Somehow, judging by a lot of the comments, the words “Separate but equal...” just flew right by you guys. His use of the phrase is, I feel, worthy of note and discussion. Also, without Congressional action, this is going to go precisely nowhere. Might as well call it FETCH, cuz it is not going to happen.
If a conclusion was guards are naturally assholes, but it turns out that in the instructions, they were TOLD to be assholes, then I would say that the conclusion was invalid, since the researcher put not only his thumb, but his whole upper body weight on, and tipped the hell out of, the scales. It begs the question, of course: what else was bullshit about that so-called study, or rather, massive fraud perpetrated upon the academic community and the world?
Samsung is leading the way in renewables... like, for example, when it recycles Appleâ(TM)s designerâ(TM)s ideas! (Come to think of it, didnâ(TM)t Apple also announce they were doing this... earlier?) Do fresh ideas contribute to carbon pollution or something? Remember the side by side photo of the iPhone 3g and the thing Samsung made, that was, IIRC, the same size, shape, and general appearance, but with a rounded-rectangle-shaped home button, instead of a round one? Like that.
I haven't used a cell phone since 2010. You don't need one. All it is, is a tracking device for the cops.
Nathan
It’s funny you should say that because it’s not the first time I’ve heard that expressed, and I’m sure you were either being facetious or hyperbolic, but I have had and used smartphones for a while... I have yet to have the cops... ANY cop, in fact, demand to see or take mine, and I used it for about fifty things just yesterday, which woild seem to be a counter to your charge that it’s only a “tracking device for the cops. Yesterday I... listened to music stored on the phone, downloaded and listened to a podcast, surfed the web extensively, including/., as it happens. I used it to see how many steps I’d taken so far, checked my bank balance, made a (brace yourselves, folks,) PHONE CALL... cancelled and rescheduled an appointment, played solitaire, made a note to myself, checked the time at least twice, used the onboard timer, (could also have used the alarm clock, but being truthful, in this case, I did not, in fact do that, nor use the stopwatch or world clock, though could have,) asked how to spell a word I couldn’t recall how to spell, logged what I ate, (or rather, most of it,) used it as a flashlight, and COULD have taken pics with it, but did not... again, this kind of belies your assertion that it’s norhing more than an electronic leash. Just saying.
And what would the cops do if I just stopped USING my iPhone, didn't carry it, or... hell, didn't even HAVE one?!? NOW WHAT? HUH?!? NOW how are you going to break into it and root around in it, if I don't HAVE ONE?!? HUH?!?
That is obstruction of justice and resisting arrest.
Just for fun, is not actually committing any crime whatsoever classifiable under our new dystopian oligarchy as obstruction and resisting arrest?
And what would the cops do if I just stopped USING my iPhone, didn't carry it, or... hell, didn't even HAVE one?!? NOW WHAT? HUH?!? NOW how are you going to break into it and root around in it, if I don't HAVE ONE?!? HUH?!?
CHECK, AND MATE, COPPERS!
(LOL... like I could really live without this damned thing...)
Use quarters. They are easy to buy and sell and you can launder them with soap and water.
While cleaning coins does not (up to the point where they are unrecognizable) alter their face-value, it does reduce their numismatic value, and every coin collector and dealer, as well as every publication I've ever seen on the subject, strongly disrecommends doing so. For example...
The notion, espoused by some, that this will help envisions an internet in which everything everyone does is indelibly stamped with the ID of whoever said it, requested it, bought it, etc., as if that will make the realm of online, digital reality akin to real life. BUT in order for THAT to be true, you would need a society in which you walk around with a shirt, a hat, and pants anywhere you go, emblazoned with your serial number, so that the cameras, or anyone with a notepad can record everything you say and do. Nowhere on Earth has seen a whole nation-state get THAT bad, that INSANE with the progress of their surveillance state, except maybe North Korea, and that is just speculation. The idea would make online or digital interactions even LESS free, more restrictive than real life, and for WHAT?!? So people will not get their feelings hurt? So no one will be able to say mean things online? The cure here looks far worse than the disease.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but it needs to be pointed out...
If how you vote can be swayed by some bullshit you see on Facebook... you probably shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway. Now this begs the question, "who decides who is allowed to vote?" and that is, of course, the $64,000 question, isn't it? How does one verify if someone HAS a Facebook account? Seems simple. Announce anyone with a Facebook page will be allowed to cast their votes for local, state, and federal offices, right there ON Facebook. Then those people are saved the trouble of having to come OUT on election day, wait in line, and cast votes, and have their votes actually COUNT. It would be a great way to get people incapable of thinking to self-select their voices and their votes to be routed to/dev/null on the way to be counted. This may make you mad, of course, if you use Facebook, but let's face it. Wouldn't you rather be on Facebook right now? Wouldn't you rather be clicking on links and watching your "friends" videos and reading their stupid meems or meams or memes or whatever, on Facebook right now? Why not click on the address bar, and type "facebook" right now, and go hang out there, where you won't be exposed to ideas you disagree with? Facebook facebook facebook, friend facebook friend facebook book face. Face?
Are they gone? Good. Now...
The fact that people HAVE in the past tried to prevent people voting based on their race, their religion, their opinions, etc., has made it difficult for a democracy to exist, and have a legitimate claim to BEING a democracy, and yet a lot of people are NOT allowed to vote anyway, in the United States. Like convicted criminals. Somehow, some morons decided to disenfranchise people for being convicted of certain crimes and sent to jail, and the court system let that stand, (which they should NOT have,) since it is sadly true that not everyone convicted of any crime actually COMMITTED that crime, and sure as fuck it is NOT the case that ALL people who commit crimes are expeditiously caught, convicted, and locked up. MANY walk free, and shockingly, or perhaps sadly, it is often the greatest and most heinous crimes that go unpunished. Corruption is the cancer killing our civilization. Courts are too busy worrying about nonviolent and victimless "crimes" to be concerned about real ones, with real, actual victims.
