I've thought the same thing. I find it hard to believe that somebody, somewhere, hasn't already done it -- it seems like an obvious step to take if you wanted to run a bunch of thin clients without much disk storage.
For everything you hear about using old hardware as thin x-server clients to run applications remotely (which comes up pretty often here on/.) there aren't -- at least to my knowledge -- very many easy to use distros that let you do it out of the box. If somebody can prove me wrong on this I'd be pleased, since I've always been interested in playing around with thin-client stuff, but it's seemed rather daunting to get into.
If somebody felt like putting together a bootable distro, suitable for low-end or old hardware, that would fit on a business-card CD or inexpensive USB flash drive, and do nothing but let the machine work as an x-server over a secure connection and run remote applications, I think there's a definite demand for it (especially if it had a matching "thick" server/x-client distro).
Although I'd love to break our dependence on foreign oil as much as the next person, I'm not sure that's going to be possible, even if you made a reusable catalyst that only cost a dollar and took raw corncobs in one end and spat 89-octane premium unleaded out the other. I've seen statistics that show that even if you took all the corn and soy and canola production on the N.American continent and used it for nothing but bio-fuel production -- no more corn or soy or canola based foods at all -- you wouldn't get more than 25% of our current transportation fuel demand. Maybe less. And if you retain the food usage that we have now (because otherwise you'd just be replacing everything that uses corn syrup right now with imported cane sugar anyway) and just use surplus farm capacity plus recycled oil, I think it's only about 10% of demand that could be filled.
I think the biggest potential for bio-diesel isn't using it as a straight fuel, but as an additive to regular diesel, to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Also, we need to keep working on catalysts to find other ways of replacing lighter fossil-fuels with renewable ones. In particular, I'm thinking of jet fuel and aviation gasoline: I don't know of anything that has the energy density to replace them (although I do think the Air Force experimented once with the idea of a nuclear powered plane), and we're going to really be stuck when we start to run out of petroleum if we haven't found a replacement for those products that come off higher up the cracking tower than diesel fuel.
The biggest problem with hydrogen is the distribution network. Biodiesel can be taken from refineries to the consumer using the current delivery systems, which are all designed around volatile liquid fuels. (Actually they'd be overkill for biodiesel, which isn't really even very volatile.) The only thing you'd need to do is keep it from getting cold, since the gel-point is much higher than gasoline or conventional diesel. This is nontrivial in higher climates, but it's still nothing compared to the problems that you'd have switching from a liquid to a compressed-gas fuel. Especially one that's tough to liquefy at high pressure like H2 -- you can't even use the same technology that you'd use for natural gas or propane.
Also, biodiesel is an honest-to-god energy SOURCE for transportation (okay, technically it's stored solar), but it doesn't require a massive manmade energy input like hydrogen does. The "hydrogen economy" people are talking about usually rests on one of two source options: either crack natural gas to make hydrogen, or use electricity (from fossil fuels or nuclear, because they're the only practical sources that produce enough power) to crack water.
Perhaps less importantly in the long view, but critical in the short term, is that biodiesel works in conventional reciprocating-piston, internal combustion engines without huge amounts of retooling, new development work, or restrictive patents or licensing. Pretty much any auto shop in the world can convert a diesel car to run on biodiesel, if there was a demand for it. And the production lines which make gasoline engines now could easily be changed over to making diesel ones with far more ease than they could make fuel cells or electric motors.
The difference between hydrogen and biodiesel is one of time-scale. Hydrogen is a good idea from a long-term perspective, where creating a new distribution network from scratch and scrapping every car and truck on the road can just be written off as "conversion difficulties", but in the short run they're deal-breakers. That's where biodiesel starts to look really good.
I think that if you engage in any of the various distributed computing projects, whether SETI or Einstein or anything else, there is an implicit assumption that the work being completed is worth the electricity being used and the fuel expended. In some cases this tradeoff is explicit, since people choose to leave their computers on all the time (or not go into sleep/low-power mode) and pay for the electricity, so they can do work on these projects.
I and many others apparently think it's worth the power; if you don't, that's your business, nobody makes you leave your system on.
I just read through the site and I don't think there's any evidence to show that the hypervisor that it's being speculated is used by the x360 is the same one that's been developed by IBM. The IBM one I believe is designed for large scale use on big iron, providing abstraction and security services to virtual machines; the xBox one is just to monitor the kernel for modifications and checksum the RAM against stored values in the processor. They seem so different in scope that I'm not sure it's a good assumption to think that they're the same thing, or that the MS one isn't just something they cooked up in-house. There doesn't seem to be any strong evidence that they're the same, and the Slashdot article link just seems to be something the author pulled out of Google.
