I really like Hydro power, but

1) you can't simply put hydro power generation where you like it. Hydro power needs established geophysical features in order to work. And, as luck would have it, the things that make a location a good candidate for hydropower also make it a good candidate for farms, valuable waterfront properties, wildlife preserves, public parks, etc etc.

2) Believe it or not, it's not just nuclear power that environmental whacktavists have succeeded in choking out. There are dams that have been torn down to restore animal habitats, for instance. Building a small nuke plant is massively less environmentally disruptive than building large scale hydro.

The chief problem, in my view, with hydro is that you cannot put hydro plants out where people won't care. You have to put them where the water is, and often, people have reasons for wanting such natural water features left alone.

You can put a nuke plant anywhere you like - in a submarine, on a space craft, etc. You bring the fuel to it, you move the waste away from it. The nuke plant I think is fundamentally better adapted to the realities of power generation if for no other reason than fuel source portability. In this way, it beats hydro, and, to a large extent, solar.

A 100k john deere combine is several years old.

New, you'd be hard pressed to get one for under 400k I think.

This.

One of my first professional programming projects was to take a look at the custom C++ billing software our company had purchased from a contract programmer.

I had a long unix and programming background, and was back for a summer job after doing 1 semester of C++ in college.

My boss told me, since I was the only one who had C++ experience, to start documenting the system.

At the time, we were using IRIX, and so I was using the SGI compiler and tools suite, which were, I believe, licensed from EDG. The point is that there was a very nice call graph visualizer. This was helpful for understanding things at a superficial level.

However, what was even better was just running the program a bunch of times on test data and seeing what it did while under the debugger.

While my summer began with the task of documenting the system, as I learned things I'd report them to my boss.

By the end of the summer, I had re-written some fundamental parts of the system; I'd moved some of the processing outside, and I pre-processed and pre-sorted the data.

The overall execution time went from many hours to about 45 minutes to calculate monthly bills. THe key innovation was replacing the inner loop of the charge tabulation -- which was 2 or 3 levels of nested linked list traversal.

Instead, I used the standard unix sort tools to pre-sort the data files before being loaded into the system, and I changed the system to use a data structure that supported a binary search.

The majority of the code got left alone. By understanding the code under a debugger, and realizing that how it worked on production data was much different than how it performed on the test data it was originally delivered with, I was able to make a critical set of changes that had a huge impact.

In general, I spend as much time as I can not writing code, but instead, understanding how the existing system works. For a current project, I've spent the last two weeks playing with somebody else's code, and now I've expanded it so that it can also operate on my data sets, and I've probably changed fewer than 100 lines across about 5 different projects.

Your complaint about anonymity stems from the fact that you suppose that if people weren't anonymous, it would be possible to track them down in the real world and subject them to consequences.

That is precisely what I don't want. Not because I want people to threaten others with real world violence, but precisely because that is what I don't want.

You want to know who people are so if you don't like what they say, you can send others to track them down and punish them.

I went to trolltalk.com just now and was disappointed.

I actually very much like the idea of the internet being a place, or, at least having places, where there is no authority, no oversight, and no rule makers. Where if you say something that upsets people, you are mercilessly attacked -- with speech.

I think of my very early days on IRC - and all of the new ideas I was exposed to.. all of the people who said extremely offensive things... and there was nobody to do anything about it (except perhaps encourage it)... I had to learn to adapt, and I had to learn that other people's words were just that - words -- and that there wasn't any fairy angel to come and save me from not having to hear things I didn't like.

Society needs places like that.

You are correct that what twitter does is twitter's choice. I don't use or care about twitter, because very few people have the talent to say anything at all, much less say it well in 100 characters.

It seems that people are endeavouring to make the internet like the "real world" - where speech codes exist, where stupid people flourish, and where idiots expect others to put up with their idiocy.

I was hoping that the real world would become a bit more like the internet - where there are no rulers, no more identity than one wishes to have, and people come and where they please as they please.

I prefer the online company of intelligent people who are purposefully offensive much more than I prefer idiots who are purposefully offended.

Obviously, I haven't read a 300 page PDF before posting.

But self driving cars don't fundamentally change the traffic problem. And what is needed _today_ in dense urban areas is a fundamental change.