If modern America is anything, it's an indictment of the very idea of democracy itself. You give people power without responsibility, and... well, this is what you get. Sickening as this idea is, I'm wondering if Bre-entry is a possibility at this point. If enough Americans start drinking tea, ditch the coffee, apologize for the revolution, agree to start misspelling things again, like litre and metre, and colour, and ask with a properly stuffy and British accent, do you think they'd take us back?
You've abused your modpoint privileges and I hope they get taken away from you. THAT post wasn't flaimbait, dipshit. THIS one may be, sure. But THAT one was not. Too bad there's no system (or is there one?) for reporting inappropriate moderation.
Either you clicked the wrong one, (in which case you're incompetent,) or you don't know what "flaimbait" means, in either case, you should not be allowed modpoints. There was nothing deliberately inflamatory in this post, and it should have been moderated either +1, Interesting... +1, Insightful, or perhaps +1, Underrated.
No reasonable person would read that post and say, "Oh, man... he's trying to start a flameware!" Only a fool would conclude that. Does anyone know how to fix this? Because this is kind of bullshit right here.
To the thoughtless asshole who modded this flaimbait: instead of abusing your moderation privileges, why not reply like a fucking adult, and actually address the points I brought up, instead of trying to supress what I said? Are you involved in the research, in which case you have a conflict of interest and shouldn't be moderating discussions ABOUT the research in the first place, in which case you're unethical and shouldn't be allowed mod points? Or are you a childish asshole who mods things down because someone was mean to you and you just couldn't handle it?
See, THIS post could be viewed as flaimbait. It's not, it's a legitimate gripe about some idiot abusing his mod points, but I'm sure it will be modded down too.
This begs the question why I am wasting my time venting about this trivial injustice, but the same could be asked about why I wrote the original post, or even look at slashdot. And it's a good question. Some people play video games. Some people read slashdot. Neither's really a productive activity, but that doesn't mean much in the end, since given the ultimate futility of life itself, there's really no such thing as a productive activity. I come here because it's a slightly more intellectual activity than... well, some things.
Based on the description, this is a waste of money. PAYING people to be confined in such conditions?!? Ordinarily, people PAY to be confined to such conditions; why not just send the researchers on an ocean-going cruise ship? The cost would probably be the same as they're proposing to pay, per person, but instead of paying them, they'd only have to pay the cruise-line for the people they actually send.
Probably be more fun for everyone involved, and they'd likely get the same results.
famous artists and wealthy corporations will benefit greatly while the public will get absolutely nothing in return
They're the ones who buy your "elected" officials, so of COURSE they're the ones who benefit, and you who have been DUPED into voting these corrupt, bought-and-paid-for assholes into office, you of course get nothing, which is what you deserve, for voting these Republicrats into office, despite the obvious fact that BOTH halves of the "two" part"ies" are owned by the same group of people. Let me quote Willie Wonka:
"It's all there, in black and white, clear as crystal. You get NOTHING. You LOSE! Good DAY, sir." Or watch here...
Next time, instead of voting for a phony "Democrat" or a corrupt "Republican," consider voting for a REAL candidate for office, not one of these puppets of the super-rich and corporations.
My point is that your point is irrelevant because you can not cool something below ambient (let alone quickly) without suffering inefficiencies. So you will always use more energy to cool something than it will dissipate if it cools naturally.
So the ocean may warm up but less than if it was cooling the power station used to drive aircon.
20x? Depends how much of the power station, fuel mining, transportation, transmission infrastructure (and associated mining, transportation, manufacturing), power conversion, aircon efficiency (and manufacture, Inc. mining, trans.. etc) and severe other uses of energy that you want to allocate as part of calculating it.
I haven't run the maths. I don't need to. My point stands anyway, and proves the flaw in your own.
No it doesn't, especially when you haven't done the math. Suggesting or implying I have to do your math for you undermines your argument. Come back with math complete and we'll talk. P.S., why do you think using seawater magically undoes the reality of having to expend energy to cool something to below ambient? Why would you imagine seawater has some magical property of heat elimination that air does not? Sure it's denser, and thermally more efficient, but as your "datacenter" heats the water around it, the heat doesn't just magically disperse instantly, and as the water around it warms, this will reduce the efficiency with which this thing can dump its heat, requiring either that the target for how cool it's kept has to be adjusted (up) or that it be built with a really BIG heatsink to increase the contact between it and the water. Oh, and what about the cost of mining all that metal you need for that heatsink? Or are you planning on building a fan into yours, or a propeller, or an impeller, and forcing water through it, in which case, where does the energy come from to do that?
Simply asserting that you've "won" without presenting evidence in an argument does not make the point of someone you disagree with go away. But I'm done trying to educate you. My argument doesn't have a "flaw" which you've "proven". My argument (perhaps maybe you've forgotten) was that relocating the thing that is dumping heat to be closer to a place that can absorb large amounts of it will turn out to be bad for the environment and people who depend on it, especially if it turns out to be technically feasible and economically viable, because everyone will start doing it, and there will be tons of these damned things, everywhere, concentrating heat in places where that heat will cause changes I'm confident, without breaking into their offices and looking, they haven't fully investigated because if they HAD, they might have learned something they will get sued for having known BEFORE they did it.