Also, if you read on the Free60 documentation site, it's apparent that the factoids being discussed, including the only mention of the hypervisor, are being attributed to "someone on the IRC" -- not exactly a reputable source.
Yeah if there actually turned out to be even some semblance of support for it as an architecture, I'd probably pick one up just to play around with. I don't really have any desire to buy any games for it, but if I could get a development/hobby platform for under $400 (okay, add a case that doesn't suck) while at the same time sticking Microsoft for $125, I'm all over it.
What would be cool is if somebody would port the BOINC distributed computing client, and put together a bootable CD for xBox. If you know you're not going to be using your console for a while, just put the CD in and reboot it, and it crunches numbers until you're ready to play again. If you think of the numbers of game consoles that are sold, and the number of hours that they're probably used per day (after the initial fascination wears off), that's a lot of idle CPU time. Now that consoles are getting comparable to computers in power, and have network connections and attached disk storage, I don't think it's that ridiculous an idea.
... of the promotional material for the Sega Saturn from a few years back?
I remember right about the time it came out, there was a lot of hype about it's architecture. Two main processors and a bunch of dedicated co-processors, fast memory bus, etc., etc. I don't remember any more specifics, but at the time it seemed very impressive. Of course it flopped spectacularly, because apparently the thing was a huge pain in the ass to program for and the games never materialized. Or at least that's the most often spoken reason that I've heard.
Anyway, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to have realized this, Cell is starting to sound the same way. The technical side is being hyped and seems clearly leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, but one has to wonder what MS is doing to prevent themselves from producing another Saturn on the programming side.
I don't want to put words in the GP's mouth, but what he's saying seems to make sense to me. I don't think he was implying that Mono Lake is drying up because of anything to do with the Colorado River specifically; it's drying up because L.A. is diverting away water that would otherwise feed it. In a separate but related issue, L.A. is ALSO diverting a large portion (so he says) of the Colorado River. Two separate issues.
To say that L.A. is the only thing that Mono Lake and the Colorado River have in common seems perfectly in line with the sentence as written. They have nothing in common except they're both used as water supplies by Los Angeles -- since that's what the discussion is about, that's why they're both being mentioned together.
What we need is a no-flush frictionless system. Or at least a low-flush low-friction system.
How would that work? Use a Teflon-coated toilet bowl?
It seems to me based on my experience that most clogs in toilets happen in the U-bend: this is where you need the most water (or highest velocity, anyway), to push the waste through this bottleneck and into the pipe. I don't think the problem there is friction-related as much as it's simply mechanical; it takes some velocity to force the waste around the 180-degree turn that a U-bend is, because often the waste is bigger or longer than the internal radius of the pipe, and you have to break up the waste to get it through. I'm not sure how lowering the friction inside the pipes would really change anything too much. If you don't have enough momentum to break up the waste, it's not going to go around the bend and you've created a clog.
Perhaps you'd like to elaborate on what you had in mind?
In regards to the Canadian water, my guess is that we'll "take" it from Canada in the same way we currently "take" their natural gas: in exchange for hard currency. Even if we in the U.S. were of a mind to drive the Army up there and steal it, there would have to be a water shortage of Apocalyptic proportions for that to be economical, and even then a water supply is an awfully easy thing to contaminate and render useless. Even in the most extreme scenario, I doubt any water will ever come across the border without those on the Northern side agreeing, and probably helping every step along the way.
OT: Those of us in NorCal have been wishing we could do the same to LA. Yeah, really. I've always thought that Northern California really got the shaft politically and in terms of taxation/welfare, and now they're taking your water and piping it down South? That's rough. I guess you guys could always try and pull a West Virginia, although I'm not sure how well it's worked out for them there in the long run.
Agreed; I was going to point this out but it's rarely worth arguing with people who think mandatory conservation will ever work, since they're generally quite detached from reality anyway. Schemes like that would be so unpopular and raise such public outrage in this country that they're nearly always a no-go from the start.
