Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Looks to Reinvent the Toilet
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the German government are working on a $10 million project to provide innovative sanitation facilities to 800,000 Kenyans over the next five years. From the article: "The goal is to find 'innovative solutions' for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources." I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.
I'm just curious how someone will find a way to spin this as a bad thing. Will it be "Gates will probably insist they use only Windows toilets!"? Or maybe it will be "This is just a ploy for him to sell more Windows copies to the poor people after they take a shit!" Or perhaps "I'll be he'll ban Linux and Apple from these shithouses!"
Come on, I know there are plenty of Slashdotters just ACHING to find SOME way, ANY way to bash him some more. Forget that Steve Jobs does NO charitable activities (Steve don't do charity) or that this has nothing to do with Linux. Someone will find a way. He's the guy with the Borg picture, after all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
but I think we can all agree it's a damn good one.
The last comment in the story about BSoDs is disappointing. I like to poke fun at Windows and Microsoft software in general as much as the next person over but I have genuine respect for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They're doing more to solve world problems than most countries are. I can recognize a good thing when I see it and making BSoD jokes when it comes to the foundation just belittles the work they do.
We all might make fun of gates but he's putting money into something that is worth while and often over looked. Having a safe place to poo is a pretty big deal, as it stands now a lot of places that don't end up draining into rivers and other water sources and making people sick.
With Vista?
Funny as fuck and I'm out of Mod points!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.
I wonder what the Slashdot version of "Why did the Chicken cross the road?" is.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
http://lavatoryreader.typepad.com/the-lavatory-reader/page/3/
It still will be a BSOD, the Brown Screen Of Death.
It is called humor dammit, even though it may be shitty humor.
Fight Spammers!
Blue Screen of Death will be replaced by Blue Splash of Death, probably chemical.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Alright. I'm convinced that you really are just a troll and aren't actually expecting people to believe your nonsense.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but that's no longer the same thing as Bill Gates. I've been a /. user for around a decade and have certainly made my share of bad Bill Gates jokes, but the guy is literally trying to save the world now. He has the money and the connections to do it, and the projects he's working on are incredibly selfless. Let's give him a break. OP was being very immature IMHO.
Last I checked most of the surface area of Earth is water. Why not flush toilets with saltwater when 38% of the population lives within 100km of an ocean? Tidal driven pumps could be used for energy efficiency and in desert areas, solar desalinization is a possible source of drinking and irrigation water.
64.0 oz of water should be enough for anyone!
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
...money down the toilet?
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
http://humanurehandbook.com/store/LOVEABLE-LOO-Eco-Toilet.html
Why re-invent the wheel, just make it low cost and difficult to block up..
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
My not-so-old house has toilets with a "continental shell" and a tap to do the flushing, So after the Kenyans get their newfangled MicroToilets, I'd like one of their old ones to replace my shitty (pun intended) Western-style pot.
After about three months of relentless Willy action I reckon I'm now as good as when I was 10.
Hi my name is TeePee, think of me as your potty assistant! It looks like you're trying to go #2...
While many of the comments so far are focussing on the issue of toilets, as does the summary, it's the whole sewage infrastructure that's the issue. In the African cities I've been to, large areas don't have proper underground sewers, and sewage is carried in stinking open gutters at the side of the road; having any kind of toilet doesn't help if it's flushing into those open sewers. TFA talks about supporting construction of pit latrines in slums that lack any form of sanitation, so it seems they are being quite practical about working with the existing infrastructure.
Oh no... it's the future.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why would you want the privy right there in the house?
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I think he has finally went over to the nutter side. a flush toilet that wastes precious water is NOT the answer.
Did you even read the summary? He's not trying to give them flush toilets. He's aware that it wastes water. From the SECOND LINE of the summary: "The goal is to find 'innovative solutions' for sanitation in poor urban areas..." What do you think "innovative solutions" might mean? Could it possibly be something along the lines of "a way to deal with waste in a sanitary way that doesn't involve water"?
Yeah. Try reading at least the summary before you post.
Steve's only charity is Steve. And to that he gives generously.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
By not crapping in their drinking water they might actually have a source of clean water. A proper outhouse might go quite far in accomplishing this.
