I'm not trying to downplay the role of amateur radio communications - I am a shortwave radio buff. But I've heard people on the news talk to survivors in Nepal using telephones. Apparently, there is some landline or satellite communications to Nepal available. Just saying.
That's the case in any disaster - some traditional communications are working, but not in all areas. Even Satellite has limited capacity, it works when a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand disaster workers are using it, but if a significant fraction of the population start using their satellite phone, the system is going to be overwhelmed. Ham Radio is also capacity constrained, but with many ham radio users being trained in disaster communications, organized health and welfare messages can still be sent out of the disaster area through the limited communication channels.
I was in Hawaii for the 2006 quake that knocked out power on Oahu. The landline system was nearly useless -- took 45 minutes to get a dialtone and even then, it was impossible to make a call (both locally and out of the area). I had DSL for about 45 minutes until my UPS battery ran out, but it was super slow. No voice cellular calls, but could send SMS within the same network (i.e. I could send to other AT&T customers, but not to Sprint and Verizon, and vice versa).
My landlord was worried about his elderly mother 15 miles away and a car accident plus a downed tree had blocked the only entrance/exit from our neighborhood so I ended up riding my bike to his Mom's house to check on her since he couldn't use the phone system to reach her. (turns out she was at her neighbor's house who was having a big BBQ to use up the meat from his fridge before it went bad)
And this was a relatively minor 6.7 earthquake 200 miles away that caused no real physical damage on Oahu, just knocked out the power on the Island. If it were a 7.0+ quake on Oahu, the situation would have been much worse.
Toss a few gallons of water in your trunk before you head to remote locations -- while the propylene glycol in the antifreeze may not kill you, the corrosion inhibitors and other ingredients
The glycol is the corrosion inhibitor. That's its job as much as anti-freezing. That's why we use it even in climates without freezes, and not just a smaller package of corrosion inhibitors. You have to substantially change the properties of the water to retard corrosion.
Propylene glycol oxidizes when exposed to air and heat, forming lactic acid.[9][10] If not properly inhibited, this fluid can be very corrosive, so pH buffering agents such as dipotassium phosphate, Protodin and potassium bicarbonate are often added to propylene glycol, to prevent acidic corrosion of metal components.
This is why I always try to purchase the "Low Tox" antifreeze for my vehicles. Should I ever be stranded in a remote location without water, I could survive for days just by cracking the draincock on the radiator. Plus, I don't have to feel as bad about parking my car over the storm sewer and emptying out the cooling system when I do a flush!
Toss a few gallons of water in your trunk before you head to remote locations -- while the propylene glycol in the antifreeze may not kill you, the corrosion inhibitors and other ingredients plus possible oil and combustion product contamination is not going to be great for you.
Seems like this should really be IBM's forte. I wonder why they didn't jump into it with both feet.
-jcr
Cheap commodity services was never IBM's forte - they don't want to rent you a $20 virtual server that you maintain yourself, they want to sell you a million dollar mainframe and $10,000 Intel servers that you pay IBM to maintain.
Amazon is my favorite nonprofit organization! Their investors are footing the bill for that 100 pound room air conditioner I had shipped to me via Amazon Prime 2 day shipping, and all those times they spent 2-3 dollars to to ship me a 5 dollar item.
Amazon is squeezing the shipping carriers to lower shipping prices, so don't bet that they lost money on those packages.
Isn't AWS used for more than cloud storage and computing? It's also used for simple web hosting. Did they subtract the revenue from website hosting from that $1.5B figure.
What's the difference between cloud storage + computing and "web hosting"? AWS just provides the platform.
I'm tired of these security experts holding these sites hostage. They should disclose these vulnerabilities to build a safer Internet, not to line their pockets.
If they really wanted to line their pockets, they'd sell them to the black hats.
Blindly disclosing the security holes to the internet at large makes the internet less safe in the short term since the bad guys can exploit the vulnerabilities before the good guys can fix them.