What does need to happen is that we need to have water rates that: 1. Accurately represent the entire cost of what is being used; perhaps including sewage treatment and water recycling, dam construction and maintenance, and other high-level infrastructure, either in the overhead/distribution flat fee, or the unit price per gallon, 2. Fluctuate depending on supply and demand: some water companies only bill bi-monthly, with pricing to match, and this means that customers aren't encouraged to tailor their usage to match supply, and 3. Equal rates for equal product delivered: business and industrial consumers shouldn't receive a discount on their consumption, except on the distribution/overhead charges (because it's a lot less piping to run one 4" line to a factory that consumes 1,000,000 gal/day than 1,000 small lines to homes that each consume 1,000 gal/day, the large users can fairly demand and should receive less of an overhead or "distribution surcharge," but the cost per gallon of water ought to be the same). This is probably the biggest issue, since I'd bet many major consumers are paying essentially subsidized rates for their water because of old agreements with utility companies.
The short-term effect of this might be to drive some water-dependent industries out of some areas, but this is really only a correction of behavior that shouldn't have existed if the market had been operating correctly. In the long run, water conservation will be encouraged in the same way that's most encouraged energy conservation: increasingly high utilities costs make the upfront investment in 'greener' facilities justifiable. It's just that for historical reasons, water supplies have always been insulated from having prices that represent the true cost of what's being delivered, especially in arid regions, and now we're seeing the consequences of that.
Exactly. Despite the opinions of many Californians I've met, the universe does not revolve solely around them, or their state. Water shortages are rarely an issue in the U.S., outside of California (and I suspect probably mostly only Southern California) and the Southwestern states -- the only exception being the odd seasonal shortage during a bad summer drought in other places, or if the water supply is contaminated for some reason.
In any event, this seems like an issue that should be dealt with on the local municipal level, and certainly not on a Federal one. There are no water shortages in my area, and I have no desire to switch to a different design of toilet that wouldn't have any advantage to me and would just mean a lot of additional complexity, and I would take a very dim view of any legislation that tried to force this. If people who choose to live in places essentially unsuited to human habitation have problems with their water supply, obviously their governments should address these issues. But it's not a universal problem, and it does no good to make it one artificially.
There are enough problems which affect the entire country that need to be dealt with; we should leave those that only affect certain regions to the levels of government closest to the problems to fix as they see fit.
Maybe you could program them with an OR condition: flush every 5 uses, or after 5 minutes of inactivity. That way if the toilet was being used continuously (say a whole line of guys using it one after the other) then it wouldn't flush after every use, but it wouldn't sit full of urine and stink for more than a few minutes after the last person was done, either.
Perhaps simpler, just program them with a longer delay-before-flush on the motion sensor. Instead of flushing as soon as the person steps back from the unit, as most of them do now, use a few second delay so that if another person moves into position to use it, it doesn't flush immediately. I don't think that many men would really be bothered by this, and it could potentially save a lot of water in locations where the usage comes in large surges (think restrooms at sports stadiums, concert halls, etc.).
Probably because until somebody came up with this application for microwaves, it was a solution looking for a problem. Sure, you could have made a microwave water heater any time between the invention of the microwave and today, but why would you want to? It's not like anyone really has a problem with resistance-coils; they're remarkably close to 100% efficient when submerged in the fluid you want to heat, and dead simple.
I still question their claim (which is their invention's raison d'être, as far as I can tell) that you can't heat water fast enough for an 'on demand' application with resistance coils, because it would take too much electricity. Heating water is heating water -- if you want to do it faster you use more coils, and thus more power, but the power required isn't necessarily any higher than what you'd need to do the same amount of work with a microwave emitter. It doesn't quite make sense to me.
Just think if they heated the water using a critical-sized lump of plutonium -- then it would both heat and irradiate your water! For maximum germ killing power. And it wouldn't just be 'on demand' hot water, it would be hot water all the time whether you want it or not.
Plus it would be emission free, and a great use of all those Soviet ICBM warhead initiators that are just sitting around, going to waste.
Just don't turn off the cold water supply....ever.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. If you bend your knees and your waist, you keep your center of gravity above your feet, so there's not any force on the copier at all. Of course to get that perfect "squashed ass" look, you'd need to apply some on purpose, but I'm sure you could ask people to use moderation.
I wonder what the best cleaner is to get ass grease off of copier glass... I feel like Windex might not be up to the task.
Actually, given that I'm not really in a 'buying mood' right now, I'd love to see some more interesting/exotic processors thrown into the mix. The one I'd really like to see are some SPARCs, although I don't think they'd do very well on the benchmarks that are being used (they seem to favor single-thread performance). But some big iron -- especially old big iron -- would be fun for comparison value. We always hear glib comparisons between modern desktop computers and the mainframes of the past, but I've never seen any hard evidence of how they would stack up.