Good (for-profit) corporations are great at not finding out what they suspect their executives may not be able to buy their way out of trouble for knowing at the time down the line.
What they're planning to do is likely hazardous to the things that live where they're planning to do it, it's being done in a place no human knows enough about to do this safely, as the seas and oceans are inadequately explored or understood, they're vast systems existing in delicate balances in probably a hundred different ways, but it will help their bottom line as a corporation, so they don't care about little things like, what they're doing potentially devastating others, because they live for the here and now. "Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead" only means what it does because the moron who said it got lucky and most of his boats didn't sink that particular day. If they had, the saying would have the more appropriate meaning, being an expression of hubris that gets other people hurt or killed because of disregarding the consequences.
Perhaps the takeaway from this should not be people arguing about the technical points when neither knows anything about them, but that a way needs to be found to make enviro
So this is a story about TWO bills about Quantum Computing coming before the US Congress, and NO jokes so far relating to quantum theory, quantum mechanics, the bills being quantum entangled with each other, nothing suggesting we are able to know the way one bill will be voted on, even if deliberations are held in closed session, merely by observing the state of the other despite the distance between them... what HAPPENED to you, SLASHDOT?!? There should be like, fifty jokes about this so far! FIFTY! This has been here for... minutes and minutes! WTF? Come ON, guys! Up the GAME! This is like a politician's sex scandal and you write jokes for late night television show hosts! They practically write themselves! I'm no comedian, and I've already come up with like, THREE! Let's GO!
I need to dispel 10 million BTUs. Do I:
1 - let the sea absorb it
2 - create 200 million BTUs in wasted frictional energy to provide the cooling needed to dispel it
Forget the pollution, the greenhouse effects; the efficiency savings alone make this a more sensible idea.
I need to dispel 10 million BTUs.
Need to, or want to? I think we should examine this bare assertion a little more closely. Also... do you really think cooling something takes 20 times more power than the thing itself? If you have a thousand watts (1000 W, or 1kW) being used and radiated as heat into the space inside your home from electrical devices running, chugging away, doing their things, and your house is (otherwise) at equilibrium with the outside air, thermally, do you really think it's going to take 20 KILOWATTS to cool your home?!?
If that's the typical performance you've been seeing, you may need to check your filters, because they may have been surreptitiously replaced with solid blocks of wood... or maybe call the HVAC people, and have the system as a whole checked, because it's not supposed to take that much power to do that. Hell, I'm not sure it should take that much to HEAT the place in the dead of a very cold winter. Perhaps consider having the place insulated? LOL
Seriously though, my point was mainly that they're monkeying with things they don't understand, in the name of corporate profits, and when that's what you're concerned about, corporate profits, anything that gets in the way that you can pretend doesn't exist, is going to be treated like... well, like it doesn't exist. Sadly, things don't just cease to exist because they're inconvenient.
hahaha, you know all the power consumed by human civilization, if converted to heat and dumped in the ocean, woul not make an iota of difference compared to the sun. Even the natural variation in solar output totally dwarfs the heat output of mankind. We do NOT have a mans-waste-heat-warming-the-earth problem.
Pollutions making gases that trap a bit more SOLAR heat, pollution darkening ice and snow to trap more SOLAR heat...yes, those might be a problem.
Okay, first, all the power consumeD (past tense) that you're talking about, assuming you're right... but what about 50 years from now, when 95% of human activity is farming cryptocurrency, and there are like, a million computing devices per person...? (Just a guess, I confess, but it seems logical.)
But again, we can't forget the issue where you can't just assume that after dumping heat in ONE location, it will, completely safely, disperse throughout the system, without impacting all that lives in that place. When a chemical plant dumps its toxic sludge in a river, and that river drains to the ocean, and you say, a few million barrels of MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) in 10^18 gallons (or whatever) of ocean is not going to even be noticeable, not even detectable, but what about the 500 miles of river between where it's dumped and the ocean? And what if it's not MEK but unrefined crude tarsands oil?
Without (admittedly) looking too far into the details of this plan, I'll bet there's a really good reason they're trying to do this far, FAR away from whatever is LEFT at this point, of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and its ability to regulate shenanigans like this, and fine the fuck out of Microsoft if they turn out to need to be fined, when this ends up going horribly, terribly wrong. Or maybe it's because this experiment might save them money, and they need to do it far away from the IRS's taxing authority, through some chain of subsidiaries and shell companies so they can pretend they didn't profit... but I'm guessing it's more the environmental thing, though I suppose it COULD be both. Or maybe Microsoft just LOOOVVVESSS them some fresh, North Scottish islands fish, and want to go do this where it's freshest? I'm thinking though that it's the lack of rules or taxes thing.
>> so the layer where this thing hangs out is going to end up hotter...with probably far-ranging consequences for marine ecology,
Yep agreed. But if undersea volcanic activity is anything to go by, actually more life will live and thrive there.
> This is potentially going to end up being next-level bad,
I truly doubt that one small server box could make any real difference to ambient sea temperature more than a handful of feet away, even if it tried. If this experiment starts a trend where companies like Microsoft and Google that have big server farms start moving all their servers underwater, then maybe you'll start to have an actual point.
