I understand that one of the current problems with desalination filtering is that the salt left behind clogs up the filter fairly quickly. Hopefully researchers will test to know for sure, but this may well suffer from the same problem. The other problem is that the water wants to be with the salt - ie. it's an energetically stable state. You have to put in some energy (usually via pressure) to get it through a filter and away from the salt. Compare that to simply filtering out fine particulates that might settle out on their own given enough time. I would imagine a more practical use might be in prepping water for chip (read IC) fab plants where the water used must be extremely pure. I'm just guessing here - it may still not meet the requirements with filtration alone.

Since it's Gingrich proposing this government funded government housing project on the moon, I suppose he'd be the first one we ship off to this socialist moon utopia you describe...

If perhaps Gingrich wants moon exploration to be handled by private enterprise, maybe he should put his money where is mouth is and go start an actual business, like what Romney did (sort of), instead of applying for a fat cat government job, er, running for President.

You seem to be in a situation where PEBKAC - it's corrupting the text of your post. Of course what you meant to say is that the Open Source model does not guarantee security but simply allows interested parties to audit for and fix security problems independent of any single company or other rights holding restricting access to the source. Generally we find that the Open Source model has worked well for Linux and has been effective at addressing security concerns. The question is sometimes not whether problems exist, but whether or not they are found and corrected.

Speaking of security on Windows - if that post of yours isn't a case where PEBKAC, you might want to install some anti virus software - looks like someone might have pwnd your machine.

We see in practice that this sort of damage is extremely difficult to prove, takes years to resolve in court, and is too easily written off as part of the 'cost of doing business' in most cases. In the meantime the damage is still being done to the environment and to the health of the people living in it. In West Virginia, many people affected by the coal industry are dying before they see any resolution in court. If you have acid rain falling on your head, how do you know which of the thousands of factories are responsible? Does everyone affected by the acid rain have to sew every factory operator. In such a system, the only people who win are the lawyers.

What's needed is a system that prevents the damage from being done in the first place. You could certainly argue that court awarded damages could be made high enough to deter bad practices, but that would just encourage frivolous lawsuits and every more acrimony about "environmental activists" undermining profits.

Just to play devil's advocate, if Libertarians really believe the courts could address environmental abuse, why aren't they supporting reforms to the existing court system? It seems to me that every time an issue like this comes up they're almost invariably on the side of pollutersm railing against 'activist judges' and 'environMENTALists.' They give me little hope that such a system would work any better in the great Libertarian utopia.

I'd like to offer an example of responsible environmental protection. I went on a whale watching cruise out of Boston a couple years back and they mentioned that shipping lanes had recently been rerouted to bypass whale feeding areas. Research showed that the whales only gather in certain areas. Rerouting the shipping lanes is yet another case of 'big' government and environmentalists interfering in business, but the fact is that fewer ships hitting whales means less damage to vessels and fewer disruptions to shipping. It's a win-win: safer whales and smoother more effective business operations. This sort of win-win arrangement could never have happened if someone had to go to the courts and try to prove damage. Who's the victim that could even present the lawsuit in this case? Businesses would never make the change on their own - even if the shipping lanes were managed privately - because no company or trade association would ever justify the cost of an "environmental study" to determine the best routes. Maybe they'd do it to pay lip service to good stewardships or as part of a "green" pr campaign, but never because they actually intend to do it properly or take the results seriously.

The fact is that for many years the US had a very Libertarian approach to the environment and many other areas. Regulation and other government interferance only came about because under those laissez-faire policies we had the biggest abuse of the environment the Nation has ever seen. The existing systems have done far better and the question should be how to make them better, not whether or not we should return to an era of policies that clearly didn't work. In some cases, the current system has motivated individual landowners to implement environmental solutions themselves. There was a case a while back of ranchers setting up turtle crossings under roads to keep the government from stepping in and marking the lands as protected. If individuals can solve the problem better than the government - show what they've done and allow independent confirmation of the results - then so much the better for everyone. You can't tell me though that the same results would have been acheived with a glut of lawsuits and fines.

that "smart" will be the adjective of this decade the way "on demand", "extreme" and "turbo" were misused in previous decade.

You missed a few:

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The electric grid can't handle any more load and there's too much government regulation preventing us from upgrading it.

Using electricity in this country means burning coal and obviously it's much harder to mine coal and haul it by train across the country than it would be to extract oil from unstable countries, move it around the globe in a boat, refine it, then truck it to filling stations, and then for me to personally go get it every week or three. Oil is just so much simpler.

