > For example: say you need to send a message from Earth to Mars, currently it is 0.794 AU away. This means it takes light 6.603 minutes to travel this distance. Now you're talking about the physical limit. That's something else. If you want to talk about physical limits then you have the same thing for bandwidth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_limit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_limit But the physical limit is not what causes a 56k modem to have a 100ms latency. And just as you can run more cables to mitigate the Shannon limit, you can move the endpoints closer together to mitigate the latency of the speed of light. Obviously moving planets closer together to reduce latency is not very practical, but neither is running fiber optic cables to Mars to allow more bandwidth than you can get out of radio.