I do wonder why something like the basic outhouse won't work. You dig a hole, put a tank* in, built the structure around it. When it gets full either have a truck come and empty it or build a new one. Also when planning an outhouse the best place for it is down stream from your water supply and usually 100' (30 meters) from the well. This way even if the tank leaks it won't contaminate your water supply since it is down stream and a way from it as the dirt acts as a filter.
* The tank can be pretty much made of anything, like an old metal barrel, old plastic barrel, concrete, special formed plastic tank. I have seen all of these used for outhouses.
Time to offend someone
The brown cheeks of ass.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Another tough nut to crack "Show me the science"-type.
Yeah, stupid science. What we need is more people like Bob here who know more about magic beans than those ignorant science type people.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I lived in Africa, and built outhouses. We dug a deep hole. Then, we made a shallow square hole, about 6 inches deep, in the soft pile of dirt. We placed a bucket on the ground inside the square, poured cement (and rebar) around the bucket, and when the cement dried we removed the bucket and had a floor with a hole in it. We put the floor with the hole over the hole we'd dug. Then we required people to sign a EULA agreement that by peeing in the outhouse, they agreed not to copy our idea. Wait, no we didn't. Kidding aside, I don't see that water has ever been part of the toilet equation in the developing world.
Gently reply
Mod this up!
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This is a solved problem. Composting toilets have been around for decades, and are not uncommon in highway rest areas. They're low/no water use toilets. Liquids are either evaporated with help from a solar-powered exhaust stack or separated and run through underground perf pipe to water flower beds. The solids break down into a sterile compost, and can be used for fertilizing flower beds. They could, in theory, be used safely for fertilizing vegetables, but the yuck factor is more than most people can get past for that.
They're not cheap at the moment, but if you ramped up production and focused more on function than appearance they'd be a lot cheaper to make. They've got very few moving parts (a door to get compost out, an electric fan to encourage evaporation of liquids), so they're easy to maintain.
I appreciate that Bill Gates is trying to solve an important problem -- and it IS an important problem! -- but I find myself wondering why he's not just promoting and improving an existing solution.
Mod parent down. Illiteracy should be punished.
Why not just use seawater for toilets. It's not a potable system anyway. This way you're not wasting fresh water. I guess you still have to do something with the waste, but that seems like 1/2 the battle right there.
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How about a system where the excrement passes through a mesh, or screen if you will, that supplies an electric charge to produce ozone (the system could be gravity fed). Add in a natural way to produce chlorine, and you have a simple system to kill bacteria and other organisms. We can call it the "Poo Screen of Death."
Doesn't have to waste water...
Sancor has one of the very answers that Bill and Melinda envision. No, it can't scale to large communities- but the thing is...they're not trying to do large communities.
You can do waterless self-contained, remote, very low flush (~0.5l), and if there's enough power via solar/wind/etc. you can do vacuum flush (~0.2l) systems that can run without much in the way of maintenance for years and years. In the case of the low-flush and waterless systems, the system's capable of handling 10 people continuously with a 12v solar-cell or similar setup.
Now, if the Gates Foundation can improve upon that...more power to them.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
A proper privy is sanitary, stinky, but still sanitary. I think he has finally went over to the nutter side. a flush toilet that wastes precious water is NOT the answer.
I think maybe you've misunderstood something.
In some locations, it's not QUITE that simple. As for contaminating the drinking water...heh...a composting system can actually fill the bill without needing a classic outhouse, fill the same role, and do it for decades while being able to be placed in locations that would be otherwise impossible for an outhouse.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
How about teaching people how to use a 5 gallon plastic bucket, some sawdust and their kitchen scraps to compost their poop.
Link: http://humanurehandbook.com/
No water needed. Your poop and kitchen scraps already contain all the water needed for a thermophilic reaction. Furthermore, you get nice compost that these people can use to fertilize their land. If not for growing things they can keep their land from turning into desert.
Also, *everything* organic goes into the compost pile: fats, oils, bone, meats, fish, urine, etc., etc.
There's thousands of folks already doing this in the US. We need to stop using purified drinking water to whisk away our poop.