I have a gas guzzler now. Nobody's going to tell me that I don't already have the best thing on or off* the road.

I need a vehicle I can use for my weekend trips to the mountains / lakes. We only have my truck, my wife's car, my daughter's sports car, my son's car, the RV and the jeep. If I get an electric car I just won't have anything for the weekend trips.

* off road refers to that time I drove through my neighbor's lawn to run over his campaign posters

</sarcasm>

Well, Rasberry Pi could be described as a proof of concept for the whole SoC as a PC substitute idea. At least for the Windows world, the popular software is only offered as precompiled binaries for x86 based platforms. It may be a while before there's a critical mass of ARM based offerings to attract serious commercial attention. Windows 8 may change this but I think it's still too early to tell.

I think upgradability is possibly not the main advantage of desktops though it's certainly a key factor for many people. I'd argue that a sizeable number of PC's, if not the majority, will never get an upgrade that requires opening the case (so, I'm excluding new peripherals). That's why there's a market for things like onboard (ie. on the mobo) audio, NIC, and others including sometimes GPU.

Hmm. 5-6 years. I'm guessing that's enough time, given the corporate turnover rate, for anyone who could be held responsible for entrusting such data to Symantec to pack their bags and pass the buck. For anyone who's left, how's it go again? Something like, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment." I wonder if there's an equivalent today regarding security and trusting your data to third parties. Clearly, having management learn something other than "VPN equals security" and "large corporations are trustworthy" would be asking too much.

I guess I'm playing with cheat codes. All I have to do is check out and compile one of our solutions and I've automatically got all the "Power Coder" achievements. Until today, I'd never considered any of those attributes to be things anyone would want to consider as goals - not that they are inherently bad. That's nothing special either. I think there are hoardes of programmers out there working on software for which this is true.

Where's the points for things like consistant formatting and naming conventions? How about a low ratio of intermodule dependencies comparied to complexity (ie. orthogonality)? How about points for checking error conditions? How about points for adding a unit test or updating the comments around the code you're working on? Is "Equal Opportunist (10 points) Write a class with public, private, protected and internal members. It's all about scope." really the best they could come up with for a Top 6 list? It's sad to see how far they've fallen since the days of Steve McConnell and Code Complete.

Indeed. I often hear the accusation that scientists are afraid to challenge the consensus for fear of losing grant money. Actually, it seems that all the incentives are rather to challenge the mainstream. After all, in science you get famous by discovering something new not by blindly reenforcing old beliefs.

It seems SOPA is trending higher than "Wikipedia alternative" at least according to the information available at the moment. It will be interesting to see which really spikes today (if any).

This smells a little bit like Y2K in that the real problem was that noone wanted to pay to find and fix the remaining incompatible code. From my vantage point it appears that it is still cheaper for MIT to do nothing. I wonder if there's a reasonable price point at which it would be worth their while to free up some address space to sell. Of course, that might involve asking cantankerous professors to change some static ip's that they've cherished for years. I suppose I'll be ice skating on an imaginary frozen lake of fire before that happens. By contrast, the only revenue stream I can think of that would help offset the cost of going to IPv6 is grant money *rolls eyes*.

Disclaimer: my only experience with IPv6 was on a Linux client machine. For me, it meant horribly slow web browsing as many requests involved waiting for IPv6 to timeout before if would fall back and try IPv4. I opted for lazy and just disabled IPv6 rather than go looking for a solution.

Funny you should mention. Some researchers recently published experimental results which, in spite of their best efforts to check and rerun the tests, still contradicts Einstein's theory. Instead of being "ignored" or "told they are wrong" this has sparkd a healthy debate in the community where people either need to determine why the experimental results are not as expected, perform their own experiments to provide meaningful and relevant data for comparison, or they need to accept that the current consensus is wrong (at least to a certain extent) and reflect on this new information we've just learned about the world. That's how science works.

Note that those researchers have received plenty of criticism for their findings but they have chosen to participate in the scientific process instead of doing something childish such as forming groups to lobby the government to prevent Einstein's theories from being taught in public schools. If someone has credible data to the contrary of the current findings and concensus they will get much further by presenting their own data than they will by trying to censor the data and conclusions of others.

BTW. The US Congress isn't exactly a credible authority on matters of science and technology. You would do a bit better to find sources from people who actually have some knowledge about the subject.