Groupon could hire people themselves to find the vulnerabilities, but they chose not to, instead they offer a bounty for security bugs, which apparently is very cost effective when they don't pay up, so it's a double win - no need to pay money to hire security experts when a community of bug hunters will do the work for a token bounty, and no reason to actually pay the bounty when you can find a technicality (if one out of 30 bugs were released in violation of their guidelines, why aren't they paying their promised bounty for the others?)
Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.
They are already smart enough to use shell corporations to do the drilling -- by the time water contamination or triggered earthquakes are discovered, the shell company is long done and a new one has taken its place.
Two specific APIs which are of use to us in this work are the Typed Array Specification [9], which allows efficient access to unstructured binary data, and the High Resolution Time API [16], which provides sub-millisecond time measurements to Javascript programs
Yes, but it cannot observe what data from other processes is moving out of the cache The attacking process already has to know what bits the other process might have in the cache that they are attempting to time. The cache side-channel attacks are using statistical techniques... in artificially constructed scenarios: where only one other process has shared data you want to do a timing attack against.
Well yeah, that's kind of what the whole paper is about - the fact that they can analyze cache behavior to detect network and mouse activity on the system.
It's also $40 cheaper, which translates into a savings of > 25% of the device price.
You want Ubuntu on the "non-crippled" version? Good news: If you are willing to pay the additional $40, you ought to be able to install Ubuntu because the same hardware (minus some RAM/storage) has already been setup to run Ubuntu.
Is it the same hardware? This implies that it's not identical: The Ubuntu version of the Compute Stick has as a similar CPU -- if the CPU is different, how much of the rest of the chipset is different?
Does that implies that AMD CPUs are also 'vulnerable'?
RTFA:
It should be noted that the AMD cache micro-architecture is exclusive, and thus the attacks described in this report are not immediately applicable to that platform
" Once there, the software inside the bogus content launches a program that manipulates how data moves in and out of a victim PC’s cache"
Uh, if the website can launch programs to manipulate your CPU cache, that's a problem.
I suspect this is the old "set up a webgl context, read back a framebuffer, maybe you will see some old shit in the framebuffer" attack that Microsoft used to attack WebGL back in the day.
Sounds like typical OMG COMPUTERS!!!!!!! from the business crowd.
God how I wish everyone with an MBA would just get the fuck out of my way when I have grownup work to do.
If you understand the CPU architecture, any program that can control what happens within its address space can manipulate data moving in and out of the CPU cache.
For the last 24 years: LINUX ISN'T STUPID BLOATWARE! IT RUNS GREAT ON ANY HARDWARE!!!
Hardware maker in 2015: OK, you're right. Here ya go.
Fanboys: OMG!! CRIPPLED HARDWARE!!
It's still a valid complaint -- why give the Ubuntu device half the ram and 1/4 the storage? Even if Ubuntu *requires* less resources than Windows, the applications that people want to run may not. Chrome, in particular, seems to grow to consume all of my RAM whether I run it on my old 2GB laptop or my 16GB desktop. And the Windows device has 19GB of usable storage -- more than 3 times the total amount of storage on the Ubuntu stick, Ubuntu users store data too, especially on a device well suited to be a media player.
But if you're already have the power cord plugged in, it should be easy to provide a wired network connection right next to it.
Getting the wired network to the laptop is not a problem -- most laptops in the office get to the wired network through the same cable they use to plug in to the monitor, but that wired network doesn't come for free, my company paid $50,000 to wire up cat-6 for an office that we only plan on being in for 2 years - and it already constraints where we can place desks. This doesn't include the $40 - $50K spent on access switches in the server room.
We have Wifi, which works well for phones, tablets, and laptops in conference rooms, but it's no substitute for the wired network since when the graphics guys are saving gigabytes of photoshop files to the file server, the rest of the network suffers.
with receivers on top of everyone's monitor with much better total throughput and less interference than RF.
What about laptops, tablets and phones ?
The same thing they do now -- use RF Wifi.