I guess the place to start would be with these guys' Cray YMP... they even have gcc and GNU make installed, so I don't think it would be too hard to get the SPEC CPU benchmark series running on it, although I'm not sure whether to get the fairest score if you'd want to use the Cray-supplied optimized C and f77 compilers, instead of gcc.
Somebody has to have done this before... but searching on the spec.org site didn't turn up anything for Cray.
At some helpdesks I've talked to, they solve this problem by having the transferring person do a 3-way call, get the other person on the line, and then hang up only after rep #2 is on. So at no point (after the first person picks up) are you ever not connected to a person. This way, if the person that you're being transferred to isn't in, you're not just left there.
Granted, the system that I've used which was like this was my (very large) company's internal IT helpdesk; I doubt that any company would bother to go even this far for external customers. Most large companies think of their customers as organisms somewhere between slime mold and cattle, at treat them appropriately.
I'm not sure about UPS, but at least on Amtrak's and several other voice-controlled menu systems, you can say "Operator" at almost anytime and be directed to a human. That's what I do every time I call -- as soon as I hear that "Hi, I'm [insert name], [insert company]'s automated agent!" I just start saying "I want to talk to an operator" over and over. Usually I get one pretty quickly.
I've actually gotten to prefer the voice agent systems more than the standard button-pushing ones, just because they're more easily broken out of. However if this "loophole" gets closed off, I could really get to hate them.
Yeah, I agree with this. While I'm not necessarily a fan of the whole third-world-outsourcing phenomenon in general, just because you get someone in a call center in Calcutta or Bangalore doesn't mean that the service is going to be any worse than it would if you got someone in America. And based on my experience, their English is often better, and they're loads more polite.
My latest experience was with Comcast, which does have a U.S.-based call center, and I found the reps to be obnoxious, rude, and prone to lie through their teeth. They seem to be trained to tell you anything, no matter how ridiculous, just to get you off of the phone. And the clincher is that sometimes when you call back, another rep will reveal some of the "notes" that previous reps make in your file, which in my case made it quite plain that the procedure that I had been told to go through was complete BS and that they never had any intention of solving my problem. And when I asked to speak to a manager, they hung up on me.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't obnoxious, rude, lying creeps in foreign-outsourced call centers as well (or that there aren't intelligent, helpful, easily understood people here in the States), but to date I've never run into any in my calls to India that were half as bad as some of the lowlifes that seem to be filling the desks at some U.S. based ones.
However this might not be a totally fair comparison, since most of the U.S. callcenters I've experienced were billing or pure "customer service," while the outsourced ones were mostly technical.
I can't offer an authoritative answer, but based on what I've heard, the situation is something like this: their bandwidth is fairly limited, since it's donated by UC Berkley; the Classic users really weren't doing any of the heavy lifting anymore, so this is something of a non-story, the transition has mostly already happened; therefore by closing down the Classic client they really don't lose anything and get back a big chunk of their limited bandwidth allowance.
The SETI@Home servers pretty regularly go down, whether for "scheduled" maintenance or just overload I'm not sure, but if this makes the system more reliable and up more often, I'm all for it.
Yes, there is. It took me a while to figure out, mostly because I didn't have any luck with the version that BOINC actually distributes. (I could get it running but there weren't any good instructions on setting up a daemon, which you need to do if you want Boinc to keep running after you disconnect and close your shell session.) Eventually I grabbed the Debian package from http://pkg-boinc.alioth.debian.org/ using apt-get, and it sets up the 'boincd' daemon to run the client and everything automatically. You attach/detach and monitor the status using the boinc_cmd program, which you can run as any user.
I have a few headless boxes sitting around that work as routers and backup servers, and are idle for over 99.9% of the time, and was able to install Boinc via the SSH commandline on all of them, once I discovered that someone had put together the package. There is a fairly decent mailing list for support, too.
If you use something that's not Debian-based, or not x86 architecture, good luck.
I prefer to think of the exorbitant price of ringtones as a sort of "stupid tax" on people who insist on using them and annoying everyone in their general vicinity. It's just a pity that you aren't charged by them per use, instead of just once to buy; if you did I'd at least have the small satisfaction of knowing that someone's wallet was taking a hit for my annoyance every time I hear one.
Seriously, I just wish they were more expensive so maybe there were less of them. And if having MP3s on cellphones is going to lead to obnoxious people playing them out of tinny cell-phone speakers in public places where I have to be exposed to them, then for the love of god, charge more than $2.50!
Slashdot Mirror
I've thought the same thing. I find it hard to believe that somebody, somewhere, hasn't already done it -- it seems like an obvious step to take if you wanted to run a bunch of thin clients without much disk storage.