The difference between this and volcanic activity is important. First, in the case of volcanism, raw materials, nutrients, chemicals, are being added to the system, whereas with the data center, all that's being added is heat. That would be like if the strength of the sun's rays suddenly doubled. Yes, some plants would LOVE that, but many would just get COOKED. Those who can handle the extra light and heat would slowly take over niches previously occupied by those who could not take the heat, but that's kind of the point. What is currently arable farmland would become arid desert, and all the people (and all the animals) who depend on certain plant species being in certain abundance in certain specific locations are simply screwed, and are going to die... or at least adapt to a new reality, VERY rapidly, which often historically has been the death-knell of whole populations of organisms.
As for the other point, did you read all the way to the end of the sentence you were replying to, where I made the exact point you posited that I would have to be making in order to have a point? Because that's exactly what I said, oddly enough. This becomes next-level bad COMMA... especially if it seems successful and free of problems, because then EVERYONE will do it [...] etc. I don't usually quote myself but... here it seemed appropriate. That had been the point I was trying to convey. One is not a big deal. It is when there are thousands, millions, causing subtle (and later not so subtle) shifts in WHERE in the ocean one may find certain water temperatures, that we run into problems. Fish and other aquatic or marine organisms don't share our ability to live comfortably in places where ambient temps range by nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. We have clothing, fire, air conditioning, paint... and water is something like 40 or 80 (I forget) times more thermally conductive than air, meaning that if you take an entire region of water and jack the temps up a degree or two, (yes, I'm aware that in quintillions of gallons of sea water, that requires immense power,) it ends up forcing the entire population to live elsewhere, either rising a few meters or falling, and any that can't handle that change, and all the attendant other changes that result, are SCREWED .
Imagine if there were a region of the sea the size of the continental United States, on the sea floor, relatively flat, at a depth of 50 meters. Crawling along the bottom are trillions, maybe quadrillions of individual life forms necessary for the health and ecology of the region, who fix in some way, the chemistry of the water, consuming dead fallen fish, whales, etc., and releasing the sulfur, nitrogen, etc., back into the sea that ends up being needed for all the life that swims above it. Then something happens and the water gets ever so slightly hotter. The temperature there has been nearly constant for lets' say, 700 million years, varying by only a 10th of a degree F. in all that while, and with pressure that is similarly, almost constant. Then suddenly, over a few years or decades, the temp goes up by a half a degree or a degree. The whole sea needn't necessarily increase by that much, due to the effect of layering of water. (I was myself surprised to learn about this kind of thing. He
Unless 100% of the power used by this kind of data center is renewable, this is like sweeping dirt under the rug. Sure, you’ve dealt with the problem of unsightly dirt on the floor, but at the end of the day the dirt is still there in the room. While dumping the heat from this thing into the vast ocean might seem like a good way to get rid of the heat, the heat remains in the system. Further, layers of ocean water do NOT mix to the point of homogeneity, so the layer where this thing hangs out is going to end up hotter by however much waste heat this thing dumps, with probably far-ranging consequences for marine ecology, changes to ecosystems we depend on to work, the possibility of mass-dyings of populations of plants, animals, fungi, changes in susceptibility to viruses by microbes without which we would all die, etc. etc. etc. according to the Law of Unintended Consequences, which states when you mess with something you can’t possibly know enough about to control all results from your messing, things you have no way of anticipating, often bad, end up happening, and of course the more widely known Murphy’s Law, which states when you sink a data center to save money on discharging heat, something will inevitably go wrong.
What, you ask? Whatever can. This is potentially going to end up being next-level bad, especially if it seems successful and free of problems, because then EVERYONE will do it, just like dumping all manner of crap into the air, imagining the environment had infinite capacity to cleanse our filth, and we wouldn’t all end up inhaling it and developing cancer, as people have. Also, yes, I know sea != ocean, but waters flow from one to the other in most instances, so the point stands.
My only hope in all this is that someone does us all the giant favor of coming along and stealing the damned thing, or cutting their cables. Rather than trying to make cooling (and thereby operations cheaper, assuring even more of these heating devices will be made, they should work instead on making them more thermally efficient, denecessitating all the efforts at cooling. Yes, I’m aware I’ve contributed to the problem by using an internet connected device, but not as much as they stand to contribute to the problem by cooking the fish while they’re still IN THE OCEAN.
I like how you try to portrait people who absolutely hate Microsoft as "emotional and irrational". Hating Microsoft is rational. It's a sign that you've been keeping up. Fuck, if you had behaved in real life the way Microsoft has, you'd have lost your teeth several times over, and be in prison for the rest of your life.
No, "phantomfive", there is nothing irrational about hating Microsoft. The irrational one is you, who are defending a known criminal, toxic and destructive entity and spit on their victims and those who actually remembers their crimes.
Just go fuck yourself, you retarded, smug shill.
God damn it.... where are my mod points when I really need them? +5 INSIGHTFUL!
Oh, you mean that feature my lowly Fitbit has literally had FOR YEARS?!? Good for Apple. Next they will add a stopwatch function and invent dual time, a breathtakingly revolutionary feature that allows an iWatch user to see a watchface display indicating an arbitrary time offset determined by the user. Wooooowwww.... feh. Apple. Did they... take this opportunity to update or refresh the archaic, obsolete waste-of-money that is the MacMini, that those assholes claim is still an important part of theMac lineup? Noooo.... of course not. But, you can now make your face into a cartoon emoticon. LIKE, I am sooo IMPRESSED. Dude, I am SOOO rushing out and buying two of everything Apple makes!
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, judging by a lot of the comments, the words “Separate but equal...” just flew right by you guys. His use of the phrase is, I feel, worthy of note and discussion. Also, without Congressional action, this is going to go precisely nowhere. Might as well call it FETCH, cuz it is not going to happen.