Everyone in my office plugs their laptop into their large monitor at their desk (which is why I said to put the receiver on top of the monitor, just as they now get their wired connection through the monitor), though a laptop may still be able to get good optical signal with a receiver built into the top of the display. Tablets and phones tend to have lower bandwidth needs than laptops and desktops (few people are editing uncompressed TIFF files on a tablet), so they could still use traditional Wifi (which will have a lot more bandwidth available when the heavy users are using Optical links). This technology wouldn't never replace RF Wifi (since it's a lot harder to ensure optical line of site than to ensure RF signal), but supplement it.
IRDA is back. Hey I have an idea, why not just have an access point that, for each user, drops a little cord out of the ceiling (where all access points are, right) and you plug it in for GIGABIT SPEEEDZZZS!!!1.
No but seriously why are we doing this when channels in the 5 Ghz spectrum are easy to come by.
This is as close to IrDA as RS-232 is to ethernet.
This technology purportedly creates small one meter hot-zones of light, so instead of an AP having one (or a few) 5Ghz channels shared by everyone in range, it can have dozens of separate hotzones so each , and an AP in one room won't interfere with one in the next room.
I could see this being very useful in offices -- instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars pulling wire to each desk back to a central wiring closet, a few AP's can be hung on the ceiling with receivers on top of everyone's monitor with much better total throughput and less interference than RF.
1 inch of water per SQFT is for those who want that golf green lawn. Until about 6 years ago I never watered my lawn and it remained reasonably beautiful with just normal precipitation. Now I only water my lawn when it's dry for extended periods. I water for only 15 minutes per section (whatever amount of water that equals to I'm not sure but I managed to do the whole lawn which is about 30x30 total which is about 1/3 inch per sqft).
Watering a 30x30 ft lawn with 1/3 inch of water is around 180 gallons, so if you're spreading 50 gallons over that lawn, you're only getting around 1/10th of an inch of water, barely enough to penetrate the soil.
So the point is, I get whatever I get out of the 50 gallons. It's water that isn't coming out of the city's water supply. Those that are more serious (such as some I know) will get a 1000 gallon tank installed at time of construction. Each 50 gallon saves me $10 (based on the lowest rate in the consumption chart) and based on my bills I figure I save between $25 and $40 a month.
Where do you live that you pay $0.20/gallon for water? In San Francisco, the water+sewer rate is closer to $0.02/gallon. The city with the highest cost for water + sewer in this chart is Atlanta, GA ataround $0.026 per gallon.
If you're refilling your 50 gallon barrel 2.5 to 4 times a month with rainwater, you probably don't need much water for irrigation anyway, sounds like you're already getting regular rain.
I didn't read all comments but suggesting to use the water that dropped on our roofs for drinking is silly to say the least. What I've seen new home owners do is have plastic reservoirs placed underground in their backyard. All gutters are redirected to this container which has an overflow to allow the excess to go back to the street. This allows the user to water his garden and lawn at no cost and it reduces the load on the network.
I personally only have a 50 gallon barrel that is hidden from view and it collects rain water. An electric pump (with filter) is used to water my lawn and garden. I also use it to wash the cars and bring up the water level of the pool. The cost of the setup paid for itself within less that 5 years. In my case I have about 1200 sqft of roof. The only disadvantage of the setup is that I have to stay on top of it before winter (drain and seal the barrel)
I don't see how you get so much use out of a single 50 gallon barrel -- a lawn needs around an inch of water per week, so a small 10 foot by 10 foot lawn is going to need around 62 gallons of water per week. Yet you manage to water your lawn, wash your cars, and bring up the water level of the pool with a single 50 gallon barrel.
To properly handle something like rainwater takes upfront design. Some kind of roof tank that can gravity-feed all house toilets, and outdoor hoses would be nice.
As to thinking the consumer should pay for water recycling costs, I'm not suggesting that.
You just suggested building rainwater collection and 6,000 gallon holding tanks into new construction, if consumers don't pay for it, who will? Putting the 24 ton tank on top of buildings sounds like it's going to drive up building costs substantially (especially in an earthquake zone). Seems like it would be better to bury the tank and pump water to where it's needed.