/.) there aren't -- at least to my knowledge -- very many easy to use distros that let you do it out of the box. If somebody can prove me wrong on this I'd be pleased, since I've always been interested in playing around with thin-client stuff, but it's seemed rather daunting to get into.
For everything you hear about using old hardware as thin x-server clients to run applications remotely (which comes up pretty often here on
If somebody felt like putting together a bootable distro, suitable for low-end or old hardware, that would fit on a business-card CD or inexpensive USB flash drive, and do nothing but let the machine work as an x-server over a secure connection and run remote applications, I think there's a definite demand for it (especially if it had a matching "thick" server/x-client distro).
Although I'd love to break our dependence on foreign oil as much as the next person, I'm not sure that's going to be possible, even if you made a reusable catalyst that only cost a dollar and took raw corncobs in one end and spat 89-octane premium unleaded out the other. I've seen statistics that show that even if you took all the corn and soy and canola production on the N.American continent and used it for nothing but bio-fuel production -- no more corn or soy or canola based foods at all -- you wouldn't get more than 25% of our current transportation fuel demand. Maybe less. And if you retain the food usage that we have now (because otherwise you'd just be replacing everything that uses corn syrup right now with imported cane sugar anyway) and just use surplus farm capacity plus recycled oil, I think it's only about 10% of demand that could be filled.
I think the biggest potential for bio-diesel isn't using it as a straight fuel, but as an additive to regular diesel, to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Also, we need to keep working on catalysts to find other ways of replacing lighter fossil-fuels with renewable ones. In particular, I'm thinking of jet fuel and aviation gasoline: I don't know of anything that has the energy density to replace them (although I do think the Air Force experimented once with the idea of a nuclear powered plane), and we're going to really be stuck when we start to run out of petroleum if we haven't found a replacement for those products that come off higher up the cracking tower than diesel fuel.
The biggest problem with hydrogen is the distribution network. Biodiesel can be taken from refineries to the consumer using the current delivery systems, which are all designed around volatile liquid fuels. (Actually they'd be overkill for biodiesel, which isn't really even very volatile.) The only thing you'd need to do is keep it from getting cold, since the gel-point is much higher than gasoline or conventional diesel. This is nontrivial in higher climates, but it's still nothing compared to the problems that you'd have switching from a liquid to a compressed-gas fuel. Especially one that's tough to liquefy at high pressure like H2 -- you can't even use the same technology that you'd use for natural gas or propane.
Also, biodiesel is an honest-to-god energy SOURCE for transportation (okay, technically it's stored solar), but it doesn't require a massive manmade energy input like hydrogen does. The "hydrogen economy" people are talking about usually rests on one of two source options: either crack natural gas to make hydrogen, or use electricity (from fossil fuels or nuclear, because they're the only practical sources that produce enough power) to crack water.
Perhaps less importantly in the long view, but critical in the short term, is that biodiesel works in conventional reciprocating-piston, internal combustion engines without huge amounts of retooling, new development work, or restrictive patents or licensing. Pretty much any auto shop in the world can convert a diesel car to run on biodiesel, if there was a demand for it. And the production lines which make gasoline engines now could easily be changed over to making diesel ones with far more ease than they could make fuel cells or electric motors.
The difference between hydrogen and biodiesel is one of time-scale. Hydrogen is a good idea from a long-term perspective, where creating a new distribution network from scratch and scrapping every car and truck on the road can just be written off as "conversion difficulties", but in the short run they're deal-breakers. That's where biodiesel starts to look really good.
I think that if you engage in any of the various distributed computing projects, whether SETI or Einstein or anything else, there is an implicit assumption that the work being completed is worth the electricity being used and the fuel expended. In some cases this tradeoff is explicit, since people choose to leave their computers on all the time (or not go into sleep/low-power mode) and pay for the electricity, so they can do work on these projects.
I and many others apparently think it's worth the power; if you don't, that's your business, nobody makes you leave your system on.
I just read through the site and I don't think there's any evidence to show that the hypervisor that it's being speculated is used by the x360 is the same one that's been developed by IBM. The IBM one I believe is designed for large scale use on big iron, providing abstraction and security services to virtual machines; the xBox one is just to monitor the kernel for modifications and checksum the RAM against stored values in the processor. They seem so different in scope that I'm not sure it's a good assumption to think that they're the same thing, or that the MS one isn't just something they cooked up in-house. There doesn't seem to be any strong evidence that they're the same, and the Slashdot article link just seems to be something the author pulled out of Google.
