"Parallels" could have been a Sliders type show if it had been picked up as a series and not released as an edited-into-a-movie pilot only on Netflix.

It was done by the guy who did "The Lost Room" which is probably one of the best things ever to appear on SciFi.

Heat is heat, it's maybe less efficient to redistribute it throughout a house than in a single room, but a rack of servers puts out a lot of heat.

You would want a thermostat that controls an input damper and an output damper, so that when it called for heat the servers recirculated the indoor air and when it didn't, the severs drew air from outside and output it outside. An existing furnace could provide supplementary heat if the rack's heat output wasn't sufficient.

I think the bigger idea has a lot of drawbacks.

Data connectivity? Maybe in the Netherlands everyone has access to gig fiber at residential addresses, but that wouldn't work in the US.

Regular server maintenance? Parts like disk drives break often enough that I wouldn't want to have to deal with the technician all the time, especially not off hours.

Power? At a residential address you would need some significant wiring done and a separate meter for the server rack. What about power outages?

But it does provide an esoteric data center model. With the right site selection, you could have a very distributed compute facility that would be insulated from single-site failures. But it would only work for the kinds of distributed workloads that don't care about a bunch of nodes dropping off.

I submit to TSA screening because it is the only kind of stimulus money one can get out of Republicans.

Of course, initially everyone has a natural response -- rally 'round the flag. Kill the invaders.

Now, what happens when people hear about the invasions continued advance? Cities in ruins, millions killed? Resisting military units wiped out, irregular paramilitary units crushed, cities and towns harboring resistance razed, their inhabitants summarily executed. Oh, and your town has been bombed, food supplies are sketchy, no electricity, etc.

Eventually the idea of anything but total surrender becomes impossible.

Our appetite for foreign militarism is entirely the result of our politicians selling the idea that our enemy is the leadership and their military forces, but the populace is our friend. With our advanced military weapons, we can defeat the defined "enemy" and then the populace will embrace us as liberators.

What I don't know is where this idea originated. My only guess was that it grew out of the reconstruction era in postwar Germany where civilian resistance was minimal and largely theoretical understandings of the Soviet domestic political climate.

Both of these seem naive. The Allies let the Germans starve for a couple of years after the war and most felt this was a better alternative than their experience with the Soviets. Despite Stalin and his repression, the Russians took massive losses and fought for the Soviet state. Much of this was compelled, but at the same time the populace did it.

Yet somehow, it's become a cornerstone of US military policy that the civilian population is at worst neutral and most likely supports US goals, not to mention US belief systems and values. Which is ironic if you look at most of the American and British propaganda from WWII, which sold the idea that the enemy nations were subhuman races which deserved to be wiped off the map.

This was my thinking.

It's been ages since I've used ipfw as a WAN simulator, but my memory of it is normally around a fairly static kind of configuration of latencies and bandwidth.

Simulating a cellular link that might hop between LTE and 1x kinds of data might be tough to do without some kind of engine which dynamically reprograms dummynets for vastly different bandwidth/latency scenarios to better simulate a node moving between 1x and LTE speeds. When I built a WAN simulator, I did to actually simulate known WAN link performance parameters.such as bandwidth and latency. I didn't have to worry about my link switching from multilink T1s to 512K frame relay to 56k dynamically.

They could have also provided a ton of statistical profile data so that the simulations closely mirrored real-world throughput associated with various media, especially common variability patterns.

A nice GUI front-end would be useful too, with actual throughput measured.

USB would not be desirable for internal system use, too much overhead. It is well designed for the purpose it has but you wouldn't want it for everything.

But what is "too much overhead" when the transport link gets fast enough? If USB4 ends up with 20 GBit/sec, overhead for anything but SAN shelf backplanes really won't matter.

I actually think I *would* want it for everything. One connector for disks and other peripherals, usable internally and externally. The way they package SSDs now you wouldn't even need to bother with an enclosure.

I think the real problem USB specifically has is a marginal performance history with USB2 devices (high CPU usage, low throughput) and Microsoft's steadfast refusal to allow Windows installs to USB devices, even USB3 (which makes no sense, really, when I can benchmark an ordinary PNY USB3 stick @ 110 MByte/sec read and 60 MByte/sec write).

