This is a very good point. In my particular apartment complex, we have over 400 units, across about 8 buildings. Each building has its own water boiler to supply the apartments with hot water. This centralized water heating provides a nice steady stream of hot water to each apartment, and you don't need to worry about a localized in-unit heater running out.
People's fear of nuclear power is way out of hand. I studied the Chernobyl incident rather thoroughly. The main cause of that was human error. They did something VERY stupid as a test, and disengaged the safety protocols. I would personally much rather live near a well built nuclear reactor than any other type of power plant.
The real problem here is nuclear misinformation. Things like Pebble Bed Reactors have very very little chance of meltdown, and especially low chance of leaking any radioactive material.
All in all, it sounds like a fantastic idea to me!
I work for a relatively high profile company that has a secure campus. We have client companies that are also high profile (household names and the like). My company pays independent auditors to see if they can get access to the building without anybody stopping them or asking for ID, and actually get ahold of any sensitive data. It's probably not that hard, and I have yet to see an auditor that I know of.
It really wouldn't be all that hard to gain access. Just get somebody to hold doors open for you, go in at peak shift changes when the doors are rarely shut for long, walk like you know what you're doing and where you're going. People rarely stop somebody who walks confidently.
From what I understand, this is a fairly common test of security protocols in the business sector.
But then all our junk is just in a higher orbit... I think we just need to turn up the gravity for a short time and let the junk burn up in the atmosphere. An added bonus to this is now the moon will be a good deal bigger in the sky for those long walks on the (now-polluted and possibly tidal-flooded) beach with your girlfriend. Let's do it! Remember to bring your asteroid-proof umbrella!
Since humans don't survive vacuums very well, and we haven't really lost any in orbit, I highly doubt that there are very many human waists out there, let alone any other human parts. There may, however, be a bit of human waste in the form of excrement flying around, which begs the question:
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned focus fusion yet. It's a method of controlling the fusion plasma by twisting filaments of it back in on themselves at a single focal point and actually has a very efficient direct electricity feedback that relies on inducing a current to slow particles as they exit the reaction. This is where we should be spending our money on research. Tokamak reactors are just far too inefficient to be of much use.
Let's see, UT2004 with custom maps and mods installed can grow to around 16GB. I also have a lot of games installed, like FEAR, CoD2, BF2, SWBF2, SWRC, HL2, Halo, Quake 4, Doom 3, Civ 4, DXIW, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fable, Farcry, Pariah, GTA-VC, GTA-SA, KoTOR 1 and 2, and I still have Quake 3 arena. It adds up. Also, for those who collect video, that adds up pretty quick too. I have a 120GB hard drive filled with nothing but videos (not porn) and music.
There are a lot of games out there, man, and they all take several gigs of space each. It might not be that games are going to get much bigger, but we are going to have so many more of them at any given time. Ain't technology great?
A real gamer would never buy a pre-built system and just assume it's going to run what (s)he wants. A real gamer builds their own system from parts. A real gamer fine tunes their machine to be a beast of performance, not a beast of burden. Why buy an Alienware machine for thousands of dollars when you can build one with better performance and much much less ugly for much cheaper? Also, there is the appearance customization element of it. You want your gaming rig to be personalized. You can't do that very well with prebuilt machines (and especially not with those that have proprietary cases).
The true benefit of multi-core processors to gamers is not that they will be able to play games while doing other things, but rather that future games will handle multiple cores much better and will be able to process the game on all cores. You don't run anything in the background when you are going to do a very system-intensive game. It's just taboo.
Bottom line is, if you really want to sell a computer to gamers, sell it part by part and give detailed specs on each part. Otherwise, don't bother.
Since when do dual core processors share L2 cache between cores? Usually, each core has it's own L1 and L2 cache and they don't have to fight for access to it. They might "fight" for access to ram, but not for L2 cache.
