If there were a real-names policy (an actual, checked, real-names policy, not bullshit like what Google tried to pull), one would surely see less trolling.

One would also see less insightful posts, since any kind of insight typically steps on the toes of some entrenched interest. And even on Slashdot posts expressing unpopular opinions typically end up downmodded because, after all, if it provokes you, it's a troll.

A forum with real-names policy is basically worthless, which is precisely why the Powers that Be try to push them. Stripping people of the shield of anonymity makes dissenting opinions easier to silence through chilling effects. And of course this is marketed for our own good, after all we all know that having someone get away with posting something offensive on the Internet is the worst thing ever.

But now let's totally eliminate the barrier between graphics, sound and all other processors. Instead of limited communications channels and local memory, have distributed shared memory (DSM) and totally free communication between everything.

This sounds a lot like NUMA. Which, I might add, absolutely requires differentiating between local and non-local memory, since the latter is much slower.

Thus, memory can open a connection to the GPU,

Like GPUs have done since the time of AGP? Or did you mean memory will simply send some random data for no particular reason?

the GPU can talk to the disk,

For what purpose? Do you plan to write a file system driver that runs on the GPU? To accomplish... what, exactly speaking?

Ethernet cards can write direct to buffers rather than going via software (RDMA and OpenSockets concepts, just generalized).

Haven't they done this a long time now? In fact, don't all devices that do significant IO use direct memory access?

What room, in such a design, for a CPU? Everything can be outsourced.

And the part that keeps track of the overall program execution state and issues these outsources tasks to other components is, for all intents and purposes, a CPU.

Have the router elements take care of heat and congestion issues, rather than compilers.

...What the heck are you talking about?

And this is marketspeak? Marketspeak for what? Name me a market that wants to eliminate complexity and abandon planned obsolescence in favour of a schizophrenic cross between a parallel Turing machine, a vector computer and a Beowulf cluster.

None does. It's the "schizophrenic" part that's the killer. Which is why, if you need to sell garbage anyway, you litter your product description with enough trendy buzzwords to convince technologically illiterate that it's cutting edge high tech. Which, if you are trying to polish a particularly smelly turd for a sale, can end up using almost all of them. And that can have great synergy with illusion-challenged human resources seeking a solution for cynicism management.

That right there is economist talk, and do not hold up to a reality check what so ever.

You have a very odd view of reality.

Idle production equipment is not wasted.

By definition that which is not used is wasted.

Idle workers are not wasted (unless they happens to still get paid).

Idle workers still need to eat, so either the factory pays them or the taxpayer will. But unfortunately, with all economic activity crippled by lack of energy, just like the factory was, there are no taxpayers any more, so there seems to be a small problem.

Sure, there is a "loss" of potential profits if the market is screaming for the widgets the factory is providing.

That, and people aren't getting the widgets. That's too bad if it's an iPhone factory, and worsel if it makes heart medicine.

But unless some book worm economist set up the whole gig, every damn widget produced, be at 0.01% production capacity or 100% capacity, is a profit earner once sold.

This might surprise you, but both buildings and machinery require maintenance. Furthermore, neither raw materials nor products simply teleport around, and the overhead of moving them is the greater the less you have. And finally, as I already noted, a lot of production processes can't simply be arbitrarily slowed - apart from chemical factories, how about things like casting molten stuff?

Your fridge can stand to shut down for five minutes to ride out a sudden but brief peak in demand. Those do happen.

My fridge can't shut down for days or weeks to ride out a period of calm and cloudy weather. Those also happen.

Also, are you suggesting the electric company gets an itemized list of every gadget I run? Because unless the fridge reports itself as such, I have a hard time imagining how you plan on cutting power to it without leaving me sitting in the dark.

The 'Corrie Break' is a very well-known example, occuring predictably during the mid-episode break of Coronation Street in the UK - it's caused by millions of people simutainously going to put the kettle on.

Indeed. So how do you suggest handling lunchtime? Should we just get used to treating warm food as a rare luxury in the green future?

If you're in an area that uses a water tower or top-of-building tank for pressure though, then the pump can be shut down during a deman peak.

I'm not, and if I was, I'd need to heat the tank to keep it from freezing. And of course pumping water needlessly high first and letting it down again means wasting power on friction.

You want real value for your real things.

The problem, of course, is that they're your chickens and land only because people agree so. Property rights are no less imaginary than currency.

The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination. Which is of course what allows people to value things differently, thus making trade possible. So it's only appropriate that we use a made-up concept of currency as an abstract representation for the made-up concept of value - or economic value, to precise.

In other words, there is not - and cannot even in theory be - non-funny money. Value being subjective is the very heart of the concept of economy. And that means any imaginable way of measuring it is ultimately just make-believe.

