[mbell]

Fun article, but I don't completely buy the conclusion. The propagation speed of cat-5, coax and fiber optic cable all fall in the neighborhood of ~60-70% the speed of light in vacuum. Also it's very unlikeliness to have anything resembling a straight line path from the mail server to the destination. If the connections were aborted in a bit over 3ms you would have much shorter range than 500 miles, I'd guess something like 1/4 to 1/2 that distance between the lower propagation speed and indirect path.

[tedunangst]

The timeout was unlikely to be 3ms. A 100hz clock would give you a timeout of 10ms. Also, the timeout needs to cover the distance in both directions. Half of 10ms is 5ms, which is just about enough for a 60% of c transmission to go 500 miles.

[frandroid]

Read the FAQ, linked at the top.