If Windows could boot off USB3, eSATA would be largely forgotten as faster but with clunky, limited cabling and even SATA as a connector internal standard might get relegated to "enthusiast" boards where some minor performance boost was seen as valuable. M.SATA adoption would end up only in places where extreme miniaturization matters or the same enthusiast crowds.

I know it sounds crazy, but it sure seems a lot less crazy with USB3.1 supposed to hit 10 Gbits.

I hope it eventually becomes "fast enough to settle on one standard". It's getting to the point where if the software support was there we could just settle on a standard like USB3.1 gen 2 (the 10 Gbit one) for internal disks and external peripherals with some kind of PCIe slotted flash solution for people who wanted stupid fast speed that only shows on benchmarks.

Maybe by the next major revision they will figure out how to come up with a way to unify interface standards. The bus speed increases are making it increasingly about who has the best connector and longest usable cable lengths, not who is 1-2 GBits/sec faster. What's crazy is that a SSD on USB3.1 is probably capable of the kind of disk I/O only the biggest 8 gig fiber channel SANs with spinning disk could deliver just five years ago.

That's the problem, though, the allure overpowers any sense of self-control.

I have a 10 year old son and as much as I hate alarmism, I do find the allure of technology kind of scary.

We give our son "screen time" (PC, XBox or iPad) but we usually limit it to an hour per day. But if given the ability, he would play much more than that. It's like a compulsion. And it's often a struggle when his hour is up to get him to quit.

When we go places, I see lots of younger kids absolutely glued to a screen (iPad, iPhone usually). The touchscreen devices seem to have some kind of extra allure, which I associate with the fact that they have a tactile component different than a game controller or keyboard/mouse.

The Romans had little use for unifying the refugees of their occupied lands. They killed all that resisted and the rest were enslaved. Those that remained assimilted Roman culture because the opposite was death. This basic structure is the same in every place where force was successful.

The West's military misadventures have failed because Western militaries have become preoccupied with defeating armies and weapon systems. They are no longer focused on defeating a nation. Military force can only be successful to the extent that it is willing to defeat a people and break not only their ability to fight but to their willingness to fight.

This is not done through "nation building", nurturing or any other touchy-feely behavior. It is done by killing people who resist and destroying their places of living. Every act of resistence should be dealt with death and destruction until everyone willing to fight is dead and everyone else won't fight.

You approach a village and you take fire from it? You level the village and kill everyone who resists. You keep doing this and you will not have any resistence. People will learn that resistence is futile, that resistence means death.

There is nothing nice about this. It is vicious and it is brutal. Which is why we should not engage in military actions unless we are willing to pursue it. Because the opposite is viciousness and brutality for both sides without any resolution.

It worked in Gaul, Carthage, post-WW I Russia, the Native Americans, Tiananmen Square, Nazi Germany (against the Nazis), Eastern Georgia under German Sherman, Imperial Japan...

wherein we find out that Monsanto has known it all along.

Probably they were hoping no one would find out until they' ready to market GMO humans that are resistant to it.

...instead of enabling or encouraging farmers to become water speculators?

If the inputs are priced more accurately than the outputs should reflect these costs. If almonds take a lot of water to grow, then almonds should be more expensive to reflect the higher water prices.

Allowing farmers to sell unused water seems like an invitation for speculators to buy farms not for the purpose of farming but to just speculate in water, or worse, figure ways to manipulate both commodity markets and water supplies.

A better solution might be encouraging water CREATION through incentives for water recycling or desalination through renewable energy.

Also, despite the whining, it is a fine OS. It's only real issue is the start screen is inefficient to us. Not impossible, not insurmountable, just inefficient. You can use a system with it just fine. What's more, it is a real easy problem to fix. Buy Start 8, or get Classic Shell for free and you're done, a classic start menu that works nice.

When I first saw this topic my gut reaction was "Those bastards!" and then I remembered I've been running Win 8 for the last year on a Surface Pro with Classic Shell without any major annoyances other than some of the built-in stuff that Classic Shell doesn't change.

And then I started thinking, where would MS be if they hadn't fucked with the UI on Win8? That seems to be their biggest problem, not the OS changes itself.