If a conclusion was guards are naturally assholes, but it turns out that in the instructions, they were TOLD to be assholes, then I would say that the conclusion was invalid, since the researcher put not only his thumb, but his whole upper body weight on, and tipped the hell out of, the scales. It begs the question, of course: what else was bullshit about that so-called study, or rather, massive fraud perpetrated upon the academic community and the world?
Perhaps they omitted the word -square-? Just guessing.
Samsung is leading the way in renewables... like, for example, when it recycles Appleâ(TM)s designerâ(TM)s ideas! (Come to think of it, didnâ(TM)t Apple also announce they were doing this... earlier?) Do fresh ideas contribute to carbon pollution or something? Remember the side by side photo of the iPhone 3g and the thing Samsung made, that was, IIRC, the same size, shape, and general appearance, but with a rounded-rectangle-shaped home button, instead of a round one? Like that.
I haven't used a cell phone since 2010. You don't need one. All it is, is a tracking device for the cops.
Nathan
It’s funny you should say that because it’s not the first time I’ve heard that expressed, and I’m sure you were either being facetious or hyperbolic, but I have had and used smartphones for a while... I have yet to have the cops... ANY cop, in fact, demand to see or take mine, and I used it for about fifty things just yesterday, which woild seem to be a counter to your charge that it’s only a “tracking device for the cops. Yesterday I... listened to music stored on the phone, downloaded and listened to a podcast, surfed the web extensively, including /., as it happens. I used it to see how many steps I’d taken so far, checked my bank balance, made a (brace yourselves, folks,) PHONE CALL... cancelled and rescheduled an appointment, played solitaire, made a note to myself, checked the time at least twice, used the onboard timer, (could also have used the alarm clock, but being truthful, in this case, I did not, in fact do that, nor use the stopwatch or world clock, though could have,) asked how to spell a word I couldn’t recall how to spell, logged what I ate, (or rather, most of it,) used it as a flashlight, and COULD have taken pics with it, but did not... again, this kind of belies your assertion that it’s norhing more than an electronic leash. Just saying.
And what would the cops do if I just stopped USING my iPhone, didn't carry it, or... hell, didn't even HAVE one?!? NOW WHAT? HUH?!? NOW how are you going to break into it and root around in it, if I don't HAVE ONE?!? HUH?!?
That is obstruction of justice and resisting arrest.
Just for fun, is not actually committing any crime whatsoever classifiable under our new dystopian oligarchy as obstruction and resisting arrest?
And what would the cops do if I just stopped USING my iPhone, didn't carry it, or... hell, didn't even HAVE one?!? NOW WHAT? HUH?!? NOW how are you going to break into it and root around in it, if I don't HAVE ONE?!? HUH?!?
CHECK, AND MATE, COPPERS!
(LOL... like I could really live without this damned thing...)
Use quarters. They are easy to buy and sell and you can launder them with soap and water.
While cleaning coins does not (up to the point where they are unrecognizable) alter their face-value, it does reduce their numismatic value, and every coin collector and dealer, as well as every publication I've ever seen on the subject, strongly disrecommends doing so. For example...
The notion, espoused by some, that this will help envisions an internet in which everything everyone does is indelibly stamped with the ID of whoever said it, requested it, bought it, etc., as if that will make the realm of online, digital reality akin to real life. BUT in order for THAT to be true, you would need a society in which you walk around with a shirt, a hat, and pants anywhere you go, emblazoned with your serial number, so that the cameras, or anyone with a notepad can record everything you say and do. Nowhere on Earth has seen a whole nation-state get THAT bad, that INSANE with the progress of their surveillance state, except maybe North Korea, and that is just speculation. The idea would make online or digital interactions even LESS free, more restrictive than real life, and for WHAT?!? So people will not get their feelings hurt? So no one will be able to say mean things online? The cure here looks far worse than the disease.
...and the story it is in response to somehow is not? You're a strange one, slashdot.
One way or another, I have a sneaking suspicion he'll be the last, "businessman" to be "elected" to be "president" of the "United" States.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but it needs to be pointed out...
/dev/null on the way to be counted. This may make you mad, of course, if you use Facebook, but let's face it. Wouldn't you rather be on Facebook right now? Wouldn't you rather be clicking on links and watching your "friends" videos and reading their stupid meems or meams or memes or whatever, on Facebook right now? Why not click on the address bar, and type "facebook" right now, and go hang out there, where you won't be exposed to ideas you disagree with? Facebook facebook facebook, friend facebook friend facebook book face. Face?
If how you vote can be swayed by some bullshit you see on Facebook... you probably shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway. Now this begs the question, "who decides who is allowed to vote?" and that is, of course, the $64,000 question, isn't it? How does one verify if someone HAS a Facebook account? Seems simple. Announce anyone with a Facebook page will be allowed to cast their votes for local, state, and federal offices, right there ON Facebook. Then those people are saved the trouble of having to come OUT on election day, wait in line, and cast votes, and have their votes actually COUNT. It would be a great way to get people incapable of thinking to self-select their voices and their votes to be routed to
Are they gone? Good. Now...
