If you look closely at those pictures, in pretty much every rack there are redundant switches with absolutely nothing connected to them, yet they are powered on.

Really? Do you like the blinking lights? I measured my 24 port 3com superstack switch and it was 50 watts. I switched to a 8 port low power gigabit (i have 6 devices these days) and it runs at 8watts.

Calculating the cost savings of the switch, at .07 cents a kwh, 42w = cost per year savings of 25 dollars. Roughly the cost of the gigabit switch i replaced it with!

Come to think of it, and more fundamentally, even sharing a home directory to clients using NFS over WiFi does not work at all. Just loading firefox loads something like 50 MB of profile data from disk, NOT including the program itself, and latency kills nfs throughput. (Again, you can dink around with the settings endlessly, to little effect that I've seen).

WiFi really only works for newer things designed to be cloud-friendly.

Try streaming mpeg-ts captures from broadcast TV over wireless. They put Netflix to shame.

Another think that hardly works at all over wireless is remote X clients. X is amazingly sensitive to latency. (Yes, you can try to set up NX etc...)

I thought the one with the population density of Houston was more interesting as it implies a more livable density than Manhattan. A slight reduction in density might allow for grow-local kind of agriculture, too.

There might be actual incentives to encouraging the development of a megacity. The energy savings in transportation would be huge and there's probably a lot of other economies of scale to be gained. If other populated areas became equally less dense the environment might improve.

The downside is that all big cities have a gross aspect to them, especially poorer ones.

So the brick managed to destroy the license plates and your driver's license or other cards with your name on them in the car, but your fucking phone still works? And you happen to have a contact for your wife in your phone that says "WIFE" and not just her first name?

Do you think there is any chance that NFC might allow micropayments on the Web to become a reality? I don't like what the ad-driven Web has become, and I'm allergic to auto-recurring subscriptions.

Well, slaves actually did have substantial market value. Piketty has an interesting section on this in "Capital". Quoting from it :

What one finds is that the total market value of slaves represented nearly a year and a half of US national income in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, which is roughly equal to the total value of farmland...

In practice, in the antebellum United States, the market price of a slave was typically on the order of ten to twelve years of an equivalent free worker's wages... In 1860, the average price of a male slave of prime working age was roughly $2,000, whereas the average wage of a free farm laborer was on the order of $200.

For reference, the US National Income in 2012 was $15.7 trillion, i.e. a few percent less than the GDP. 150% of that is about equal to the total value of all residential real estate in the US.

Go ahead and try to argue why it's not true, I'll wait. In every area where achievement is objectively measurable, it is true. For example, The world record marathon time was 2:26 in 1950, but the top 50 finishers of the most recent Boston Marathon all beat that time. So, what you need to prove is that something about modern times has had such an opposite effect -- in subjective pursuits only -- as to outweigh the nearly insurmountable odds of a growing population with growing freedom times the impact of technology.

All that experience can be accumulated hundreds of times faster in digital where you can see immediate results. Tomorrow's experts will be more expert than yesterday's experts, just as the 20th century saw huge leaps in athletic performance such as running and swimming races, weight lifting records, etc. There are also thousands of artists today that equal the top handful of masters of old times, it simply isn't acknowledge because it is subjective, and appreciation is inherently relative, in the same way people love 60's sports cars even though they are actually slow and poor-handling.

The original screws were probably bronze, not brass. Bronze has no appreciable zinc while brass contains a lot of zinc. Immersed in sea water, brass will dezincify and corrode.

Most marine raw water systems use bronze fittings for this reason.

Stainless isn't suitable for below the waterline applications because the chromium can't form a protective oxidization layer due to the lack of oxygen exposure.

Your boat would have sunk with brass or stainless screws.

Another possibility is that the model 3 will eventually hit its price point but miss its delivery date. If demand for the S remains strong enough to gobble up battery production, Tesla could just keep making those, while reduced battery prices increase profit, and/or reduce the selling price to extend demand even further, thus pushing back the Model 3.

.

The basic oddity of the Model 3 plan is Tesla's intention to jump all the way from the $80K S down to half of that on the next model. An electric car doesn't really need to be as cheap as $35K, since the S has demonstrated demand for a higher price if the car is good, and since the average price of a new car is already $28,400, and those cars will burn tens of thousands of dollars of gas over their lifetime.

One way or another there is going to be a financial incentive to feel their way down the price point more gradually, although I hope they remain committed to, and are able to pull off, the revolutionary approach.

A society that doesn't allow math won't last long.

How often will we fall into trap of taking headlines like this at face value? Islam, not even radical Islam, is anti-math, as far as I have ever heard.

Read further into the (short) article, and you hear actual quotes from the new policy, which are more what you would expect:

Educators cannot teach nationalistic and ethnic ideology and must instead teach "the belonging to Islam ... and to denounce infidelity and infidels."

Books cannot include any reference to evolution. And teachers must say that the laws of physics and chemistry "are due to Allah's rules and laws."

...all of which is still bad, albeit all-too-familiar. But I will be $5 if you asked ISIS director of education if they were "anti-math" he would take it as an accusation.

Wouldn't you like to know, apk?

I don't really understand the political or economic motivations of Scottish independence.

The political side would make more sense if Scotland was greatly different than UK culturally and had a significant short-term history of English subjugation. The Scots really aren't an ethnic or racial grouping, except at some micro level and don't seem to have a serious complaint regarding discrimination on language or religious grounds.

The economics make less sense -- Scotland has been economically integrated with the larger UK for a long time. Had Scotland split off in 1850, it would have been at a time when economies were smaller and much more locally self sufficient and it would have had time to develop into something that The economy seems much more regional now and it will be a hard transition to a more standalone economy.

Bioware/EA's MMO Star Wars The Old Republic is a counter to that - 8 huge personal (single player, in a multiplayer world) storylines, one for each basic character class, with minimal and entirely optional multiplayer content until you get to the endgame, at which point it becomes almost totally about multiplayer in a traditional MMO grind-fest for gear.

Alternatively, you can do the tutorial planet, then jump immediately into PvP, PvP Dogfighting, flashpoints, etc etc, i.e. do nothing BUT multiplayer, while hitting three or four missions per planet to progress the storyline.

You get to play your way.