But water use reduction and recycling does have to be forced, one way or another -- whether that is a cost per gallon causing prudent use, or even/odd watering days, or "no lawns allowed in AZ". So you offer incentives to those who capture...much like the solar energy people are doing today. The point is we all pay, whether the cost is direct or indirect.
But what's the cost/benefit between small scale rainwater collection and large scale municipal water collection? For most people, water only costs a penny or two per gallon (including sewage costs), is it really worth $60 - $100/year to build a 6000 gallon water collection system into your home? Greywater recycling might be more affordable since it doesn't need a huge tank.
As to crops, why don't they put down thick black plastic over the entire field. Then capture that water to a swimming pool sized holding tank, and pump it back out via drip/sprinkler systems to water their plants as needed.
I don't know if such a system is workable -- each acre would collect 27,000 gallons of water from one inch of rain, that's a lot of water to store. So collecting 10 inches of winter rain to use for summer irrigation is going to take a 270,000 gallon tank for each acre (which is a 100x100x4' tank)
Plus, preventing rainwater from seeping into the ground is just going to increase the amount of water that needs to be added through irrigation.
In any case, the answer for why it's not done is "It's expensive -- more expensive than the subsidized water" it would replace.
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I'm not trying to downplay the role of amateur radio communications - I am a shortwave radio buff. But I've heard people on the news talk to survivors in Nepal using telephones. Apparently, there is some landline or satellite communications to Nepal available. Just saying.
That's the case in any disaster - some traditional communications are working, but not in all areas. Even Satellite has limited capacity, it works when a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand disaster workers are using it, but if a significant fraction of the population start using their satellite phone, the system is going to be overwhelmed. Ham Radio is also capacity constrained, but with many ham radio users being trained in disaster communications, organized health and welfare messages can still be sent out of the disaster area through the limited communication channels.
I was in Hawaii for the 2006 quake that knocked out power on Oahu. The landline system was nearly useless -- took 45 minutes to get a dialtone and even then, it was impossible to make a call (both locally and out of the area). I had DSL for about 45 minutes until my UPS battery ran out, but it was super slow. No voice cellular calls, but could send SMS within the same network (i.e. I could send to other AT&T customers, but not to Sprint and Verizon, and vice versa).
My landlord was worried about his elderly mother 15 miles away and a car accident plus a downed tree had blocked the only entrance/exit from our neighborhood so I ended up riding my bike to his Mom's house to check on her since he couldn't use the phone system to reach her. (turns out she was at her neighbor's house who was having a big BBQ to use up the meat from his fridge before it went bad)
And this was a relatively minor 6.7 earthquake 200 miles away that caused no real physical damage on Oahu, just knocked out the power on the Island. If it were a 7.0+ quake on Oahu, the situation would have been much worse.
Toss a few gallons of water in your trunk before you head to remote locations -- while the propylene glycol in the antifreeze may not kill you, the corrosion inhibitors and other ingredients
The glycol is the corrosion inhibitor. That's its job as much as anti-freezing. That's why we use it even in climates without freezes, and not just a smaller package of corrosion inhibitors. You have to substantially change the properties of the water to retard corrosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Propylene glycol oxidizes when exposed to air and heat, forming lactic acid.[9][10] If not properly inhibited, this fluid can be very corrosive, so pH buffering agents such as dipotassium phosphate, Protodin and potassium bicarbonate are often added to propylene glycol, to prevent acidic corrosion of metal components.
http://www.amsoil.com/lit/data...
Amsoil Low-Toxicity Propylene Glycol Antifreeze
Composition by Weight:
Total glycols >= 92 percent; Corrosion inhibitors and
antifoamants = 8 percent; Water
This is why I always try to purchase the "Low Tox" antifreeze for my vehicles. Should I ever be stranded in a remote location without water, I could survive for days just by cracking the draincock on the radiator. Plus, I don't have to feel as bad about parking my car over the storm sewer and emptying out the cooling system when I do a flush!