Also, if you read on the Free60 documentation site, it's apparent that the factoids being discussed, including the only mention of the hypervisor, are being attributed to "someone on the IRC" -- not exactly a reputable source.
Yeah if there actually turned out to be even some semblance of support for it as an architecture, I'd probably pick one up just to play around with. I don't really have any desire to buy any games for it, but if I could get a development/hobby platform for under $400 (okay, add a case that doesn't suck) while at the same time sticking Microsoft for $125, I'm all over it.
What would be cool is if somebody would port the BOINC distributed computing client, and put together a bootable CD for xBox. If you know you're not going to be using your console for a while, just put the CD in and reboot it, and it crunches numbers until you're ready to play again. If you think of the numbers of game consoles that are sold, and the number of hours that they're probably used per day (after the initial fascination wears off), that's a lot of idle CPU time. Now that consoles are getting comparable to computers in power, and have network connections and attached disk storage, I don't think it's that ridiculous an idea.
... of the promotional material for the Sega Saturn from a few years back?
I remember right about the time it came out, there was a lot of hype about it's architecture. Two main processors and a bunch of dedicated co-processors, fast memory bus, etc., etc. I don't remember any more specifics, but at the time it seemed very impressive. Of course it flopped spectacularly, because apparently the thing was a huge pain in the ass to program for and the games never materialized. Or at least that's the most often spoken reason that I've heard.
Anyway, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to have realized this, Cell is starting to sound the same way. The technical side is being hyped and seems clearly leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, but one has to wonder what MS is doing to prevent themselves from producing another Saturn on the programming side.
I don't want to put words in the GP's mouth, but what he's saying seems to make sense to me. I don't think he was implying that Mono Lake is drying up because of anything to do with the Colorado River specifically; it's drying up because L.A. is diverting away water that would otherwise feed it. In a separate but related issue, L.A. is ALSO diverting a large portion (so he says) of the Colorado River. Two separate issues.
To say that L.A. is the only thing that Mono Lake and the Colorado River have in common seems perfectly in line with the sentence as written. They have nothing in common except they're both used as water supplies by Los Angeles -- since that's what the discussion is about, that's why they're both being mentioned together.
At least that's the way I read it.
What we need is a no-flush frictionless system. Or at least a low-flush low-friction system.
How would that work? Use a Teflon-coated toilet bowl?
It seems to me based on my experience that most clogs in toilets happen in the U-bend: this is where you need the most water (or highest velocity, anyway), to push the waste through this bottleneck and into the pipe. I don't think the problem there is friction-related as much as it's simply mechanical; it takes some velocity to force the waste around the 180-degree turn that a U-bend is, because often the waste is bigger or longer than the internal radius of the pipe, and you have to break up the waste to get it through. I'm not sure how lowering the friction inside the pipes would really change anything too much. If you don't have enough momentum to break up the waste, it's not going to go around the bend and you've created a clog.
Perhaps you'd like to elaborate on what you had in mind?
In regards to the Canadian water, my guess is that we'll "take" it from Canada in the same way we currently "take" their natural gas: in exchange for hard currency. Even if we in the U.S. were of a mind to drive the Army up there and steal it, there would have to be a water shortage of Apocalyptic proportions for that to be economical, and even then a water supply is an awfully easy thing to contaminate and render useless. Even in the most extreme scenario, I doubt any water will ever come across the border without those on the Northern side agreeing, and probably helping every step along the way.
OT:
Those of us in NorCal have been wishing we could do the same to LA.
Yeah, really. I've always thought that Northern California really got the shaft politically and in terms of taxation/welfare, and now they're taking your water and piping it down South? That's rough. I guess you guys could always try and pull a West Virginia, although I'm not sure how well it's worked out for them there in the long run.
Agreed; I was going to point this out but it's rarely worth arguing with people who think mandatory conservation will ever work, since they're generally quite detached from reality anyway. Schemes like that would be so unpopular and raise such public outrage in this country that they're nearly always a no-go from the start.
What does need to happen is that we need to have water rates that:
1. Accurately represent the entire cost of what is being used; perhaps including sewage treatment and water recycling, dam construction and maintenance, and other high-level infrastructure, either in the overhead/distribution flat fee, or the unit price per gallon,
2. Fluctuate depending on supply and demand: some water companies only bill bi-monthly, with pricing to match, and this means that customers aren't encouraged to tailor their usage to match supply, and
3. Equal rates for equal product delivered: business and industrial consumers shouldn't receive a discount on their consumption, except on the distribution/overhead charges (because it's a lot less piping to run one 4" line to a factory that consumes 1,000,000 gal/day than 1,000 small lines to homes that each consume 1,000 gal/day, the large users can fairly demand and should receive less of an overhead or "distribution surcharge," but the cost per gallon of water ought to be the same). This is probably the biggest issue, since I'd bet many major consumers are paying essentially subsidized rates for their water because of old agreements with utility companies.