Humanure videos: http://humanurehandbook.com/videos.html
Forums: http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/messages/
But what about our own country? Granted, in the big picture, $10 million isn't all that much, but there are much closer problems to deal with. American's without homes have no computers, can't buy Windows and other Microsoft products!
With as much money as the guy has, he could do wonders for our country. Our new IT-powered smart grid will undoubtedly be run by Windows, so put some money into at least designing a classy Blue Screen of Death. Help fight hunger. Donate computing power for crop yield research. Donate computing power for automotive fuel efficiency (not fuel emission) research. For the children(!!!!!) put money into our educational system, so teachers can actually get paid and feel appreciated and love their jobs again!
I don't understand this need for us to help everyone else while we let our own country go to shit. 800,000 Kenyans get toilets, that's great. But what about the 600,000 homeless we have? What about their toilets!?
If you put your outhouse at the proper distance and dig a reasonable leech field there is no need for a tank at all. Sure it would nice to have, but with only a shovel a workable solution could be made.
Really, seriously, .....?
We can use brilliant minds to do so much needed good in the world, without having idiots worrying about something that is already
working properly...come up with a way to end hunger, or use technology to advance 3rd world countries...or come up with a way log every shipment
that is sent from these supposed help foundations to make sure the cargo reaches the destination instead of being hijacked along the way...
or bring water to villages missing it in Africa...or how to grow better crops....or just anything more then worrying about someone else's crap...
pun intended
Also, this project is a much more noble cause than Gates' misguided drive to immunize the world's population. The world's health care systems would collapse unded the weight of all the new cases of Autism if successful.
I may be dense, but I sure hope that's sarcasm. Autism has no relation to vaccination.
The article spurring that whole belief has been outed as a fabrication. Andrew Wakefield was attempting to push single-disease vaccination shots as a means of boosting pharmaceutical profits, so his "study" showed that only multi-disease vaccinations caused autism. I know it's Wikipedia, but check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy for a brief overview. Note the many citations to non-Wikipedia sources such as BMJ and the CDC.
Someone please tell me this was a Whooooosh moment and I missed the joke.
"Abort, Retry, Ignore?" you might want to try another stall
btw, Abort is an archaic German word for toilet
I'm not quite sure what this problem looks like in your imagination, but the fact is, we're approaching the stage where most of the world's population live in cities.
Population density without the infrastructure to remove the waste is the problem. It's a very hard logistics problem.
You can't just dig a hole 30m down the road in an urban environment.
Also, "planning an outhouse", yes that's another problem since lack of infrastructure, poverty, filth and improvised shelter, ie slums, are all part of the mix.
Lots of perfectly functional, albeit hippyish solutions like composting toilets do not scale to urban environments.
Not only did i read the summary but I read the FA as well. they are trying to apply technology that will not be fricking used for a problem that a solution was discovered several thousand years ago.
You dont crap where you drink and eat. A proper outhouse is the solution. they talk about children playing in sewage, that is because these people are just crapping randomly or in open pits. where a proper outhouse IS the answer.
Blowing money to find a solution that has existed forever is dumb.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The summary specifically mentions urban areas. Downstream of your water supply probably isn't downstream of your neighbour's in a city. So you need some innovation to make sure it doesn't leak. Just digging a hole and covering it up when it's full isn't sustainable in a city. You need some way of getting the waste outside city limits where there's more space for storage or to a central location for treatment. Either of those solutions could use some development to make a system that's efficient and reasonably priced.
Will it have three seashells?
The funny part is that history already has those answers to draw upon. with minor changes that can easily be done you can upgrade what we used to do in cities before the flush toilet existed.
Look at london, NYC, etc... a lot of the world had large cities without plumbing and sewage answers for a very long time.
But there are no answers for dense populations without having a way of sewage removal, unless they invent the portable black hole and give them away for free to everyone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I am impressed he's found something else to do good with.
But I suggest he look at what Nepal did:
He could fix the sanitation issue and solve a large part of their energy issues very cheaply. He just needs to push some startup money to modify the designs for the different areas and some startup money for a micro-finance so people will be able to buy them.
Here is an article on how nepal did it:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/gobar-gas.htm
to get rid of that piece of crap Vista.
