I'm looking at you Phoenix.

I've noticed that a lot in the West (I'm an east coaster -- the cities here just don't have the land available to do this anymore.) Western cities with miles and miles of flat territory around them tend to have these "planned community" developments where an entire city will be built on thousands of acres in one shot. Even if it's a planned city, people still need to go in and out of it, especially if your planned city has destinations like office parks or stadiums. (Didn't Phoenix do one of these to try to build up the area around their football stadium? And I'm sure I've read about huge abandoned planned cities in Vegas after the housing collapse.)

Where I live (metro New York,) you don't see these big bang developments -- you see random little developments sprinkled around the edges of the "insane commute zone." Northern New Jersey and Long Island have this - the first-line suburbs (example: Nassau County NY) are completely built out and full with zero land to spare. The problem is that much of the housing stock is from the 40s through the 60s on tiny lots. People still want the 2 acre lots and the 6000 sq. ft. monster houses, so they start creeping further and further out. When enough people do this, the infrastructure that was designed for a much less dense population gets overwhelmed. After about 20 years of this, more lanes get put in, encouraging more development, and making the problem worse.

Eminent domain those house and get some more lanes in.

Last time I was in LA, I noticed that lanes are not the problem. Some of the freeways are five to eight lanes in each direction. It's a crowding problem, not a civil engineering problem. Everyone is trying to get to destinations inside that corridor, _and_ through that corridor to get to other destinations. Since metro LA is hundreds of square miles of mostly low density development, travel distances to get anywhere are longer than they would be in a more compact city. Now, this Waze app is using drivers' smartphone realtime data to steer people off this road and onto surface streets, which makes the overall problem worse.

Part of it is the human factor -- yes, I know Google will perfect the self driving car in 2015, yada yada yada, but for now, you have people driving cars. People get into accidents. People have reaction times that mean they can't take their foot off the brake the instant any stopped traffic clears. (Try this sometime at the end of a long line of stopped traffic when the light turns green -- watch how long it takes for the light to turn, then Car 1 to go, then 2, then n, then you. Each driver has built in reaction delays that make this process longer than it would be in an ideal environment.)

That particular stretch of road (405) is pretty much the _only_ north south passage through that part of LA because of geography (and crappy urban planning.) It could be 30 lanes in each direction and still be slow.

App or no app, traffic in cities and suburbs is something that is going to need to be dealt with somehow. Cities like Boston or New York at least have a workable public transit system to keep some cars off the roads. LA is totally different -- it was built around cars and is only now getting a very small set of public transit choices. Buses do nothing when they're stuck in the same traffic everyone else is. Whenever I go to California for work (either northern or southern,) it amazes me how much people put up with to live there. I would go nuts spending 2 hours doing a 10 mile trip each direction every day.

Some trends are encouraging from a traffic perspective, but maybe not from a demographic one. Younger people aren't buying suburban houses and having big families the way they used to, so it's possible cities will become denser like they are in Europe. The big thing that has to stop, especially in mid-size cities, is the suburban sprawl. The ability to expand for miles in every direction directly contributes to messy traffic problems. Urban planners need to look into reclaiming hollowed-out cities and first ring suburbs, and getting people to move back into them.

I doubt it was new then, either. Businesses don't like to spend money, and IT gets classified as a cost center.

Then your IT department needs to become a business partner and enabler. That's the tact we've taken, the vast majority of our costs are in projects, and we let the business drive those with us helping to steer them, if someone complains about IT spending we ask them which of their projects they want us to defund. We recently completed an acquisition equal to about 40% of the size of the company, without adding any significant headcount, all because our IT systems have gotten to the point where the business can absorb that many extra units without adding significantly to their workload and the work around the new assets is mostly loading the data into the system which we do for them. Since we've taken this approach our budget issues have become almost non-existent and our interaction with the business have become much less adversarial.

So stupid, it's not hard to achieve damn near 100% uptime on power, get feeds from two substations A and B, put each one through two UPS's and use two different sets of generators with different fuel sources as backup so you have A, A', B, and B', use a transfer switch to feed your equipment's A side supply from A with A' in reserve, and the B side supply from B' and have B in reserve (that way one of your power sources stays up without a transfer switchover even if you have a fuel problem). If you want to further reduce the chances of an outage at the cost of some increased complexity use different UPS vendors and different transfer switch vendors so you don't have a possible common design flaw in both paths. The whole setup would probably cost as much as shutting down Heathrow for around 10 minutes. I've got this setup minus the redundant generators and I'm just running a midsized enterprise, not a freaking critical piece of national (and international) infrastructure.

but replacement costs are still lower that energy costs long term.

I'm not buying it, my VMWare hosts are pretty large boxes and they've used 630kWhrs since June when they were installed, that comes out to $128/year or so, and that's for primary usage, DX CRAC units have a PUE of ~1.28 which means it costs around $36/year to cool. Even with really cheap servers you'd have to have a LOT of them and have very little effect on AFR to justify it. I'm sure at some scale it makes sense or everyone wouldn't be researching it so hard and doing so many pilot datacenters, but if you don't have thousands and thousands of identical servers (99.999+% of installations) it's just not worth it.

Huh? There's no way a missile can outmaneuver the optical targeting system on these things, the biggest threat will be surface skimming that will reduce the targeting systems reaction time, but the newest class of ships have pretty good synthetic aperture radar and the computer aided target discrimination is getting better all the time.

Not perfectly, and the energy absorbed from a 30kw laser will quickly darken the surface accelerating the rate of energy absorption. Here's a video of a 500W laser cutting into a mirrored surface.

One can either massively over produce in summer or rely on grid power in the winter. If one is relying on winter grid power then the equipment generating that power will only be used a fraction of the year.
My average power draw during the summer is ~4x my winter draw since I use natural gas heat but air conditioning, and I'm fairly typical. So you design your solar system to produce ~75% of summer demand and your grid demand remains relatively constant yet significantly lower than today which should actually reduce the utilities costs significantly since they will need fewer plants and less grid infrastructure and fewer grid upgrades.

Do you watch use your computer after dark? There is 400 watts.
LOL, on slashdot that's funny. My VMWare hosts which are dual 10 core Xeon's with 384GB of ram, multiple network cards and fiber channel HBA's peak just over 300W:
Last Week-
average 183 W | 625 BTU/hr
peak 301 W | 1027 BTU/hr

Unless you're running dual GPU with a 60" display there's no way you're using 400W.

The problem is off-grid systems are a LOT more than 2x wholesale grid prices, and storage tech isn't moving anywhere near the pace of panel production (it turns out storing electricity chemically in an efficient and reversible process is really, really tough to do economically)

The VCP isn't very valuable, but the VCDX certainly is.

CCIE is God level

Not really, as of 3/2013 there were 38,005 worldwide, a little more than one in 200,000 people worldwide holds the cert. That IS roughly the same density as neurosurgeons though, and those guys do tend to think they're gods too.

You're misreading, the QuantumFlow Processor IS the ASIC
Further, each PPE can access hardware feature acceleration of network address and prefix lookups, hash lookups, WRED, Traffic Policers, range lookups, and TCAM for advanced classification and access-control-list (ACL) acceleration as it processes packets

If you turn off dCEF and force all packets through the RP CPU you'd quickly bring an ASR to it's knees. By comparison the Cisco 7200 did everything in CPU, but it had much lower bounds to its capabilities.

Google SDXC nGB and you'll find plenty of ads for cheap memory, the PNY one seems to be the only reasonable one at 256GB, but there are quite a few of the usual second tier players at 128GB.