Yeah, that was my thought: desert, very hot water (at least 2/3 of overall energy output is lost to heat), and cooling pounds. . . Me thinks that evaporation would need to be significant to get the water cool enough to run back through the plant.

Is this better than letting the water run downstream and be utilized for other purposes? Is this really "water conservation" or "water cost minimization?"

Yes. . . you do remember that thing they call the "Internet." Technology is just making the real world more like that. . . You can wish people were different all you want, but, for better or worse, it is what it is. You cannot change human nature. . . best to accept and move on.

NK already kills people all the time for just being human. I think that is a problem with the NK regime, not human nature.

What could possibly be done to prevent this? You really do not need to announce something like this to the world (like through Kickstarter). Technology to do something like this exists now and is just getting cheaper and cheaper. People have been sending balloons over for years. . . just a matter of time until they start sending drones. . .

It is simply the new reality we are living in. If NK starts killing people over it, it is only a testament to how out of touch with reality their regime is. . .

I agree that I am not understanding your point. However, I can't help but think that our disagreement stems from your seeing this as a zero sum game. Robert Wright has very compelling arguments that human civilization is moving towards nonzero sum games, and this is improving the lives of everyone. I recommend you test your views against the arguments he makes to support this claim.

Computational technological advances have greatly increased our ability to generate wealth. Your point seems to be about wealth distribution. However, it is far easier for a society to redistribute wealth than it is to generate wealth (this is easiest to see in developing nations). The harder problem is already being addressed by technology. Technology's propensity to decentralize concentrations of power will eventually solve the easier problem.

Overall, it is hard for me to accept your point that longer, healthier lives will not make people more wealthy. Most mortgages are ~30years. If you double the time period people can work without having to worry about a mortgage, you definitely have improved their financial situation (assuming some level of rational financial decisions).

The longer people live, the higher probability they will be directly impacted by short sighted decisions, like not increasing the retirement age. Longer life will result in more long term thinking.

If aging can be postponed, then so can retirement. Also, perhaps work will become more pleasant without the pressure of having to rush and save up for retirement.

Silly and arrogant oversimplification gets modded up sky-high. . . . Ah, Slashdot. . . the OTHER bitter, brown substance I put inside myself every morning. . .

That's aIoT.

He explicitly addresses this, saying that US employers are significantly more likely to award reserved stock or stock options to employees than Japanese employers (where it is almost unheard of). Accordingly, if Japan did not have special laws to protect individual inventors, the impact would be completely different in Japan than the U.S. (a point complete lost on PM Abe, whose only strategies are to devalue the yen and copy the U.S. wherever possible, even when it makes no sense. . .)

There isn't an app for telling you what there isn't an app for. . .

That is just as meaningless a statement about Chromebooks as it is about Android phones. . . What specific company hardware are you talking about (e.g. I have had a very good experience with Samsung and HP Chromebooks)?

Regarding your "featureless" statement, have you heard of Crouton? Also, were you aware that an increasing number of Android apps are coming to Chromebooks? Your post seems to represent the segment of /. that has not bothered to really look into chromebooks before hating them. . .

I only hope my final moments can be so bold. . .

I agree if you had only said "level of consumption" but "quality of life?" For instance, I believe the fastest growth of quality of life in the area of "lighting" is coming from the explosion of cheap solar powered LED lights. I would argue that such quality of life improvements have negligible ecological impact while significantly improving quality of life. I would also argue that it makes more sense to take such decentralized approaches at this point of human technological progress than the old and proven "dumb" way of centralized consumption.

My experience has been contrary . . . I believe everyone I have met, irregardless of their job, has had their own unique since of creativity and ingenuity. However, making money from such things in today's economy also requires a set of very specialized skills and the scope of the type of creativity that can be useful to a given application can be quite limited. It seems like a more sophisticated economy should be able to support a wider range of creative thinking, but it would require a significant change from today's world of overspecialization. I suppose if everyone had access to their own AI that could fill in the gaps in their own capabilities while leveraging their strengths . . .