One of the easiest ways to think about this is the impact that cars _necessarily_ have on density. Christopher Alexander explained this simply by thinking about how many square meters of surface different transportation systems take up per person.

Walking is relatively efficient - a person walking only needs perhaps 1 square meter to walk as fast as they like; if they are careful and are going slower, multiple walkers need even less space.

Now consider the personal car. Standing completely still, an automobile needs several meters of ground space. If it is moving in a stream of other vehicles, there must be buffers in front and behind it. It is not unreasonble to think of the ground footprint needed for a moving car as 3 meters of width and 4 meters of length, plus multiples of 4 meters ahead and behind, as speed increases.

So a car - even standing still - takes an order of magnitude more surface space than a human who is walking.

This is the fundamental problem with the individual vehicle. For each person you add, you need 10x that many meters of available surface area to the sub-segments of your road network that that person's automobile will be using.

I very much love the automobile and the driving experience. I do my own vehicle maintenance and i have a dedicated trackday car for when I can get away for a weekend of lapping. I live on a farmstead and there are 6 road legal vehicles parked on my property.

However, cars completely destroy urban density, and it doesn't matter how clean you make them, how self-driving you make them, and, how much safety buffer space you strip away. They simply use space too inefficiently for there to be any meaningful density.

Dense urban areas should have pervasive rail coverage, and that rail coverage should largely be in ugly spaces - like underground, or along the perimeter of industrial districts. On average, someone should be able to get to a subway station after a couple blocks of walking.

In urban areas, the roads as we have them today should largely be repurposed for use by busses for trunk routes that are somehow not well served by rail, and for point to point trips in cabs/ubers/lyfts. Private, single vehicle use of the roadways should be exceptionally expensive, and thus, a rarity undertaken only when financially justifiable by the end user. Electric mini-trucks (as seen in Asia) should be responsible for delivery of larger-than-human cargoes, both personal and business related.

At some point, intermodal containers that are human-scale make sense for moving goods within cities, e.g. imagine a standardized container that was about 1 meter cube; this could be loaded into a special cargo car on most current subway lines, and loading/unloading the containers from that car could be done rapidly and automatically... a half meter intermodal cube could be reasonably carried by a person, through door ways, up stairs, etc, and 8 of them could stack next to or on top of the 1 meter cube...

Many new yorkers already live without cars and take deliveries; bringing efficiencies of scale and uniformity to the delivery system would be a good idea. Democratizing it so that, for instance, at the airport you put your luggage into intermodal cubes (or, depending on where you travelled from, your luggage actually IS intermodal cubes...) and ship them off to your neighborhood, and this is largely done automatically, means that you are not carrying heavy things across a 45 minute subway ride, and you do not feel the need to take a cab ride, and yet you and your things still get to the destination at the same time..

Once cabs and cars are not gridlocking every inch of pavement, some roads should get turned into pedestrian areas; outdoor marketplaces, greenspaces, etc.

For anyone that hasn't had the pleasure of doing so, I really recommend spending some tourist time in the city of Munich. They have an exceptional rail system. You may not have any idea how nice urban life can be.

If you didn't, for a moment, know the appropriate way to pronounce the last name "Tsukinov", you might assume that the "T" is silent and that the u uses the short vowel sound instead of the long vowel sound.

In that case, it would be pronounced something like "sucking off", which is very amusing, in a juvenile way.

And, if Slashdot wasn't overrun with people looking to get offended, and you were as juvenile as I am, you'd giggle about it and move on.

But because Slashdot _is_ overrun by SJWs and other people who love to get offended, I look forward to a lecture about how this joke oppresses women; this joke is responsible for $calamity, and that I'd never make this joke about a man, blah blah blah.

To which I say: Lighten up. You are the cancer that is killing society.

The government, of course.

#insert observations/law/drferris.h

(preprocessed for your convenience)

"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted â" and you create a nation of law-breakers â" and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.â

A funny idea I had once was that after the revolution, the new government gets a 100 page blank notebook to write the laws in.

Once they fill up the last page, all of them are executed.

The next group of guys gets a 100 page blank book.

Have you tried using Windows XP on a touch device?

You know, you're right. Nobody should ever try anything new with voice interaction. We should leave that shit off because its buggy or only knows how to do web searches based on bad guesses.