How about a worm composting toilet? From what I hear, they are nearly odorless and use no water. You can even throw other stuff in there like cardboard and food stuffs. http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Your-Own-Worm-Compost-System
Given that Gates is responsible for a good part of our current software IP cultural cesspool that limits choices and uses in favor of profits and power-building, I'd say he's more than qualified to wade into this one.
His ideal toilet? You don't own it, you pay per use to use it with his permission after agreeing that he owns it.
You can't use another toilet without paying for it too, and your guests can't use your toilet unless you buy a special license.
It upgrades itself without your consent, and several times per month it freezes up and doesn't let you use it. The next version of the toilet supposedly runs twice as fast and freezes half as often, but it takes you 15 minutes to find where they put the handle on it this time.
And every time they upgrade the toilet, you need to buy a new house because your old house isn't big enough to accommodate it.
"Excrement"
It is unwise to ascribe motive
Brown Shoes of Disgust.
... the Brown Sludgy Flush of Death
I'm not sure, but I'd wager it involves a plunger.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
not being sexy.
http://www.955klos.com/Article.asp?id=1926704&spid=16130
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
I've been waiting to find out WTF the three sea shells is all about for years now!
And in a village without abundant electricity, what do you propose would power this vacuum?
My irritation grows every day with slashdotter's bashing everything Windows or Bill Gates. Hopefully they will all get flushed down Bill's new excrement eliminator. It would make for a cleaner slashdot LOL
... tentatively code named Windows PEE.
You're over thinking the problem. The bashing will be real toilet humor, heh. Something about them being full of shit, or about what floats, or you can't keep a good gates flushed down.
That's far easier than sinking a joke about windows or getting potty mouthed. But, fighting the urge is just pissing in the wind. When mother nature calls with a joke, Just go with it and let it flow.
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week folks!
I8-D
Outhouses need to be moved frequently in order to remain sanitary (especially when you have many people using them). With the population densities you have in refugee camps and slums, that becomes unfeasible. You can't just drop an outhouse anywhere either - you need to be aware of the ground water, proximity to drinking / bathing water, soil types, etc... They "worked" in other places and times because the population densities were lower (and where they weren't, people died from water-borne bacteria and parasites all the time - up until fairly recently, water-borne disease would kill more soldiers at war than other soldiers would). Sanitation education does help in places where the density is low enough to be sustained by outhouses, but more efficient processing techniques (like composting toilets, indoor plumbing, or whatever new innovation this project might come up with) are still required where outhouses are insufficient.
I've been to Ethiopia and the clean water issue was pretty much the biggest problem there. Their cities are the very definition of "ancient" I doubt there's any place on earth that's had humans living in large numbers for as long. Buildings are packed so close together there is hardly room for new ones, and the space between the buildings is filled with "homes" thrown together out of cinder blocks, Joshua tree timber and corrugated steel (this is where the middle class live.) Underneath all of this is the plumbing of the city... it's very... very... very old. When a water main brakes, a city truck comes with shovels and a replacement pipe. Ethiopians flock to the truck and grab shovels, dig out the pipe and replace it. The government dudes then hand them cash for their trouble. All the sewer pipes lead to the same place... the river. Where do they get water? You guessed it, the river. there is no simple solution to this system. There are millions of 100+ year old sewage pipes draining into that river. All the pipes are so old they likely all leak and exchange contents between themselves all the time. So even if you could get clean water to begin with it'd likely not be clean when it arrived. You can't dig up the old pipes because they all run under buildings literally older than Jesus in some cases and there are simply no utility records at all.
On top of every building thats owned by anyone with money is a water tank. They pay other companies to come and fill that tank dailly or weekly. Showering with this water would be too expensive so this is your drinking water and you shower in the tainted water and keep your mouth closed. Another problem is the way bathrooms are designed in Africa and the middle east. In every place I stayed there was a bathtub with no shower head. Instead they had a sprayer on a hose that was part of the tubs faucet that could hang up high if you wanted it. I was told this has something to do with the muslim religion or something, I dont really know. But this sort of setup is against code in the US. Why? Because you can lay the hose down into the tub. If you have the tube full of water, and wash yourself in it... now the water is dirty. If the hose is laying in the water it can now siphon the dirty water back into the water supply. Every single tub is like this.
