Is one way we are NOT winning the drought. I tried doing the math on this and it doesn't make sense to me, yet I see big F250 pickup trucks with 275 gallon tanks everywhere around here. How is driving 20 miles round trip to pick up 275 gallons of reclaimed water worth your time, wear/tear on vehicle, tank and pump, and fuel? According to my water bill that 275 gallons costs maybe $1.28. Even at higher tiers I don't see how it would add up. You'd have to make a trip to the water plant almost every day to even get enough water for even a very small lawn.

Who would want to drive 1,000 miles (13 hours???) and only stop for 30 minutes total? You could actually do that with a plug in hybrid if you want and only have to stop once for gas, but that's still kind of crazy.

Have you looked into any of the plug in hybrids like the Volt? The new model will get 50 miles of EV range. For winter driving, the gas engine will act as a heater and a back up to the battery range. Another nice thing about a PHEV is you can pre-heat it electrically before heading out, saving on gas and EV range.

There are several companies (like charge point) that sell charging stations that have billing mechanisms built into them. They work with NFC for payment.

It takes me about 15 seconds to plug in my car at home. If I'm using a public station it takes maybe 30 seconds (some time to activate). As long as I'm doing something else useful while it's charging I'm spending less time than I would be staring at the price total on a pump at a gas station.

So did they just essentially develop a super intelligent LOD loading system that uses procedural instancing? I'm pretty sure you could put together similarly impressive demos using the latest tricks from Nvidia and ATI using standard polygon rendering. The fact they are using points vs. polygons isn't that interesting to me.

What is fundamentally missing here? Animation, lighting and shadows. Those are going to be really hard problems to solve and I'm curious how they will go about it.

Also, it's not "infinite" detail. There is going to be a fundamental limit in regards to CPU memory or GPU memory. You can only store so much "detail" at the various detail levels in the different stages of memory. As soon as it has to dynamically load an entire detailed world that doesn't include just 20 instanced models, but more like 10,000, than I'm sure it will run a lot slower.

However... I am excited for this. DDR3 is getting dirt cheap, if they could make a game that actually used all 8GB of my memory I'd be impressed.

I'm surprised not very many people use 3 monitors. Maybe the barrier of having to install a 2nd video card is too difficult? I personally have a 3 monitor config at work and home. They really aren't too expensive anymore. It really does help with software development to have one monitor for administration (e-mail, web, calender), one for your IDE of choice, and another for the application your debugging.

Yeah, that's cool you can say "it has 1,600,000 books" but how are they categorized? Is the interface for selecting and searching for books intuitive? If the laptops are targeted to a younger audience are the selected books at an appropriate reading level for the age? I mean, this is really only useful if they can create a really, really, good front end.

SCART looks pretty advanced for it's time, it's like component video right? We're all using HDMI now though, or at least we should be. I would have hoped HDMI would have eliminated country specific standards.

You'd probably only save about $15 in other states that don't have such high electricity costs. If the TV cost you $150 more, it would take 10 years to recoup that cost, by which time you'd probably already buy a new TV anyway.

You're still assuming government regulation is more efficient than market rate. Sure a more efficient TV might save you money in electricity, but what if it costs $200 more up front? What if that's because it took $200 more electricity to manufacture? We would never know, because you can't micromanage industries like this. The only reason it would save energy in California is because they force production sources that are already too expensive to begin with. The main thing I hate about liberalism is that it assumes we are all stupid up front. Oh, you are too dumb to buy an energy efficient TV, so we'll make you!

The flat-line of per capita electricity consumption is proabably because all the energy intensive industries have moved out of state and out of country along with the jobs. But if you want to promote California's technological backwardness in regards to energy production go right ahead.

Cygwin is a huge pain. Yeah, it sort of gives you a POSIX environment, but good luck getting anything to actually compile under it without hours of frustration.

Qt is okay for networking applications, but in my experience Boost has much, much better performance, not to mention better support for things like multicast without creating some hacks. Qt ends up using a lot of Qt specific classes internally to create buffers and network functions, so it ends up being slower than Boost which seems to act more as a wrapper than anything.