Okay, so the submitter asked for "good" solutions, and this may not qualify, but it's what I do: A whiteboard at each location, with a camera pointed at it. I can't draw on your drawing, but I can see what you draw, and you can see what I draw. I've experimented with various web-based shared whiteboards, but they all require drawing on the computer. Even with a tablet (either Wacom-style attached to a laptop/PC or a mobile device) and a pen, a real whiteboard is better.

In my case, generally there are at most three locations in the meeting, and usually only two: My home office and a group of people in a conference room. Having more may make the "real whiteboards" solution less effective.

Damn straight. It's like all these stupid GUI interfaces. I mean, I can see using a graphical interface if you're editing photos or something, but for reading and writing text? It's ridiculous and just makes it so that stupid people can do it without having to understand anything.

It all started with visual text editors, you know? Line editing was good enough, heck, you could argue that it made things too easy, too. What was really good was when we used toggle switches to enter data and read the output from a sequence of lights. If you can't mentally translate binary to ASCII you don't deserve the power of computation.

</sarcasm>

I think this is just a further extension of the location bar vs search bar change.

I remember when I first saw the Chrome omnibox. It offended me. Mildly, but still. I know the difference between a search and a URL, and I am perfectly capable of clicking into the correct bar. Then I actually used the omnibox for a while (because Chrome was so blindingly fast compared to other browsers at the time) and found that when I jumped back to Firefox I got annoyed at the mental effort required to use the split location/search fields, even though it was trivial.

The fact is that low effort is not the same as zero effort. I like the omnibox because I just click and type, no need to spend a millisecond deciding which box I should click into.

I can see what you describe as the next step, so people don't have to bother understanding, or thinking about if they do understand, the difference between "cnn" and "cnn.com". Or I suppose those who type slowly may prefer to omit the last four characters purely for that reason.

But much higher velocity, which can be combined with frequent runs to create high capacity.

That would provide massive throughput, but higher latency.

(I'm a Google employee)

Internal backlash was massive, and as far as I can tell hugely stronger than the fairly mild complaints outside the company. The strength of the internal opposition took me by surprise. I understood that while Google doesn't wish to censor the web it also doesn't wish to be the entity serving up sexual content. That seems like a reasonable position to me. I thought the 30-day notice was a bit short, even though the terms of service only offer 14 days, but other than that it seemed reasonable to me, basically bringing blogger into line with the policies in place for YouTube, etc., for years.

Many of my colleagues, however, vehemently disagreed, calling it censorship, application of one region's values upon the world and generally declaiming it as the beginning of the end for Google as a force for openness and access to information. Many called the decision deeply inconsistent with Google's stated mission, "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The internal memegen system was awash in anti-censorship memes, and one of the memegen team went further and more or less shut the system down in protest, replacing it with a complaint about the blogger shutdown. Eng-misc, a high-volume internal mailing list for random discussions of, well, anything, was overrun with threads complaining about it. The founders got hammered with questions and complaints in the weekly company-wide TGIF meeting (which is actually held on Thursday these days, so more Googlers around the world can see it live).

It's been quite the storm.

As soon as the internal reaction started I expected the reversal, though it went further than I expected. I thought the result would just be more notice, maybe 90 days. But I suppose that's because I thought the basic decision was reasonable, and only the short notice unreasonable. Many others felt differently, obviously.

It's going to be interesting to see if this provokes re-examination of the YouTube and G+ policies. I doubt it, but I was wrong about the nature of the reversal, too.

Did Musk ever propose transcontinental hyperloops? I don't believe he did. As I recall this was always intended as a regional transportation technology, something for distances short enough that air travel is inconvenient because of the airport delays at both ends, but long enough that traditional train travel is too slow.

Technically, yes, with the caveat that you'd need regular floating reboost platforms with significant power generation scattered all throughout the Pacific, and of course maintaining the track perfectly straight while floating (one presumes at a fixed depth under the water) provides its own engineering challenges. But room-temperature rarified hydrogen instead of rarified air would allow one to make the journey at about Mach 4. Faster if it's hot hydrogen.

Are you under the misconception that hyperloop is a pneumatic tube system?

Hyperloop is a magnetically-accelerated a ground-effect aircraft operating in the sort of extremely rarified air normally only found at high altitudes. The tube's purpose is to provide such a rarified atmosphere near the ground. It's not a pneumatic train. It's not a vactrain. It's not maglev. It's a ground-effect aircraft.

Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers. Note that even Musk's proposal isn't as far as you can take the concept. If you fill the tube with very low pressure water vapor instead of very low pressure air (via more pumping to overwhelm leaks, plus water vapor injection), your top speed jumps 40%. Fill it with hydrogen and it jumps 300% (normally hydrogen is a real pain to work with due to flammability, embrittlement, etc, but the densities in question are so low that such issues are mostly avoided). So we're talking the potential for hyperloop "speedways" for long distance runs that could blow airplanes out of the water.

The low numbers of passengers per capsule is really key to making the concept economical. Compare, say, monorail track with a full sized rail bridge. The former is vastly cheaper per unit distance because the peak loadings are so much lower, because the mass of the monorail trains are so much lower. A computer-controlled high launch rate of small, high speed capsules means you're spreading the loading out greatly, which means greatly reduced loading and thus materials costs.