Gold and perhaps silver are credible currencies.

Well, no, because I have no convenient way of checking either the purity nor mass of any gold I might get, and a metal-backed currency can stop being so at any time. On top of that, gold is soft enough for wear being a problem, but still too hard to cut pieces off as needed, so we'd be stuck with precut gold pieces (coins) which can't be actually trusted to carry their nominal value due to wear and theft.

On a purely technical level, without getting into any economics or ideology, gold makes for a horrible currency.

Demand is far easier to manipulate.

No, it isn't. I need power for food storage, food preparation, Internet access and light. I also consume water, which takes power to prepare and pump. Trying to make any of these too expensive for me to afford - which is the reality behind talk of "incentives" - means it's time for torches & pitchforks.

Turn a factory on full power when the wind is blowing and slow it down when the wind isn't.

This means the factory is running at less than full speed on average, making it less profitable and thus more prone to be shut down. That's bad news for the employees and owners both. And that's assuming the factory can simply "slow down". Try reducing power to a chemical plant and it'll enter an emergency shutdown mode, hopefully only losing the raw materials under processing at the time (as opposed to, say, having them solidify in pipes or reactor vessels, or even outright exploding) but coincidentally creating work for hazardous waste disposal companies.

OpenCL is highly specific in application. Likewise, RDMA and Ethernet Offloading are highly specific for networking, SCSI is highly specific for disks, and so on.

Well, since the CPU already specializes in general-purpose serial computation, other nodes in a heterogenous environment must logically specialize for either generic parallel computation or specific applications, otherwise you have just plain old SMP.

But it's all utterly absurd. As soon as you stop thinking in terms of hierarchies and start thinking in terms of heterogeneous networks of specialized nodes, you soon realize that each node probably wants a highly specialized environment tailored to what it does best, but that for the rest, it's just message passing. You don't need masters, you don't need slaves. You need bus switches with a bit more oomph (they'd need to be bidirectional, support windowing and handle multipath routing where shortest route may be congested).

That describes neither how this heterogenous network of equal nodes would function (how do you dispatch tasks to nodes without the dispatching node becoming de facto master) nor what advantage it would have over current model (heterogenous network of nodes with some specializing in overall control). In fact it sounds a lot like buzzword bingo.

Above all, you need message passing that is wholly target-independent since you've no friggin' clue what the target will actually be in a heterogeneous environment.

You mean like the extension card mechanism PCs have had from the very beginning? Also, SATA seems to be remarkably uncaring of whether the device on the other end stores information on spinning disks or in electric capacitors.

Fuck the muslims! Seriously. FUCK THE MUSLIMS! They want global domination, from the Middle East, to Europe, the Americas, Russia and yes, China too.

How is that any different from, say, evangelical christians? Stop exporting your own brand of religious evil before you start casting stones on other people.

Anti-american muslims? That sir is a badge of honor!

Depends. Is it because they "hate your freedom"? Or is it because you keep propping up dictatorships and meddling in bloody wars in Middle-East? Which one do you think is more likely?

If we have this much surplus, clearly we're buying too much.

Not really. US's tactic is limiting casualties through high-tech warfare, and technology marches on. If you want to stay on the cutting edge, you'll constantly be replacing still-functional hardware with newer. This isn't limited to the military, of course, but is something all too familiar from the PC world.

A bigger problem is that giving military hardware to the police will eventually make the police into a domestic army. Is this desirable?

I was wondering why the Washington Post was spamming me! How did the Washington Post get my email address? Now I know. Jeff Bezos is allowing his "personal purchase" to have the email address I gave to Amazon.

Bezos apparently bought the Washington Post so that he can use it to try to force legislators to give him attention. The U.S. is becoming even more a rich-get-richer country.

The subjects of the spam messages:

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I think it is a very effective advertising campaign. The effect will be that people will try to avoid buying things from Amazon. Also, after the "Summer Sale", digital access to the Washington Post will cost $100 per year!

Finally, if we dump the cpu-centric view of computers that became obsolete the day the 8087 arrived (if not before), we can restructure the entire PC architecture to something rational. That will redistribute demand for capacity, to the point where we can actually beat Moore's Law on aggregate for maybe another 20 years.

Please explain how your vision is different from, say, OpenCL?

He also showed that one particular thing was absolute, if you recall.

Nope. Einstein showed consequences of the speed of light being a constant of nature. He didn't show or even predict that it was one, that was done by Maxwell's equations and various attempts to measure Earth's velocity relative to luminous aether (which turned out to be "zero").

And as it happens, one of those consequences is that timewise and spacewise distance are relative.