The short-term effect of this might be to drive some water-dependent industries out of some areas, but this is really only a correction of behavior that shouldn't have existed if the market had been operating correctly. In the long run, water conservation will be encouraged in the same way that's most encouraged energy conservation: increasingly high utilities costs make the upfront investment in 'greener' facilities justifiable. It's just that for historical reasons, water supplies have always been insulated from having prices that represent the true cost of what's being delivered, especially in arid regions, and now we're seeing the consequences of that.
Exactly. Despite the opinions of many Californians I've met, the universe does not revolve solely around them, or their state. Water shortages are rarely an issue in the U.S., outside of California (and I suspect probably mostly only Southern California) and the Southwestern states -- the only exception being the odd seasonal shortage during a bad summer drought in other places, or if the water supply is contaminated for some reason.
In any event, this seems like an issue that should be dealt with on the local municipal level, and certainly not on a Federal one. There are no water shortages in my area, and I have no desire to switch to a different design of toilet that wouldn't have any advantage to me and would just mean a lot of additional complexity, and I would take a very dim view of any legislation that tried to force this. If people who choose to live in places essentially unsuited to human habitation have problems with their water supply, obviously their governments should address these issues. But it's not a universal problem, and it does no good to make it one artificially.
There are enough problems which affect the entire country that need to be dealt with; we should leave those that only affect certain regions to the levels of government closest to the problems to fix as they see fit.
Maybe you could program them with an OR condition: flush every 5 uses, or after 5 minutes of inactivity. That way if the toilet was being used continuously (say a whole line of guys using it one after the other) then it wouldn't flush after every use, but it wouldn't sit full of urine and stink for more than a few minutes after the last person was done, either.
Perhaps simpler, just program them with a longer delay-before-flush on the motion sensor. Instead of flushing as soon as the person steps back from the unit, as most of them do now, use a few second delay so that if another person moves into position to use it, it doesn't flush immediately. I don't think that many men would really be bothered by this, and it could potentially save a lot of water in locations where the usage comes in large surges (think restrooms at sports stadiums, concert halls, etc.).
Probably because until somebody came up with this application for microwaves, it was a solution looking for a problem. Sure, you could have made a microwave water heater any time between the invention of the microwave and today, but why would you want to? It's not like anyone really has a problem with resistance-coils; they're remarkably close to 100% efficient when submerged in the fluid you want to heat, and dead simple.
I still question their claim (which is their invention's raison d'être, as far as I can tell) that you can't heat water fast enough for an 'on demand' application with resistance coils, because it would take too much electricity. Heating water is heating water -- if you want to do it faster you use more coils, and thus more power, but the power required isn't necessarily any higher than what you'd need to do the same amount of work with a microwave emitter. It doesn't quite make sense to me.
Just think if they heated the water using a critical-sized lump of plutonium -- then it would both heat and irradiate your water! For maximum germ killing power. And it wouldn't just be 'on demand' hot water, it would be hot water all the time whether you want it or not.
Plus it would be emission free, and a great use of all those Soviet ICBM warhead initiators that are just sitting around, going to waste.
Just don't turn off the cold water supply....ever.
Oh hell yes it does. Have you ever had that thing fall on your foot?
I guess I won't be taking the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics anywhere near a Canon next time I want to copy a page out of it, either...
Yeah that's what I was thinking. If you bend your knees and your waist, you keep your center of gravity above your feet, so there's not any force on the copier at all. Of course to get that perfect "squashed ass" look, you'd need to apply some on purpose, but I'm sure you could ask people to use moderation.
I wonder what the best cleaner is to get ass grease off of copier glass... I feel like Windex might not be up to the task.
Actually, given that I'm not really in a 'buying mood' right now, I'd love to see some more interesting/exotic processors thrown into the mix. The one I'd really like to see are some SPARCs, although I don't think they'd do very well on the benchmarks that are being used (they seem to favor single-thread performance). But some big iron -- especially old big iron -- would be fun for comparison value. We always hear glib comparisons between modern desktop computers and the mainframes of the past, but I've never seen any hard evidence of how they would stack up.