The fact that people HAVE in the past tried to prevent people voting based on their race, their religion, their opinions, etc., has made it difficult for a democracy to exist, and have a legitimate claim to BEING a democracy, and yet a lot of people are NOT allowed to vote anyway, in the United States. Like convicted criminals. Somehow, some morons decided to disenfranchise people for being convicted of certain crimes and sent to jail, and the court system let that stand, (which they should NOT have,) since it is sadly true that not everyone convicted of any crime actually COMMITTED that crime, and sure as fuck it is NOT the case that ALL people who commit crimes are expeditiously caught, convicted, and locked up. MANY walk free, and shockingly, or perhaps sadly, it is often the greatest and most heinous crimes that go unpunished. Corruption is the cancer killing our civilization. Courts are too busy worrying about nonviolent and victimless "crimes" to be concerned about real ones, with real, actual victims.
If modern America is anything, it's an indictment of the very idea of democracy itself. You give people power without responsibility, and... well, this is what you get. Sickening as this idea is, I'm wondering if Bre-entry is a possibility at this point. If enough Americans start drinking tea, ditch the coffee, apologize for the revolution, agree to start misspelling things again, like litre and metre, and colour, and ask with a properly stuffy and British accent, do you think they'd take us back?
You've abused your modpoint privileges and I hope they get taken away from you. THAT post wasn't flaimbait, dipshit. THIS one may be, sure. But THAT one was not. Too bad there's no system (or is there one?) for reporting inappropriate moderation.
Either you clicked the wrong one, (in which case you're incompetent,) or you don't know what "flaimbait" means, in either case, you should not be allowed modpoints. There was nothing deliberately inflamatory in this post, and it should have been moderated either +1, Interesting... +1, Insightful, or perhaps +1, Underrated.
No reasonable person would read that post and say, "Oh, man... he's trying to start a flameware!" Only a fool would conclude that. Does anyone know how to fix this? Because this is kind of bullshit right here.
To the thoughtless asshole who modded this flaimbait: instead of abusing your moderation privileges, why not reply like a fucking adult, and actually address the points I brought up, instead of trying to supress what I said? Are you involved in the research, in which case you have a conflict of interest and shouldn't be moderating discussions ABOUT the research in the first place, in which case you're unethical and shouldn't be allowed mod points? Or are you a childish asshole who mods things down because someone was mean to you and you just couldn't handle it?
See, THIS post could be viewed as flaimbait. It's not, it's a legitimate gripe about some idiot abusing his mod points, but I'm sure it will be modded down too.
This begs the question why I am wasting my time venting about this trivial injustice, but the same could be asked about why I wrote the original post, or even look at slashdot. And it's a good question. Some people play video games. Some people read slashdot. Neither's really a productive activity, but that doesn't mean much in the end, since given the ultimate futility of life itself, there's really no such thing as a productive activity. I come here because it's a slightly more intellectual activity than... well, some things.
Based on the description, this is a waste of money. PAYING people to be confined in such conditions?!? Ordinarily, people PAY to be confined to such conditions; why not just send the researchers on an ocean-going cruise ship? The cost would probably be the same as they're proposing to pay, per person, but instead of paying them, they'd only have to pay the cruise-line for the people they actually send.
Probably be more fun for everyone involved, and they'd likely get the same results.
famous artists and wealthy corporations will benefit greatly while the public will get absolutely nothing in return
They're the ones who buy your "elected" officials, so of COURSE they're the ones who benefit, and you who have been DUPED into voting these corrupt, bought-and-paid-for assholes into office, you of course get nothing, which is what you deserve, for voting these Republicrats into office, despite the obvious fact that BOTH halves of the "two" part"ies" are owned by the same group of people. Let me quote Willie Wonka:
"It's all there, in black and white, clear as crystal. You get NOTHING. You LOSE! Good DAY, sir." Or watch here...
Next time, instead of voting for a phony "Democrat" or a corrupt "Republican," consider voting for a REAL candidate for office, not one of these puppets of the super-rich and corporations.
My point is that your point is irrelevant because you can not cool something below ambient (let alone quickly) without suffering inefficiencies. So you will always use more energy to cool something than it will dissipate if it cools naturally.
So the ocean may warm up but less than if it was cooling the power station used to drive aircon.
20x? Depends how much of the power station, fuel mining, transportation, transmission infrastructure (and associated mining, transportation, manufacturing), power conversion, aircon efficiency (and manufacture, Inc. mining, trans.. etc) and severe other uses of energy that you want to allocate as part of calculating it.
I haven't run the maths. I don't need to. My point stands anyway, and proves the flaw in your own.
No it doesn't, especially when you haven't done the math. Suggesting or implying I have to do your math for you undermines your argument. Come back with math complete and we'll talk. P.S., why do you think using seawater magically undoes the reality of having to expend energy to cool something to below ambient? Why would you imagine seawater has some magical property of heat elimination that air does not? Sure it's denser, and thermally more efficient, but as your "datacenter" heats the water around it, the heat doesn't just magically disperse instantly, and as the water around it warms, this will reduce the efficiency with which this thing can dump its heat, requiring either that the target for how cool it's kept has to be adjusted (up) or that it be built with a really BIG heatsink to increase the contact between it and the water. Oh, and what about the cost of mining all that metal you need for that heatsink? Or are you planning on building a fan into yours, or a propeller, or an impeller, and forcing water through it, in which case, where does the energy come from to do that?
Simply asserting that you've "won" without presenting evidence in an argument does not make the point of someone you disagree with go away. But I'm done trying to educate you. My argument doesn't have a "flaw" which you've "proven". My argument (perhaps maybe you've forgotten) was that relocating the thing that is dumping heat to be closer to a place that can absorb large amounts of it will turn out to be bad for the environment and people who depend on it, especially if it turns out to be technically feasible and economically viable, because everyone will start doing it, and there will be tons of these damned things, everywhere, concentrating heat in places where that heat will cause changes I'm confident, without breaking into their offices and looking, they haven't fully investigated because if they HAD, they might have learned something they will get sued for having known BEFORE they did it.