The only thing that I saw that was really working there was bottled water. It was plentiful and it was cheap. I could get a liter of good bottled water for about 10 cents. That's still a lot for the poor there, but, with a little more effort it could be made even cheaper.
Despite all this, the fact of the mater was water born illness was so common they didn't even bother to treat it in most cases. They wait until it becomes a real health problem. We adopted our son there and when we got back our entire family were basically on antibiotics for a full year afterwards. The stuff is so easy to spread, especially when you have a child in diapers that you cure one familly member and a week later another gets sick... in the end the doctor got fed up and just put everyone, even our dog on antibiotics at the same time for 6 weeks strait and finally we were rid of it.
10 million dollars might come back around to reinventing this. What could be simpler than a sanitary, biodegradable bag? http://www.peepoople.com/
Even better than your standard outhouse - a composting outhouse. Those are designed to collect the crap rather than put it in a hole in the ground. Then at some point you move it from the bin where you've been keeping it to a separate composting area, wait a while, and eventually end up with something that can be used as fertilizer.
It's worth noting that much of Africa has been improving significantly with regards to water safety and sanitation in a lot of areas, precisely because a lot of the governments and NGOs have been focusing on it. It's a way to get a big health and quality-of-life improvement in rural areas at a relatively low cost.
The Gates Foundation is targeting the right problem, no question. What they aren't realizing is that there are established really good solutions out there already. (More cynically, they might be looking for a solution that somebody can patent and make big bucks off of. I sincerely hope that's not the case.)
I am officially gone from
Yes, seawater. Exactly what you have a surplus of in the Serengeti.
I am officially gone from
Seems like MS will not let go of their old ideas :)
http://www.zdnet.com/news/microsoft-flushes-out-iloo-gag/129298
I'm not sure, but I'd wager it involves a plunger.
That's probably how you'd initiate the reboot process.
Bill Gates is truly a great man. During his tenure with Microsoft, he was a great big douchebag who harmed the world and reaped untold riches off the gullibility of people who should have known better. Now, he is a great big philanthropist who helps the least of humanity, and is on track to fulfill his promise to gift away the vast majority of his treasure.
That's how greatness usually works -- greatly good, and greatly bad -- and it's often unclear whether the sum of all works of a great person is net positive or negative.
Had to post this link...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121219687026134617.html
Building inadequate sewage infrastructure... and its consequences.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
But there is a difference between not having a degree in biology or waste management and living under the control of people that tell you to pray for rain in a massive drought. Or who believe raping a baby (or any virgin but easiest with a baby) cures aids. Or eat albino people to gain their powers. And don't act so high and mighty, it wasn't so long ago in the west we burned people alive for voodoo, oops witchcraft or killed people for their faith and made lampshades out of them.
Civilization, you never truly appreciate it until every last bit of it has been stripped away from you. There are still houses in western Europe where you can see the design for crapping out on to the street. The London sewer system isn't all that old (compared to civilized man capable of building a toilet) but us modern humans still rely on it because we are no longer capable of the massive engineering it took to build it to upgrade it to modern needs.
A hole in the ground that is all? What about leach area, the radius around the hole in which you shouldn't dig or grow crops etc? How do you know? For thousands of year NO human knew. We thought smell kept evil spirits away. You and I can drink purest water from the tap for less then the cost of a peanut but drink instead poisoned water from plastic bottles at outrages prices and waste most of it for flushing the toilet.
I sit here within easy reach of enough food to last me a week, pure water how ever much I want, power for a dozen gadgets, in building that doesn't even budge in the worsed storms. Maybe you are too, but I don't pretend that my state in the norm in the rest of the world. Am I grateful for it? Hell no, I am a spoiled westerner but at least sometimes a story like this reminds me there are other places in the world. Maybe you should too. Even knowledge we consider basic is not universal. Just because you had over a decade maybe even two of education doesn't mean everyone has.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
So we are finally getting our three sea shells. (Look it up)
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Most Corps use Microsoft Outhouse already.
