If "the cloud" (the whole of it) is gone someday, there also won't be any RSS/ATOM feeds left for you to use your desktop app with.

My point is, "the cloud" being gone isn't very probable - some services like Google Reader may disappear, but if they are popular, others will immediately spot the opportunity to take their place (like presently feedly.com, netvibes.com or newsblur.com), possibly even improving upon these on their way out.

The 95% of business that you had experience with must have been from some bottom of the barrel places, intelectually-wise.

In the three companies I've worked for in the last 12 years (the last two counting > 10k employees), the "track changes" functionality, along with all related stuff (review comments, automated tracked change merging, accept/reject) was in active, constant use as an integrated part of work processes and culture. This extended to all of those companies' partners throughout any collaborative work on any set of documents.

That's not to say that the dreaded document versioning scheme using name suffixes (Document_2012-11-28.docx, etc.) wasn't in use - one practice doesn't exclude the other. It has been a common sight to see multiple document copies with different versions in their names cluttering a shared network drive, SVN directory (!) or a SharePoint document library, even when the underlying store was capable of versioning by itself. Still, lots of those versions were "draft" ones with tracked changes and comments inside them.

Too many software projects/architects have an easy-in, hard-out policy on features. "We can't drop feature X, it's been there for years and some crazy people in siberia still use it". It's ok to drop features on major-cycle releases. Perhaps even necessary for long-term project health.

What for? In the name of what? With such approach, when breaking feature-level backward compatibility, you'd give lots of people (not only "crazy people in Siberia") loads of pain since they would be forced to devise a strategy for getting rid of/replacing those deprecated features.

On the other hand, the model of "old things become outdated, new things emerge, some people stick with the old and are happy, some jump onto the new stuff because it suits them better" works quite well IMHO. It's the natural way the world works. Including nature, civilization, science, technology and so on. Do you imply that there's something wrong with that and we should artificially force some change upon those who are unwilling to take it?

..., due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability.

Poor performance, high cost? That sounds exactly like systems that big business love the best (judging from looking around me).

Sorry, took a minute to reread what you said about albedo and convection. Are you sure that you don't overestimate convection here?

Not quite. Without PV, lots of solar enerdy would simply get reflected (assuming that the tents would be made of a bright material - you could even possibly use bare sheet metal roofs that would act like mirrors, reflecting most of that energy with just a fraction of complexity of the system involving PV and Peltier).

With PV, you are deliberately accepting that energy using dark solar panels and have to do something with it.

You need to solve the problem of transporting the heat away, otherwise you're doing a thing that amounts to (pardon my French) shitting next to your dining table.

Yes, that's obvious, but what do you do about the unmanageably hot sides of the elements that hang outside the tents? They will emit heat into the air, the air will circulate and reheat the surroundings and possibly the insides of the tents... What about people who travel between the tents?

Wouldn't that only add to the heat present in the system? Unless you solve the problem of moving the waste heat somewhere away from the place, you'll just introduce more heat produced by thermodynamic inefficiencies of the process involving transport of heat using Peltier elements - the laws of thermodynamics, especially the first one, are ruthless.

True, the air heated by radiators attached to Peltier elements might get hot enough to raise upwards and travel away from the camp, but you'd need to perform real world tests to really know whether the effect that you achieve would be that of cooling, or warming.

Wouldn't that add to the heat? The waste heat transported by Peltier elements needs to be moved somewhere else, otherwise you'll just get more heat stemming from the thermodynamic inefficiency of the process.

Sure, the hot air might rise upwards and the tents might gain some cooling from such a setup, but I think this needs testing in real life in order to determine whether the real effect will be that of cooling, or warming.

The trust has to do not with sexual activity, but with people generally being possessive with regards to each other in a relationship (especially women towards men but this may be a cultural bias, not necessary evolutional/biological).

This is a universal trait of humans and it's not dependent on religion. It has more to do with inherent egoism and self interest.

Take a look at any ancient epics like Greek myths or Norse sagas.

"Monopoly on an idea"? I always thought that patents are about state granting temporary monopoly on an invention (that is, a concrete working implementation of an idea), not a plain idea.

It seems from your description that this is becoming a significant nuisance.

So just get a new account, with a non common e-mail address, notify all your contacts and start using that.

On the original account, put an automatic reply notifying the sender that they probably got a wrong address.

Infidel! How dare you not mention The Mighty Java in your pity list of inferior, poor imitations of programming languages!

DRIM? Direct Rendering Infrastructure Manager.