Toss a few gallons of water in your trunk before you head to remote locations -- while the propylene glycol in the antifreeze may not kill you, the corrosion inhibitors and other ingredients plus possible oil and combustion product contamination is not going to be great for you.
Web hosting companies will take a steep penalty to you for using too much CPU or memory. And usually ask you for your money in advance.
The only difference between a web hosting company and Amazon is the billing model?
Seems like this should really be IBM's forte. I wonder why they didn't jump into it with both feet.
-jcr
Cheap commodity services was never IBM's forte - they don't want to rent you a $20 virtual server that you maintain yourself, they want to sell you a million dollar mainframe and $10,000 Intel servers that you pay IBM to maintain.
Amazon is my favorite nonprofit organization! Their investors are footing the bill for that 100 pound room air conditioner I had shipped to me via Amazon Prime 2 day shipping, and all those times they spent 2-3 dollars to to ship me a 5 dollar item.
Amazon is squeezing the shipping carriers to lower shipping prices, so don't bet that they lost money on those packages.
Isn't AWS used for more than cloud storage and computing? It's also used for simple web hosting. Did they subtract the revenue from website hosting from that $1.5B figure.
What's the difference between cloud storage + computing and "web hosting"? AWS just provides the platform.
I'm tired of these security experts holding these sites hostage. They should disclose these vulnerabilities to build a safer Internet, not to line their pockets.
If they really wanted to line their pockets, they'd sell them to the black hats.
Blindly disclosing the security holes to the internet at large makes the internet less safe in the short term since the bad guys can exploit the vulnerabilities before the good guys can fix them.
Groupon could hire people themselves to find the vulnerabilities, but they chose not to, instead they offer a bounty for security bugs, which apparently is very cost effective when they don't pay up, so it's a double win - no need to pay money to hire security experts when a community of bug hunters will do the work for a token bounty, and no reason to actually pay the bounty when you can find a technicality (if one out of 30 bugs were released in violation of their guidelines, why aren't they paying their promised bounty for the others?)
Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.
They are already smart enough to use shell corporations to do the drilling -- by the time water contamination or triggered earthquakes are discovered, the shell company is long done and a new one has taken its place.
But Javascript?
RTFA:
Two specific
APIs which are of use to us in this work are the
Typed Array Specification [9], which allows efficient access
to unstructured binary data, and the High Resolution
Time API [16], which provides sub-millisecond time
measurements to Javascript programs
Yes, but it cannot observe what data from other processes is moving out of the cache The attacking process already has to know what bits the other process might have in the cache that they are attempting to time. The cache side-channel attacks are using statistical techniques... in artificially constructed scenarios: where only one other process has shared data you want to do a timing attack against.
Well yeah, that's kind of what the whole paper is about - the fact that they can analyze cache behavior to detect network and mouse activity on the system.
It's also $40 cheaper, which translates into a savings of > 25% of the device price.
You want Ubuntu on the "non-crippled" version? Good news: If you are willing to pay the additional $40, you ought to be able to install Ubuntu because the same hardware (minus some RAM/storage) has already been setup to run Ubuntu.
Is it the same hardware? This implies that it's not identical: The Ubuntu version of the Compute Stick has as a similar CPU -- if the CPU is different, how much of the rest of the chipset is different?
Does that implies that AMD CPUs are also 'vulnerable'?
RTFA:
It should be noted that the AMD cache
micro-architecture is exclusive, and thus the attacks described
in this report are not immediately applicable to
that platform
How is having your browser fail to work on many websites "FTW?"
Because if you want to ensure your security and privacy, you shouldn't use the web.
They cant even describe what happens.
" Once there, the software inside the bogus content launches a program that manipulates how data moves in and out of a victim PC’s cache"
Uh, if the website can launch programs to manipulate your CPU cache, that's a problem.