You know, I've heard that story many times. It comes up every time the Gates Foundation is mentioned on /. But I have yet to see an actual reputable citation supporting the claim that this supposed requirement actually exists. The Gates Foundation Wikipedia article doesn't mention it under its "Criticism" section. I looked at the Economist articles on the Gates Foundation and don't see the article you describe. The closest thing I could find was this article in the L.A. times, which criticizes some of the Gates Foundation's investments.
The only stuff I can find on the Gates Foundation and IP at all seems to indicate that their only concern with IP is with the rights of the local researchers that they give grants (they generally are required to publicly publish their results). And nowhere have I seen any mention of a requirement that a country that gets a grant has to sign the WIPO treaty (or any other treaty).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well. I answered, since the current version is 7, yer' an 8.
Did I mention she's an ex?
No brain, no pain.
How about turning all that excrement into a meat substitute? http://www.examiner.com/technology-in-national/japanese-scientist-claims-can-turn-excrement-into-meat-substitute
It's interesting that you never hear of Apple or S. Jobs charitable activities mentioned. Most other mega-wealthy individuals enage in some charitable activities. Other than hob-nobbing with rock stars, what kinds of noble works does Steve support, or his corporation?
What the fuck does that have to with anything? Just because you oppose Gates-bashing, Jobs-bashing is not a relevant response. Is everything MS vs. Apple to you?
http://m.prioritymail.com/stepone.aspx
Probably should include plastic liner bags with that.
The other problem is exactly where are they going to send these to?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If the toilet was nicknamed the crapper due to the invetor
do we now go to the bathroom and take a giant gates?
Hopefully he's one of the first adopters that gets turned into relatively cheap medical innovations later. The government is going to have to clamp down on spending and they won't be paying for anything experimental. Those innovations, if they are going to come, are going to come from rich people.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
In other words, if Jesus was calling out the Pharisees for being overt in their charitable deeds, he was not challenging them with anything they would not have already known.
Very similar to Maimonides Eight levels of Charity. From highest to lowest:
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If you ever used or in that particular case tried to use a plane toilet on a long distance flight or when you traveled in a brand new ICE 3 (German high speed train) after the first month of its deployment, than you know how such exception looks and smells like.
However, I guess they will not built vacuum toilets, because this would require a lot of energy to create the vacuum and therefor the classic morning routine of a million people could crash the net as it is hard to predict when they finish and press the button.
I'm old enough to remember outhouse technology! I actually used it for several months. It worked, required no water, and was simple to construct.
The major drawback was that you had to get up and go outside in the middle of the night. This was even more unpleasant when it was cold.
> I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.
The Brown Screen of Death.
3/4ths of the planet's surface is 2 miles deep in water. You don't need fresh water to flush a toilet. Build these poor saps some pumping stations, you dope.
With all due respect to Mr. Dyson's quite notable contributions, I think we need something low tech and cheap to fit this bill.
WALSTIB!
It's been done!
http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-etoilet-to-revolutionize-online-shitting,633/
E-Toilet To Revolutionize Online Shitting
Early e-toilets forced users to keep a lot of windows open, so e-dumpers lacked the kind of privacy you want while doing your business," said designer Peter Cheng, a self-described "whiz kid" who has put hundreds of gigaflops through the new e-toilet without once encountering the dreaded, bomb-emblazoned "Shit Failed" message.
"With the new Advent e-toilet, cutting-edge cyberdump technology has finally arrived and is within reach for all Americans," said Scoscia, smiling. "The question is: Do you want to go today?"
Brown Splash of Death .. nasty, lol.
this is just a natural progression.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The meta-comments in the article summaries is getting out of hand. I just want to read 2 sentences about the content of this article without kdawson or whoever throwing in their snide 2-cents and shitting all over stories. (pun intended)
The problem isn't really efficiency though. The cities where this is happening don't have to social or economic structures to handle those systems. Sure, it may stay running well for a few years but if something breaks they are not likely to go out and replace it with only genuine replacement parts. Someone will cobble together a rubber mat and some string to fix that pipe. Even in western civilization, there are people who don't have the money or the education to properly repair their plumbing/electricity/etc. and they duct tape it all to hell because that's what they have on hand.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
It was an 8086 real mode limitation. The Intel 8086 had 20 address lines, giving a total of 1MB of memory that they could address (in 64k segments). So right there for anything running in purely 16-bit real mode, you have a 1MB limit. Well you had other things that needed memory addresses as well, like VRAM and BIOS and so on. As such the memory was split, 640k for OS and programs, 384k upper memory.