... they even have gcc and GNU make installed, so I don't think it would be too hard to get the SPEC CPU benchmark series running on it, although I'm not sure whether to get the fairest score if you'd want to use the Cray-supplied optimized C and f77 compilers, instead of gcc.
I guess the place to start would be with these guys' Cray YMP
Somebody has to have done this before... but searching on the spec.org site didn't turn up anything for Cray.
I used to have oil heat but with the price of petroleum, now I just use SETI@Home.
At some helpdesks I've talked to, they solve this problem by having the transferring person do a 3-way call, get the other person on the line, and then hang up only after rep #2 is on. So at no point (after the first person picks up) are you ever not connected to a person. This way, if the person that you're being transferred to isn't in, you're not just left there.
Granted, the system that I've used which was like this was my (very large) company's internal IT helpdesk; I doubt that any company would bother to go even this far for external customers. Most large companies think of their customers as organisms somewhere between slime mold and cattle, at treat them appropriately.
I'm not sure about UPS, but at least on Amtrak's and several other voice-controlled menu systems, you can say "Operator" at almost anytime and be directed to a human. That's what I do every time I call -- as soon as I hear that "Hi, I'm [insert name], [insert company]'s automated agent!" I just start saying "I want to talk to an operator" over and over. Usually I get one pretty quickly.
I've actually gotten to prefer the voice agent systems more than the standard button-pushing ones, just because they're more easily broken out of. However if this "loophole" gets closed off, I could really get to hate them.
Yeah, I agree with this. While I'm not necessarily a fan of the whole third-world-outsourcing phenomenon in general, just because you get someone in a call center in Calcutta or Bangalore doesn't mean that the service is going to be any worse than it would if you got someone in America. And based on my experience, their English is often better, and they're loads more polite.
My latest experience was with Comcast, which does have a U.S.-based call center, and I found the reps to be obnoxious, rude, and prone to lie through their teeth. They seem to be trained to tell you anything, no matter how ridiculous, just to get you off of the phone. And the clincher is that sometimes when you call back, another rep will reveal some of the "notes" that previous reps make in your file, which in my case made it quite plain that the procedure that I had been told to go through was complete BS and that they never had any intention of solving my problem. And when I asked to speak to a manager, they hung up on me.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't obnoxious, rude, lying creeps in foreign-outsourced call centers as well (or that there aren't intelligent, helpful, easily understood people here in the States), but to date I've never run into any in my calls to India that were half as bad as some of the lowlifes that seem to be filling the desks at some U.S. based ones.
However this might not be a totally fair comparison, since most of the U.S. callcenters I've experienced were billing or pure "customer service," while the outsourced ones were mostly technical.
I can't offer an authoritative answer, but based on what I've heard, the situation is something like this: their bandwidth is fairly limited, since it's donated by UC Berkley; the Classic users really weren't doing any of the heavy lifting anymore, so this is something of a non-story, the transition has mostly already happened; therefore by closing down the Classic client they really don't lose anything and get back a big chunk of their limited bandwidth allowance.
The SETI@Home servers pretty regularly go down, whether for "scheduled" maintenance or just overload I'm not sure, but if this makes the system more reliable and up more often, I'm all for it.
Yes, there is. It took me a while to figure out, mostly because I didn't have any luck with the version that BOINC actually distributes. (I could get it running but there weren't any good instructions on setting up a daemon, which you need to do if you want Boinc to keep running after you disconnect and close your shell session.) Eventually I grabbed the Debian package from http://pkg-boinc.alioth.debian.org/ using apt-get, and it sets up the 'boincd' daemon to run the client and everything automatically. You attach/detach and monitor the status using the boinc_cmd program, which you can run as any user.
I have a few headless boxes sitting around that work as routers and backup servers, and are idle for over 99.9% of the time, and was able to install Boinc via the SSH commandline on all of them, once I discovered that someone had put together the package. There is a fairly decent mailing list for support, too.
If you use something that's not Debian-based, or not x86 architecture, good luck.
I prefer to think of the exorbitant price of ringtones as a sort of "stupid tax" on people who insist on using them and annoying everyone in their general vicinity. It's just a pity that you aren't charged by them per use, instead of just once to buy; if you did I'd at least have the small satisfaction of knowing that someone's wallet was taking a hit for my annoyance every time I hear one.
Seriously, I just wish they were more expensive so maybe there were less of them. And if having MP3s on cellphones is going to lead to obnoxious people playing them out of tinny cell-phone speakers in public places where I have to be exposed to them, then for the love of god, charge more than $2.50!