We shouldn't spend any time putting this stuff in front of users and learning what works well, what doesn't work, what people like, what they don't like. God forbid we try and see if there are ways to integrate it with how people currently use computers.

Instead, what we should do is wait until the 23rd century, when we have starships. Even though we've done no incremental work between now and then, in the distant future, voice recognition and natural language processing is just going to be really, really good, because The Future. It's just going to build itself, and when we are bald and say "COMPUTER" to our starship, its going to listen and then do exactly the right thing, and nobody is going to ask why the bridge has so many buttons and levers and consoles and shit if there is a ship-wide computer with unlimited power and perfect human voice recognition. And we're going to gloss right over how a near-Ai level of natural language understanding still needs us to say COMPUTER first before it figure out who we're talking to, as if anyone else on the bridge could execute the command we're asking when we're staring off into nowhere instead of at another human in the same room...

Anyway, I'm running 9926 on two machines - neither of which are touch-enabled. I've never talked to the thing yet. It appears to run faster than 8.0/8.1. The start menu behavior is better, and you can flip back and forth between little-menu-on-desktop or "big screen of metro" with a simple gesture.

The UI feels positively snappy. The paradigm has been reversed entirely from 8 - now, metro apps run on your desktop - instead of your desktop is some weird bad neighborhood nobody wants you to go to.

I think a lot of people will like Windows 10.

It depends on the specific service member in question.

http://oathkeepers.org/

During the time of the US Civil war, Americans shot their literal brothers - not just their squad mates.

It starts with one soldier. How many follow, and when they follow, depends on the rhetoric of the separatists, how they conduct themselves, how they spread their message, and the counteracting rhetoric and actions of the government.

All of us are alive because people on both sides of the Atlantic with their finger on the "launch" button skipped opportunities to press it. Soldiers are people in difficult situations, trying to balance many opposing directives.

RT has desktop mode.

It's patently untrue that the web is the future for "the kinds of apps that made windows dominant"

Actually, windows was dominant for every kind of app. The growth in apps of all sectors - LOB, entertainment, etc -- is on devices, and people regularly pan device apps that are just thin shells around a browser control.

People want native apps on their devices. MDD (multi-device-development) is something enterprise is very interested in -- they need to deal with a BYOD workforce, and they always want to economize on IT spend.

If it had been feasible to make Win32 apps run well on ARM, don't you think we would have done that?

The most insightful thing you wrote is this:

"But yes, Intel hasn't been asleep, and ARM is no longer as much of a requirement for mobile devices"

Consider the following -- and note that while I work at MS, I am neither privy to, nor attempting to disclose -- any high level strategy

1) Microsoft delivers a lot of value to enterprise customers because of app compat
2) think back a few years at what the CPU landscape looked like -- think about the power consumption of Intel's offerings. Remember, there was no ATOM yet.
3) app compat, battery life, performance -- if you don't have a low-power native x86 processor, you can only get two of these at a time.
4) Enterprise customers want all three
5) Intel, years ago, didn't appear to have any intention to deliver a low-cost, low power x86 part
6) this meant that MS would be unable to deliver low cost, new form factor mobile devices that could still run legacy software
7) this would force a wedge between new form factors and the Microsoft platform advantages (great compatability)

Clearly, what needed to happen is that something had to convince intel to develop a low cost, low power, good performing x86 chip

Based on 20+ years history, considering ARM, AMD, dec Alpha, etc, what makes intel innovate well and do its best work?

A credible marketplace threat to Wintel.

Claim: The purpose of Windows+ARM was to force intel to develop a low-power, low-cost x86 chip. If Windows+ARM took off in its own right, great. But the main purpose has been to secure a $99 x86 windows tablet -- which means that enterprises have the price points and form factors they want, and the app compat they need.

Exhibit A:
http://www.amazon.com/HP-Strea...

I happen to like my RT tablet -- but the Surface Pro is a credible do-it-all device, and now software that runs on the Pro is the same software that runs on your $99 HP tablet and your $4999 gaming rig.

Back when windows+ARM started, the intel hardware to allow that continuum didn't exist.

As I said -- nobody at MS tells me how things really go down. But this is a high stakes game. The people at MS aren't stupid.