The problem remained for so long because we kept running in real mode. In fact, it is still around. Run an Intel processor in real mode (they all will, even 2nd Core i processors) and you still have access to only 1MB of RAM directly in 64k segments. You have to use EMS or XMS to access more RAM.
All that went away with protected mode, fully introduced on the 80386, which has a 4GB flat memory architecture. Now we are hitting that limit and ones related to it (on 32-bit system you'll find less than 4GB usable because again, VRAM, PCIe cards and so on take up memory) and of course there's long mode, which has a 64-bit address space for new CPUs.
To be completely fair, BSOD-like failures happen in all operating systems, although windows ME, and Vista (pre service pack) certainly were notorious for this.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
The toilet here on my farm sports a 'Designed for Windows XP' logo, as does the toilet paper holder so he must be building on previous experience here...
--frank[at]unternet.org
does no one recall the Microsoft iLoo disaster in the UK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is."
That was uncalled for.
I believe Gates is influenced/impressed by https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Toilets_in_Japan
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Did you ever have to dig several deep holes, then build wooden structures over them - just so people could shit all over your work?
Did you have to do it for free?
Digging holes is hard work. Building wooden outhouses is less hard but it still has costs in tools and resources.
Both activities require compensation of some kind. Preferably monetary, with the rock-bottom price being somewhere around what you'd have to pay for about 4000 calories per worker.
But you will most likely have to pay a lot more than the rock-bottom price on account of that being hard work.
Repeat that every couple of weeks/months depending on the population numbers divided by the number of holes.
And that can add up to be quite a cost for an extremely poor community.
I know it's somewhat cruel and elitist, but I often can't understand the dynamics of these places in Africa... if you have these millions of desperately starving children, WHY do they keep having children?? And, if "we", the outside world, keep providing food don't we realize that we're just creating an unmanageable problem? If you have 10M people that can't feed themselves, so you feel sorry and give them food, you'll just end up with 20M that can't feed themselves on the budget of 10M persons worth of food you provide... thus you must provide even more food...
Humans are not perfectly rational automatons. Well... not counting the psychos.
That's regarding your "WHY do they keep having children?" question.
As for "our compassion to save millions of starving people will only serve to create TENS of million of future starving people" - it doesn't work that way.
You are working with an assumption that people in those countries are "just like you only poor".
Thing is... most of those extremely poor are closer to your ancestors 10000 years ago than to you.
Culturally, educationally and most important in this case - regarding health and life expectancy.
There are places in Africa where a 40-year-old man is a rarity - most people die long before that.
Only way for ANY humans to survive in such conditions is to start breeding like mad. Propagate the species, follow the instincts of the hunter-gatherer.
By providing food and medicines to those people and raising their standard of living you are not creating "TENS of million of future starving people" - you are providing a window for generations to be raised in conditions good enough so that they can dedicate resources to more than just eating, sleeping and breeding.
Instead, they can work on their education and ways of solving their problems so you will not have to provide more help in the future but less or no help at all.
Naturally, that education (and other forms of help) will have to be provided too.
You can't expect of them to "come up" with all the civilizational advancements on their own once they are not hungry and sick any more.
Why?
Well, besides most humans not being heartless bastards (or perfectly rational automatons) there are also perfectly rational reasons.
You need those people, their land, their resources, their workforce.
And no. Just killing them off or enslaving them wont work.
You need their genetic adaptations to the environment as well (can't kill them unless you want your 1st world ass to live in their 3rd world conditions yourself) and enslaving them does not solve any of the problems that are there already - it only makes them YOUR problems.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If anyone is interested in Sanitation (possibly a niche topic, I realise) they could do worse than read The Big Necessity by Rose George.
It's amazing some of the things we take for granted in the West - for instance the teenage "untouchable" girls in India whose job is to literally scrape up other people's shit and dispose of it.