Having access to Google Maps... there's a Starbucks (and Panera) basically next door. Granted the area isn't all that walkable and "next door" is still kind of far without a car.
This project was clearly around before Autobahn (May 27 blog post vs June 8 start date) and according to the Chrome Web Store it has more users (785 vs 409).
It's claimed the system will offer 12mbps or more to each passenger via ViaSat-1, which should offer 140 Gbps total throughput ("the highest capacity satellite in the world" with "more capacity than all current North American satellites combined")
When I stopped my Linodes I'm pretty sure I remember they warned that my DNS would be stopped along with them, so I do think you have to be a paying customer for that to work.
According to the NY Times, it "contains almost all American-made parts" but "Semiconductor chips are more of a challenge. In some cases, the chips are made in the United States and shipped to Asia to be packaged with other electronic components."
It looks like that's true, "except for those inventions that ... Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer."
With a company like Google it would seem that quite a lot of things might fall into that category.
> the cost and latency hit of cross-cloud network communication.
AWS Direct Connect might help with that. Anyone have any experience with it?
"AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premise to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections."
Can they do that? The "Limitations on Diaspora, Inc." section of the contributor agreement says:
> Diaspora, Inc. will not distribute your Contribution to any third party under any license without also requiring that third party to also make your Contribution available to the public under the same license.
I'm not sure but it sounds like that might prevent them from closed-source dual-licensing arrangements. I suppose that doesn't preclude them from building their own proprietary extensions to the Diaspora software for their own hosted services, although the agreement also states:
> Diaspora, Inc. will distribute the Diaspora™ Software, as a whole, under version 3 or later of the AGPL.
If extensions are considered part of the software "as a whole" then they might not even be able to do that.