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This is a very good point. In my particular apartment complex, we have over 400 units, across about 8 buildings. Each building has its own water boiler to supply the apartments with hot water. This centralized water heating provides a nice steady stream of hot water to each apartment, and you don't need to worry about a localized in-unit heater running out.
People's fear of nuclear power is way out of hand. I studied the Chernobyl incident rather thoroughly. The main cause of that was human error. They did something VERY stupid as a test, and disengaged the safety protocols. I would personally much rather live near a well built nuclear reactor than any other type of power plant.
The real problem here is nuclear misinformation. Things like Pebble Bed Reactors have very very little chance of meltdown, and especially low chance of leaking any radioactive material.
All in all, it sounds like a fantastic idea to me!
I work for a relatively high profile company that has a secure campus. We have client companies that are also high profile (household names and the like). My company pays independent auditors to see if they can get access to the building without anybody stopping them or asking for ID, and actually get ahold of any sensitive data. It's probably not that hard, and I have yet to see an auditor that I know of.
It really wouldn't be all that hard to gain access. Just get somebody to hold doors open for you, go in at peak shift changes when the doors are rarely shut for long, walk like you know what you're doing and where you're going. People rarely stop somebody who walks confidently.
From what I understand, this is a fairly common test of security protocols in the business sector.
...and smoke it?
But then all our junk is just in a higher orbit... I think we just need to turn up the gravity for a short time and let the junk burn up in the atmosphere. An added bonus to this is now the moon will be a good deal bigger in the sky for those long walks on the (now-polluted and possibly tidal-flooded) beach with your girlfriend. Let's do it! Remember to bring your asteroid-proof umbrella!
Since humans don't survive vacuums very well, and we haven't really lost any in orbit, I highly doubt that there are very many human waists out there, let alone any other human parts. There may, however, be a bit of human waste in the form of excrement flying around, which begs the question:
Who flung poo?
And you also have to figure out which magic tab to push/pull on to take the damn things apart. Why can't they use screws like normal people?
Hell, I'll take it off your hands for free!
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned focus fusion yet. It's a method of controlling the fusion plasma by twisting filaments of it back in on themselves at a single focal point and actually has a very efficient direct electricity feedback that relies on inducing a current to slow particles as they exit the reaction. This is where we should be spending our money on research. Tokamak reactors are just far too inefficient to be of much use.
Let's see, UT2004 with custom maps and mods installed can grow to around 16GB. I also have a lot of games installed, like FEAR, CoD2, BF2, SWBF2, SWRC, HL2, Halo, Quake 4, Doom 3, Civ 4, DXIW, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fable, Farcry, Pariah, GTA-VC, GTA-SA, KoTOR 1 and 2, and I still have Quake 3 arena. It adds up. Also, for those who collect video, that adds up pretty quick too. I have a 120GB hard drive filled with nothing but videos (not porn) and music.
There are a lot of games out there, man, and they all take several gigs of space each. It might not be that games are going to get much bigger, but we are going to have so many more of them at any given time. Ain't technology great?
A real gamer would never buy a pre-built system and just assume it's going to run what (s)he wants. A real gamer builds their own system from parts. A real gamer fine tunes their machine to be a beast of performance, not a beast of burden. Why buy an Alienware machine for thousands of dollars when you can build one with better performance and much much less ugly for much cheaper? Also, there is the appearance customization element of it. You want your gaming rig to be personalized. You can't do that very well with prebuilt machines (and especially not with those that have proprietary cases). The true benefit of multi-core processors to gamers is not that they will be able to play games while doing other things, but rather that future games will handle multiple cores much better and will be able to process the game on all cores. You don't run anything in the background when you are going to do a very system-intensive game. It's just taboo. Bottom line is, if you really want to sell a computer to gamers, sell it part by part and give detailed specs on each part. Otherwise, don't bother.
Since when do dual core processors share L2 cache between cores? Usually, each core has it's own L1 and L2 cache and they don't have to fight for access to it. They might "fight" for access to ram, but not for L2 cache.