I suspect this is the old "set up a webgl context, read back a framebuffer, maybe you will see some old shit in the framebuffer" attack that Microsoft used to attack WebGL back in the day.
Sounds like typical OMG COMPUTERS!!!!!!! from the business crowd.
God how I wish everyone with an MBA would just get the fuck out of my way when I have grownup work to do.
If you understand the CPU architecture, any program that can control what happens within its address space can manipulate data moving in and out of the CPU cache.
For the last 24 years: LINUX ISN'T STUPID BLOATWARE! IT RUNS GREAT ON ANY HARDWARE!!!
Hardware maker in 2015: OK, you're right. Here ya go.
Fanboys: OMG!! CRIPPLED HARDWARE!!
It's still a valid complaint -- why give the Ubuntu device half the ram and 1/4 the storage? Even if Ubuntu *requires* less resources than Windows, the applications that people want to run may not. Chrome, in particular, seems to grow to consume all of my RAM whether I run it on my old 2GB laptop or my 16GB desktop. And the Windows device has 19GB of usable storage -- more than 3 times the total amount of storage on the Ubuntu stick, Ubuntu users store data too, especially on a device well suited to be a media player.
But if you're already have the power cord plugged in, it should be easy to provide a wired network connection right next to it.
Getting the wired network to the laptop is not a problem -- most laptops in the office get to the wired network through the same cable they use to plug in to the monitor, but that wired network doesn't come for free, my company paid $50,000 to wire up cat-6 for an office that we only plan on being in for 2 years - and it already constraints where we can place desks. This doesn't include the $40 - $50K spent on access switches in the server room.
We have Wifi, which works well for phones, tablets, and laptops in conference rooms, but it's no substitute for the wired network since when the graphics guys are saving gigabytes of photoshop files to the file server, the rest of the network suffers.
Or they can be trained to alert on whatever signal their handler wants to give them. Hell, they are dogs, they want to please their handler.
That sentence was valid with "their": "Hell, the handlers dogs, they want to please their handler."
with receivers on top of everyone's monitor with much better total throughput and less interference than RF.
What about laptops, tablets and phones ?
The same thing they do now -- use RF Wifi.
Everyone in my office plugs their laptop into their large monitor at their desk (which is why I said to put the receiver on top of the monitor, just as they now get their wired connection through the monitor), though a laptop may still be able to get good optical signal with a receiver built into the top of the display. Tablets and phones tend to have lower bandwidth needs than laptops and desktops (few people are editing uncompressed TIFF files on a tablet), so they could still use traditional Wifi (which will have a lot more bandwidth available when the heavy users are using Optical links). This technology wouldn't never replace RF Wifi (since it's a lot harder to ensure optical line of site than to ensure RF signal), but supplement it.
IRDA is back. Hey I have an idea, why not just have an access point that, for each user, drops a little cord out of the ceiling (where all access points are, right) and you plug it in for GIGABIT SPEEEDZZZS!!!1.
No but seriously why are we doing this when channels in the 5 Ghz spectrum are easy to come by.
This is as close to IrDA as RS-232 is to ethernet.
This technology purportedly creates small one meter hot-zones of light, so instead of an AP having one (or a few) 5Ghz channels shared by everyone in range, it can have dozens of separate hotzones so each , and an AP in one room won't interfere with one in the next room.
I could see this being very useful in offices -- instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars pulling wire to each desk back to a central wiring closet, a few AP's can be hung on the ceiling with receivers on top of everyone's monitor with much better total throughput and less interference than RF.
Can they do this without it being visible light?
I'm pretty sure you could really mess up some epileptics this way.
Not to mention I can see this giving some people migraines ... I know many many people who can see the flickering of fluorescent lights.
Cool, awesome, yay progress. But I don't want to be in a place where I am aware of the flashing lights.
Even if they used visible light, no one is going to see the flickering of a multi-megahertz flickering light.
