I have a mental image of the cloud servers being managed by a gaggle of nearly-homeless sysadmins the IT manager picks up in an unmarked van every morning at five in front of the local Home Depot.

I replace the word "cloud" with mainframe. 'Cause that's what a mainframe is. Amazing to think that the Hollywood movie script writers are getting it right by accident now.

And yup, it means a lot of people are out of jobs. Nope, it doesn't mean they work for the mainframe companies, as they obviously don't require as much staff. And a boon for the NSA, FBI, IRS and other Three Letter Names, as now we are all nicely lined up like humans in a Matrix power tower, oblivious to the complete exposure of our data to any schmuck with power who wants to access it.

Their bosses.

Let's build a few miles of solar roads and find out.

The road-surface lights go on in an emergency situation, I'd think. Not really necessary. But the roads could power the overhead lights at night.

Rush Limbaugh posts here?

Republican states, almost invariably, pay less to the federal kitty than the federal kitty pays back. They've great roads because they're on federal road welfare.

We've too many roads going to too many places that don't justify the expense of dropping 40 million a mile. And it is about aging.

It's a rolling problem. We started out with town roads, then county roads, then state roads, then interstates. And we happily kept building more. But the roads fall apart on a steady schedule even as we merrily throw down more. What happens is you spend more every year just to keep up what your great-grandfather made, your grandfather made, your father made, and eventually the backlog of the rebuilding costs more than you can pay - and your infrastructure falls apart, slowly at first, then the process accelerates.

You can either let it die, or raise taxes, and of course lower costs by eliminating unions, using immigrant labor, removing health benefits from labor and taking advantage of new road-laying tech. But it's obvious by gross evidence that we can't keep up. We don't want to be taxed enough to maintain the backlog.

Question about this glass isn't about how much it costs - the first part of the cost accounting problem - but how much it saves over time. If the glass wears longer and as a grid produces three times more power than the entire nation requires, then it is worth more than the asphalt roads made of oil.

The road lasts longer. It self-lights. New energy grid. More power than we need, with over-production used to melt snow. Acts as a information highway, literally. Needs no new land. Could self-plow. Hell, it could power electric vehicles by induction. Remember, a stretch of highway can use more power than it produces because is part of a grid of all roads, some of which overproduce electricity.

Rain.

Glass is a lot tougher than people think. This glass especially - it takes a quarter million tons to crack it. They broke the testing machine.

Any commissioner with backbone will be fired by a, sorry to point out the obvious, Republican president in less than two years, probably. And then, poof! goes the man with the backbone, a new commissioner with more Comcastic ideas will be appointed, and all will be for nothing. Democracy sucks when one party is insane. Nothing remotely good can last for more than a decade or so. And we don't even have remotely good at this time. Image how much worse it will be.

He understands it just fine. They are re-setting up the groundwork to steal every penny they can, once again.

Consider: radio interference is not a physical phenomenon, but a result of our limited abilities to process signals. Interference can be beaten with the right algorithms and fast signal processors.

We could, in theory, broadcast different streams on the same frequencies, and so open up the entire spectrum to anyone who wants to use it. Money, brains, and time, and it can be done. Channel 2 can broadcast on the same frequency as channel 7. All the TV channels can broadcast on one frequency. We are not limited by the problems of 1950.

What if that could be done? It means hundreds of TV channels on the air. Thousands. It means you don't need a wire to watch TV, or surf the internet. "New radio" could blow this monopoly straight to hell. And happily, we wouldn't need megacorporations anymore - it could be done locally. Bring back the towers.