That's hilarious! One thinks of a lot of possible hangups with email (delivery delays, spam filter false alarms, etc.) but rarely maximum range.

It's a great story, but I'm not sure that I'm buying it. The conclusion is what bothers me; he says the timeout was three milliseconds and proceeds to convert 3 millilightseconds to 558.85 miles. So what's the problem? The packets have to go there and back in 3 milliseconds. This means that the 558.85 miles is for the round trip, meaning that any places more than, say, 250 miles away should have had issues. For me, this destroys the premise of the whole article, since it contradicts things he said throughout.

The idea, though, that something like this could feasibly happen is certainly true, and made for interesting reading.

Ahh, I stand corrected. Thanks for the link.

My units doesnt have millilightseconds. :(

If it's because you're on a Mac, I recommend http://www.finkproject.org/ -- but I hear MacPorts is good too: http://www.macports.org/

Either one gets you a modern GNU Units.

or you can do 3 milliseconds * c