Good (for-profit) corporations are great at not finding out what they suspect their executives may not be able to buy their way out of trouble for knowing at the time down the line.
What they're planning to do is likely hazardous to the things that live where they're planning to do it, it's being done in a place no human knows enough about to do this safely, as the seas and oceans are inadequately explored or understood, they're vast systems existing in delicate balances in probably a hundred different ways, but it will help their bottom line as a corporation, so they don't care about little things like, what they're doing potentially devastating others, because they live for the here and now. "Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead" only means what it does because the moron who said it got lucky and most of his boats didn't sink that particular day. If they had, the saying would have the more appropriate meaning, being an expression of hubris that gets other people hurt or killed because of disregarding the consequences.
Perhaps the takeaway from this should not be people arguing about the technical points when neither knows anything about them, but that a way needs to be found to make enviro
So this is a story about TWO bills about Quantum Computing coming before the US Congress, and NO jokes so far relating to quantum theory, quantum mechanics, the bills being quantum entangled with each other, nothing suggesting we are able to know the way one bill will be voted on, even if deliberations are held in closed session, merely by observing the state of the other despite the distance between them... what HAPPENED to you, SLASHDOT?!? There should be like, fifty jokes about this so far! FIFTY! This has been here for... minutes and minutes! WTF? Come ON, guys! Up the GAME! This is like a politician's sex scandal and you write jokes for late night television show hosts! They practically write themselves! I'm no comedian, and I've already come up with like, THREE! Let's GO!
I need to dispel 10 million BTUs. Do I: 1 - let the sea absorb it 2 - create 200 million BTUs in wasted frictional energy to provide the cooling needed to dispel it
Forget the pollution, the greenhouse effects; the efficiency savings alone make this a more sensible idea.
I need to dispel 10 million BTUs.
Need to, or want to? I think we should examine this bare assertion a little more closely. Also... do you really think cooling something takes 20 times more power than the thing itself? If you have a thousand watts (1000 W, or 1kW) being used and radiated as heat into the space inside your home from electrical devices running, chugging away, doing their things, and your house is (otherwise) at equilibrium with the outside air, thermally, do you really think it's going to take 20 KILOWATTS to cool your home?!?
If that's the typical performance you've been seeing, you may need to check your filters, because they may have been surreptitiously replaced with solid blocks of wood... or maybe call the HVAC people, and have the system as a whole checked, because it's not supposed to take that much power to do that. Hell, I'm not sure it should take that much to HEAT the place in the dead of a very cold winter. Perhaps consider having the place insulated? LOL
Seriously though, my point was mainly that they're monkeying with things they don't understand, in the name of corporate profits, and when that's what you're concerned about, corporate profits, anything that gets in the way that you can pretend doesn't exist, is going to be treated like... well, like it doesn't exist. Sadly, things don't just cease to exist because they're inconvenient.
hahaha, you know all the power consumed by human civilization, if converted to heat and dumped in the ocean, woul not make an iota of difference compared to the sun. Even the natural variation in solar output totally dwarfs the heat output of mankind. We do NOT have a mans-waste-heat-warming-the-earth problem.
Pollutions making gases that trap a bit more SOLAR heat, pollution darkening ice and snow to trap more SOLAR heat...yes, those might be a problem.
Okay, first, all the power consumeD (past tense) that you're talking about, assuming you're right... but what about 50 years from now, when 95% of human activity is farming cryptocurrency, and there are like, a million computing devices per person...? (Just a guess, I confess, but it seems logical.)
But again, we can't forget the issue where you can't just assume that after dumping heat in ONE location, it will, completely safely, disperse throughout the system, without impacting all that lives in that place. When a chemical plant dumps its toxic sludge in a river, and that river drains to the ocean, and you say, a few million barrels of MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) in 10^18 gallons (or whatever) of ocean is not going to even be noticeable, not even detectable, but what about the 500 miles of river between where it's dumped and the ocean? And what if it's not MEK but unrefined crude tarsands oil?
Without (admittedly) looking too far into the details of this plan, I'll bet there's a really good reason they're trying to do this far, FAR away from whatever is LEFT at this point, of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and its ability to regulate shenanigans like this, and fine the fuck out of Microsoft if they turn out to need to be fined, when this ends up going horribly, terribly wrong. Or maybe it's because this experiment might save them money, and they need to do it far away from the IRS's taxing authority, through some chain of subsidiaries and shell companies so they can pretend they didn't profit... but I'm guessing it's more the environmental thing, though I suppose it COULD be both. Or maybe Microsoft just LOOOVVVESSS them some fresh, North Scottish islands fish, and want to go do this where it's freshest? I'm thinking though that it's the lack of rules or taxes thing.
>> so the layer where this thing hangs out is going to end up hotter ...with probably far-ranging consequences for marine ecology,
Yep agreed. But if undersea volcanic activity is anything to go by, actually more life will live and thrive there.
> This is potentially going to end up being next-level bad,
I truly doubt that one small server box could make any real difference to ambient sea temperature more than a handful of feet away, even if it tried. If this experiment starts a trend where companies like Microsoft and Google that have big server farms start moving all their servers underwater, then maybe you'll start to have an actual point.
