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I'd imagine the main reason is the larger pump necessary to circulate the refridgerant from the central AC unit to the heat exchanger in the pool and back. Also, you'd have to insulate the long length of piping pretty well to avoid major heat transfer losses to the air/ground before it reaches the pool.

True, but there's a lot easier way to do it than piping the refrigerant all the way to the pool; you can always just install an extra loop in the pool filter's piping that runs over to the A/C compressor. Then you're just moving water around, rather than Freon, which is pretty simple. If it's in PVC, it's also fairly well-insulated.

Sure, you'd need a slightly bigger pump, but probably not much more than you'd need to pump water through a conventional fossil-fuel fired heater.

I think the problem is more that there aren't air conditioners that are designed to work with pools or to be water-cooled (residential ones, anyway; industrial ones are frequently water cooled, and combined with an evaporative cooling tower). The common design is the barrel-shaped, periperhal-intake/axial-exhaust one, and it's tough to figure out a good way to water-cool it, I expect.

I actually found online that there is at least one company around that does this, by adding an additional heat exchanger to the cooling circuit and then running the pool water through it. It has the downside of apparently making it impossible to run your air conditioner without the pool pump being on (I don't understand quite why -- wouldn't this just make it work like a normal air-cooled system, without the benefit of the water-cooled exchanger?), but it's otherwise pretty neat.
http://www.toad.net/~jsmeenen/pool.html

And then there are standalone heat pumps for pool heating, which just move energy from the air into the water in order to raise the latter's temperature; I wonder if you could just redirect the (cool) exhaust air from one of these and use it as air conditioning, for example in an outdoor patio room or something.
http://www.centralsolar.com.au/pool_heat_pumps.htm

Thank you Ghost of Wernher von Braun!

Hmmm... I'm not sure Von Braun's ghost is the best entity to summon here. Von Braun had more than a little to do with putting the shuttle on NASA's technology roadmap. Mars Direct is called Direct partly because it deliberately abandons a big chunk of the Von Braun architecture, which is that you have a space station, serviced by shuttles, where you assemble your outward bound spaceships. Even when you take out the station, Von Braun's 1969/1970 Mars architecture relies on shuttles to cover the gap between LEO and the ground. This article entitled The Von Braun Master Plan: National Dream or National Nightmare? sums up the objections to Von Braun's architecture -- and NASA's long term adherence to it -- concisely.

BTW, Here's Von Braun's 1950's vision

Whoops random space got in there some how try Mirror of the torrent

Is there a way to keep their porn/mortgage/penis size ad server busy so that it can not open more connections?
http://www.toad.net/~mischief/archives/00000084.sh tml

This tool is a "honeypot." The idea is that you install this software on a Linux/Unix machine (believe there might also be an NT version available) and it pretends to be like multiple computers on the network, acting as virtual hosts. Whenever a worm comes along and probes one of those virtual hosts, La Brea hangs on to the thread and slows down the process of infection, logs all the relevant info, etc. It's actually a brilliant idea and now, thanks to some of our genius legislators, potentially illegal to possess or use.
Someone created a tar-pit for Code Red. google for la brea code red

any ideas?

or am I suggesting a DoS?

I think more important than the story is the recent trend to use the term "Google" as a common phrase - "to google," "googlewashing." Xerox, Kleenex, and Microsoft are all aware of the possibly of losing exclusivity of their trademarks by having their brand become a household name.

I hope Google is paying attention.

Another place to go for help would be Volunteers for Medical Engineering. They do a lot of terrific stuff - My business partner has been involved in a number of their projects, such as a mouth/breath-controlled IR keyboard built for a quadrapalegic.

Microsoft in the past has argued that words like "internet" and "explorer" are generic, and can't be trademarked. All the while claiming (with a straight face) that "windows" is not generic, and demands trademark protection.

A little background. In 1994, a little-known Chicago area company called SyNet started distributing a web browser, called "internet explorer". Then, in 1995 Microsoft came out with its own "internet explorer". The Chicago company sued, and went bankrupt fighting the behemoth. Eventually, in 1998 Microsoft agreed to pay $5mil to settle the case (after SyNet had gone bankrupt, so they basically accepted anything that they could).

toad.net is a GREAT provider based in Severna Park, MD. They have nationwide coverage (if you can get DSL from any other company, you can get it from them too), and have no restrictions on port traffic. I run several sites with mail, web, SSL, SSH, etc, and have never had a problem.

Microsoft claims that "windows" is special and can be trademarked. On the other hand, they claimed (but eventually lost in court) that "Internet Explorer" is a generic term. They claimed that the word "internet" is too generic.

toad.net - these guys are extremely professional (techs who can answer your question on the phone -- in person! -- within 5 minutes both times I've had to call in the past 6 or so months). The fact that I've only had to call twice in over 6 months should say something too! (Both times were due to outside factors - fire in a t-3 warehouse-type place, and verizon cutting wires another.)
Seriously, check them out!

VME, or Volunteers for Medical Engineering, has been helping disabled persons for years now. One of their earliest projects, built by senior undergraduates of the JHU Mechanical Engineering Dept. was a curved keyboard that was activated with a "puffer" stick. The stick fit in the mouth like a traditional mouth stylus, but kicked a pulse of IR light onto a IR-sensitive keyboard. This allowed the user to greatly reduce neck strain and increase typing speed.

My guess is that an inquiry to the Mech.E. Dept. or VME will get you a load of useful info.

And, yes, I'm an undergrad there, and I'm doing my senior design project for VME, also. I'm working under the supervision of the keyboard's inventor. E-mail me with any serious inquiries.

--Jurph