Still, while Musk has been thinking of Hyperloop stations in the "airport" concept, he really needs to get out of that mindset. His proposed plan had them on the outskirts of cities. Airports are only on the outskirts of cities because they *must* be. You greatly reduce your utility by doing that, by making people catch connecting trains. Hyperloop can extend just fine into towns; with his two proposed endpoints in particular there are excellent rail routes into town that are quite straight that it could be built over.

End to end encrypted communications and the concept of circle of trust. The original creator of PGP is involved, but this product seems to be much easier to operate (although they still haven't fixed the problem of me convincing friends or family to also want one, therefor justifying my purchase as a personal device. They are therefor the BlackBerry of the Android world)

...Man, you're past jaded.
Necessary information: It has most of it.
Variable conditions: You do what you can.
No incentive to do the right thing: Says you. I'm not saying it'll be perfect, but collecting tax money is done rather routinely.
Job seeking after EPA duty: Meh. Like I said earlier, a fairly simple fee structure is harder to mess up.

You're still committing a fallacy - do nothing unless the solution is 'perfect'. I don't demand perfect.

Actually no. I'm actually advocating loosening control by changing the way the EPA does business. Currently it works on a basis of dictating the AMOUNT of pollution an industry, down to specific industrial facilities, can produce through a system of permits. If you violate your permit, you may or may not be charged substantial penalties. If it doesn't want a particular industry inside the USA, it simply has to set the permitted levels of pollution low enough, require expensive enough remediation, to render the business uneconomical. Meanwhile it preserves current players through grandfathering, often allowing orders of magnitude more pollution from older facilities.

Correct. Though 'their air' and 'their water' gets rather complicated because it's constantly moving.

Which is what I proposed, so why are you complaining?

Which is what I was complaining about... 'Grandfathering' = 'free license'. Blanket standards being too strict in some areas and too lenient in others is probably always going to be an issue, which is why I simply said 'use the best available science'. Then add an administrative fee on top because you're probably underestimating it.

'You're overcharging for sulfor dioxide and undercharging for nitrogen dioxide' isn't, to me, a condemnation of my system, it results in a shrug and me updating the fee schedule.

Okay, read the pollution section from the ebook. I'll summarize my thoughts:
1. Just who do you propose to sell the rivers to, where they can still be used for trade, wildlife preservation, and such without massive, massive issues with negotiating with, potentially, thousands of owners?
2. How do you arrange it so that companies are liable for their pollution when it's basically impossible to point your finger at a specific factory having caused you harm, or making it so easy that anybody who gets a cough is suing everybody and clogging the courts up?

What I'm getting at is that my 'solution' is to make the government the overseer - the union, if you will(still not a good comparison, but I can't think of better at the moment). It then charges the industries for their pollution, so we can still have industry, but charges enough that it can then spend that money(through lowered taxes, if nothing else) to remediate the harm caused by remaining pollution, and industries, because they have to pay for what they emit, are 'encouraged' to prevent said emissions.

Just to let you know, you've been arguing with a self-described moderate libertarian. You may be closer to the anarchy scale.

I'll summarize:
1. We need a policy that is 'simple' enough for businesses to be able to work with it.
2. It needs to be as non-intrusive as possible.
3. It needs to render external cost(pollution) internal in as efficient of a method as possible. Lawsuits aren't efficient. Negotiating with potentially thousands or tens of thousands of people isn't efficient.
3a. By rendering the cost internal, companies are encouraged to not pollute.
3b. By avoiding lawsuits as much as possible, we can still have industry.

That's where you use CPVC. It's stronger than straight PVC as well as resistant to higher temperatures. My old house was plumbed in CPVC.

It's generally a tan color as opposed to white for PVC. The GP probably either didn't know or care about the 'minor' difference - it's still PVC. ;)

Yep, tweekers are pretty much a lost cause.

It's not just copper piping they can steal; they'll also steal electrical wiring. Nothing's too small or low-value for them.

Also, I don't think you can replace copper with PVC; you can use some other stuff, like PEX, but PVC isn't used for high-pressure supply piping as far as I know, at least not inside walls. I have seen it used for irrigation systems though. I think the problem is that you can't use PVC for hot water supply lines.

If they're "high-prestige" why aren't you willing to move? It's not like you own that apartment you're renting. Move out when your lease comes up and make sure you tell management why you're doing it. Good tenants are hard to find, if you complain infrequently and pay your rent on time (less common than you'd think) they'll be sorry to see you go and will listen to your reasons for doing so.

Doesn't solve your problem in the short term but it's more effective for long term change than griping about the problem on Slashdot.

Because corporations bad, mmm'kay?

That's really the crux of it. Any argument against this ruling is immediately shouted down. I posited this question on another forum and received the equivalent of -1, Troll: Why is everybody cheering a ruling that attacks hypothetical problems (the oft discussed "fast lane" has yet to actually happen) while ignoring the actual problems that are impeding innovation? The "killer app" that started this whole argument is streaming video, so ask yourself which of these two things are a greater threat to that: The data caps that are currently being imposed or the fast lane that only exists on paper?