The difference between this and volcanic activity is important. First, in the case of volcanism, raw materials, nutrients, chemicals, are being added to the system, whereas with the data center, all that's being added is heat. That would be like if the strength of the sun's rays suddenly doubled. Yes, some plants would LOVE that, but many would just get COOKED. Those who can handle the extra light and heat would slowly take over niches previously occupied by those who could not take the heat, but that's kind of the point. What is currently arable farmland would become arid desert, and all the people (and all the animals) who depend on certain plant species being in certain abundance in certain specific locations are simply screwed, and are going to die... or at least adapt to a new reality, VERY rapidly, which often historically has been the death-knell of whole populations of organisms.
As for the other point, did you read all the way to the end of the sentence you were replying to, where I made the exact point you posited that I would have to be making in order to have a point? Because that's exactly what I said, oddly enough. This becomes next-level bad COMMA... especially if it seems successful and free of problems, because then EVERYONE will do it [...] etc. I don't usually quote myself but... here it seemed appropriate. That had been the point I was trying to convey. One is not a big deal. It is when there are thousands, millions, causing subtle (and later not so subtle) shifts in WHERE in the ocean one may find certain water temperatures, that we run into problems. Fish and other aquatic or marine organisms don't share our ability to live comfortably in places where ambient temps range by nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. We have clothing, fire, air conditioning, paint... and water is something like 40 or 80 (I forget) times more thermally conductive than air, meaning that if you take an entire region of water and jack the temps up a degree or two, (yes, I'm aware that in quintillions of gallons of sea water, that requires immense power,) it ends up forcing the entire population to live elsewhere, either rising a few meters or falling, and any that can't handle that change, and all the attendant other changes that result, are SCREWED .
Imagine if there were a region of the sea the size of the continental United States, on the sea floor, relatively flat, at a depth of 50 meters. Crawling along the bottom are trillions, maybe quadrillions of individual life forms necessary for the health and ecology of the region, who fix in some way, the chemistry of the water, consuming dead fallen fish, whales, etc., and releasing the sulfur, nitrogen, etc., back into the sea that ends up being needed for all the life that swims above it. Then something happens and the water gets ever so slightly hotter. The temperature there has been nearly constant for lets' say, 700 million years, varying by only a 10th of a degree F. in all that while, and with pressure that is similarly, almost constant. Then suddenly, over a few years or decades, the temp goes up by a half a degree or a degree. The whole sea needn't necessarily increase by that much, due to the effect of layering of water. (I was myself surprised to learn about this kind of thing. He
Unless 100% of the power used by this kind of data center is renewable, this is like sweeping dirt under the rug. Sure, you’ve dealt with the problem of unsightly dirt on the floor, but at the end of the day the dirt is still there in the room. While dumping the heat from this thing into the vast ocean might seem like a good way to get rid of the heat, the heat remains in the system. Further, layers of ocean water do NOT mix to the point of homogeneity, so the layer where this thing hangs out is going to end up hotter by however much waste heat this thing dumps, with probably far-ranging consequences for marine ecology, changes to ecosystems we depend on to work, the possibility of mass-dyings of populations of plants, animals, fungi, changes in susceptibility to viruses by microbes without which we would all die, etc. etc. etc. according to the Law of Unintended Consequences, which states when you mess with something you can’t possibly know enough about to control all results from your messing, things you have no way of anticipating, often bad, end up happening, and of course the more widely known Murphy’s Law, which states when you sink a data center to save money on discharging heat, something will inevitably go wrong.
What, you ask? Whatever can. This is potentially going to end up being next-level bad, especially if it seems successful and free of problems, because then EVERYONE will do it, just like dumping all manner of crap into the air, imagining the environment had infinite capacity to cleanse our filth, and we wouldn’t all end up inhaling it and developing cancer, as people have. Also, yes, I know sea != ocean, but waters flow from one to the other in most instances, so the point stands.
My only hope in all this is that someone does us all the giant favor of coming along and stealing the damned thing, or cutting their cables. Rather than trying to make cooling (and thereby operations cheaper, assuring even more of these heating devices will be made, they should work instead on making them more thermally efficient, denecessitating all the efforts at cooling. Yes, I’m aware I’ve contributed to the problem by using an internet connected device, but not as much as they stand to contribute to the problem by cooking the fish while they’re still IN THE OCEAN.
If Microsoft hadn't done those things, there really wouldn't have been a Microsoft left to speak of.
Um... good. Fuck ‘em.
I like how you try to portrait people who absolutely hate Microsoft as "emotional and irrational". Hating Microsoft is rational. It's a sign that you've been keeping up. Fuck, if you had behaved in real life the way Microsoft has, you'd have lost your teeth several times over, and be in prison for the rest of your life.
No, "phantomfive", there is nothing irrational about hating Microsoft. The irrational one is you, who are defending a known criminal, toxic and destructive entity and spit on their victims and those who actually remembers their crimes.
Just go fuck yourself, you retarded, smug shill.
God damn it.... where are my mod points when I really need them? +5 INSIGHTFUL!
Oh, you mean that feature my lowly Fitbit has literally had FOR YEARS?!? Good for Apple. Next they will add a stopwatch function and invent dual time, a breathtakingly revolutionary feature that allows an iWatch user to see a watchface display indicating an arbitrary time offset determined by the user. Wooooowwww.... feh. Apple. Did they... take this opportunity to update or refresh the archaic, obsolete waste-of-money that is the MacMini, that those assholes claim is still an important part of theMac lineup? Noooo.... of course not. But, you can now make your face into a cartoon emoticon. LIKE, I am sooo IMPRESSED. Dude, I am SOOO rushing out and buying two of everything Apple makes!
... so I could close it. As with everything having to do with Microsoft... this is a trap.