Wow, you're right!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

No, that's not desert. CA has deserts, but most of the state is not a desert and certainly coastal southern california and the southern san jaquin valley are not deserts. They may be dry, but they ain't deserts.

I always cringe when I see stories about CA water conditions because they bring out comments like yours that try to redefine the meanings of words like desert and drought.

Well if you anchor the pumping stations to the ocean floor you can probably use tidal action and some one-way valves(like you have in the blood vessels in your legs) to have a distributed pump. Freshwater is lighter than salt water, right? I'd try to use that desity difference to drive the flow.

I wonder how feasible it would be to grab freshwater from the mouth of the columbia river and transport it via flexible, non-rigid tubing laid on the seafloor through the SF bay and up to the CA aqeduct? I bet you could lay it fairly cheaply and you wouldn't need to worry about real estate prices.

No, CA is not "mostly desert". Not even close.

I always hate these kinds of discussions when there are too many engineers in the room. Of course, digital is better. You can prove it with Nyquist's theorem. In the long run, digital will win.

That said, there are numerous implicit signal-changing steps which tend to happen with analog equipment that people often find pleasing and which are not/haven't been sucessfully emulated in most digital audio equipment.

Take guitar amps. I've got a couple of decent Roland digital amps. They do an OK job of modelling a few different old tube amps. Do they sound like my friend's old blackface quad reverb? Oh god no. There is some magic going on there that the digital guys haven't figured out how to reproduce. Even vs. odd harmonics? Yeah I think we get that now, but there's more in there and we're not successfully modelling it. I can enumerate a lot of factors we're probably missing(power supply brownout at high volume, capacitive and inductive feedback loops, tube nonlinearities, transformer nonlinearities, temperature fluctuations, microphonic components... etc etc etc) but there are still more we haven't really considered yet.

That said, there are still people who prefer solid-state guitar and HiFi sound to analog colored sound. A lot of it is what you're used to. People hear different things, sometimes due to culture, sometimes due to physiology... it's complicated.

Back to vinyl records - they do have a nicer sound in many cases, clicks and pops aside. It's probably a result of the RIAA EQ and the physics of a needle riding over vinyl, but I don't really know. One thing I do think has value is the act of listening to a complete record. Not only are you appreciating the artists' complete work as they intended it, the ritual of listening to a record often entails setting aside time and space to solely enjoy that record. You can't compare listening to, say, Dark Side of the Moon, while lying on your couch in a dark room to listening to a few out-of-context songs on your headphones while riding a bus.

Whatever... we aren't going to solve this battle on /.

you're probably autistic... haha...

ok, seriously, if you like this and you live in San Diego, why not check out something similar(albeit with a mechanical bent): http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum...

Good point about the socket strips.

The point? Well, it gives you an appreciation for digital layout(crosstalk, trace capacitance, etc). You also understand intimately how the pieces fit together, so when you encounter them in an integrated package you have a better feeling for what's going on. I get you though - I wouldn't try to use a wirewrapped 68k for anything I need to rely on.

Getting it working on a breadboard is no small feat. Kudos. I'm sure it helps to only run at 2MHz.

Rather than, as has been suggested, spin a PCB for it, why not try wire-wrapping next time? Less capacitance than a breadboard and a bit more permanent.

Back at DeVry(haha) we built 7MHz 68k systems using wirewrap. Great times. I freaking love 68k assembly. We(well, the smart ones) also used 22V10 PALs for address decoding to save on 74 series logic chips.

Another next step - find a chip with an MMU so you can run real linux. I think a 68020 or '030 has one. Much higher clock speed too. The pin density is still low enough(I think it's 0.1 but in a grid) that you can work with it. Check old electronic stores' back shelves for sockets.

Don't get me wrong, reddit sucks... it's just better than slashdot in some of the technical subreddits.

The smart folks left /. years ago.

I still use /. as a news aggregator, as they *sometimes* post stories that I don't find elsewhere.

In the olden days you'd find some real insights in the comments section. Nowadays you're better off on reddit(*shudder*).

Microsoft should really consider a re-org that puts their consumer focused products(xbox, phones, etc... not the windows OS though) in a separate division with a different name.

Put aside all of your feelings for Microsoft and just consider for a second how terrible a name like Microsoft is when it comes to cool, fashionable devices. Micro... soft... that's not a name I'd like associated with any kind of status symbol purchase. Sure, it's fine in the enterprise software space where image is less important, but if they ever want to seriously consider competing in the personal electronics space they'll need to change not only their branding but their name.

Nope, just an old ('08?) 24" iMac. I'm not sure retina would make their poor color choices(the blue folders are horrendously loud) or lack of gradients/shadows.

Nope, didn't backup. It's the wife's desktop, so if it died, nothing of importance would be lost. Besides, I backed up a few months ago when I upgraded to a SSD.

Upgraded yesterday. I can't comment on the internal changes, but IMHO the new look is ugly. It even looks like the 'X' in the close button isn't centered. I want my old look back.

I've tried taking SSRIs a few times over the years for depression/anxiety/OCD. I haven't been able to last longer than 36 hours. I feel like I am experiencing all of the anxiety and uncontrolled mental energy of LSD without any of the good feelings or positive emotions. I think I have a wacko serotonin system. Tramadols get me reallly high(like taking an E pill) and I am very sensitive to serotonin-system drugs like LSD and psilocybin.