1 inch of water per SQFT is for those who want that golf green lawn. Until about 6 years ago I never watered my lawn and it remained reasonably beautiful with just normal precipitation. Now I only water my lawn when it's dry for extended periods. I water for only 15 minutes per section (whatever amount of water that equals to I'm not sure but I managed to do the whole lawn which is about 30x30 total which is about 1/3 inch per sqft).
Watering a 30x30 ft lawn with 1/3 inch of water is around 180 gallons, so if you're spreading 50 gallons over that lawn, you're only getting around 1/10th of an inch of water, barely enough to penetrate the soil.
So the point is, I get whatever I get out of the 50 gallons. It's water that isn't coming out of the city's water supply. Those that are more serious (such as some I know) will get a 1000 gallon tank installed at time of construction. Each 50 gallon saves me $10 (based on the lowest rate in the consumption chart) and based on my bills I figure I save between $25 and $40 a month.
Where do you live that you pay $0.20/gallon for water? In San Francisco, the water+sewer rate is closer to $0.02/gallon. The city with the highest cost for water + sewer in this chart is Atlanta, GA ataround $0.026 per gallon.
If you're refilling your 50 gallon barrel 2.5 to 4 times a month with rainwater, you probably don't need much water for irrigation anyway, sounds like you're already getting regular rain.
I didn't read all comments but suggesting to use the water that dropped on our roofs for drinking is silly to say the least. What I've seen new home owners do is have plastic reservoirs placed underground in their backyard. All gutters are redirected to this container which has an overflow to allow the excess to go back to the street. This allows the user to water his garden and lawn at no cost and it reduces the load on the network.
I personally only have a 50 gallon barrel that is hidden from view and it collects rain water. An electric pump (with filter) is used to water my lawn and garden. I also use it to wash the cars and bring up the water level of the pool. The cost of the setup paid for itself within less that 5 years. In my case I have about 1200 sqft of roof. The only disadvantage of the setup is that I have to stay on top of it before winter (drain and seal the barrel)
I don't see how you get so much use out of a single 50 gallon barrel -- a lawn needs around an inch of water per week, so a small 10 foot by 10 foot lawn is going to need around 62 gallons of water per week. Yet you manage to water your lawn, wash your cars, and bring up the water level of the pool with a single 50 gallon barrel.
To properly handle something like rainwater takes upfront design. Some kind of roof tank that can gravity-feed all house toilets, and outdoor hoses would be nice.
As to thinking the consumer should pay for water recycling costs, I'm not suggesting that.
You just suggested building rainwater collection and 6,000 gallon holding tanks into new construction, if consumers don't pay for it, who will? Putting the 24 ton tank on top of buildings sounds like it's going to drive up building costs substantially (especially in an earthquake zone). Seems like it would be better to bury the tank and pump water to where it's needed.
But water use reduction and recycling does have to be forced, one way or another -- whether that is a cost per gallon causing prudent use, or even/odd watering days, or "no lawns allowed in AZ". So you offer incentives to those who capture...much like the solar energy people are doing today. The point is we all pay, whether the cost is direct or indirect.
But what's the cost/benefit between small scale rainwater collection and large scale municipal water collection? For most people, water only costs a penny or two per gallon (including sewage costs), is it really worth $60 - $100/year to build a 6000 gallon water collection system into your home? Greywater recycling might be more affordable since it doesn't need a huge tank.
As to crops, why don't they put down thick black plastic over the entire field. Then capture that water to a swimming pool sized holding tank, and pump it back out via drip/sprinkler systems to water their plants as needed.
I don't know if such a system is workable -- each acre would collect 27,000 gallons of water from one inch of rain, that's a lot of water to store. So collecting 10 inches of winter rain to use for summer irrigation is going to take a 270,000 gallon tank for each acre (which is a 100x100x4' tank)
Plus, preventing rainwater from seeping into the ground is just going to increase the amount of water that needs to be added through irrigation.
In any case, the answer for why it's not done is "It's expensive -- more expensive than the subsidized water" it would replace.
Nearly $1M per home sounds like a lot even by Marin standards, assuming that the cost of land is not included in that $200M figure.