Roads could be improved incrementally. A railroad that only connects two cities still has value. Any large, flat field could handle an early airplane, as long as you moved the cows out first.

The problem with this "storage-less" renewable grid is that no partial implementation is adequate. It simply cannot function on anything less than continent scale, and may require a global-scale grid to average out the fluctuations enough.

Fortunately, a water heater is simple enough that you can rip out the "smart" electronics and replace them with the sort of thermostat-and-relay circuit that almost everything uses right now.

I don't think there's ever been a proper study of astronauts' natural sleeping patterns in space. There are always more things people want astronauts to do than there are hours to do them in, so everything (including sleep) is very tightly scheduled. Nobody's ever said "spend the next week doing nothing but keeping your spaceship running, and do it on your own schedule".

We don't know what effect, if any, the freefall environment has on sleep patterns. It may be that astronauts are so sleep-deprived because Mission Control has been scheduling things wrong.

Slashdot is male dominated, so it should have more colorblindness than a random population sample. If we know the sex ratio on /., maybe we could predict how the poll converges.

The problem with this is that many people with red-green colorblindness (especially with the milder forms) are unaware of it. There's a reason why colorblindness as a disorder wasn't recognized until 1798...

You know how they work their way up with drugs? By offering reduced charges/reduced sentences for providing evidence. For example, a drug user will be offered probation/dropped charges for ratting out his dealer, who in turn will have a "possession with intent to distribute" reduced to mere possession for saying who his supplier is, and so on up the line until they find someone big enough to go all-out against.

The police can't do that with CP. There are no lesser versions of possession, and dropping charges will get a prosecutor crucified by his opponent in the next election.

Requests to fix errors come in all the time -- and are forwarded to the community, who decide if the request is reasonable or not. In such cases, the Foundation merely acts as a conduit for the request, rather than granting or denying it.

The denied requests come about when someone demands (and it's almost always a demand) that the Foundation use their powers as operator of the website to make a change to an article.

They did it to all sites hosted by Freedom Hosting. Most notably, they did it to Tormail -- not a kiddie porn site, a webmail provider.

whatever is above them in downtown Seattle.

Five city blocks (low-rise -- doesn't look to be anything over eight stories tall), a quarter-mile of the Alaska Way Viaduct, the entrance to the downtown ferry and water taxi docks, and two entrances to one of the larger docks at the Port of Seattle. If the tunnel is deeper than I think, or the soil is more liquid, add another seven city blocks (also low-rise), one park, the ferry docks themselves, part of the Port of Seattle dock, and maybe the football stadium.

Yes, disassembling from behind would be cheaper, if it worked. If anything went wrong, it would be far, far more expensive.

I calculated from the other end: assuming that the Bitcoin market represents an efficient market (ie. sale prices are only slightly above production prices), and that the marginal cost of mining hardware is 0:

- A bitcoin sells for $584
- Mining a block generates 25 bitcoins
- 144 blocks are mined per day
- 63000 transactions per day

584 * 25 * 144 / 63000 = $33.37 per transaction.

And do you perhaps think point-of-sale systems and credit/debit card systems or wire transfers require none?

The Bitcoin network uses about $35 worth of energy to process a single transaction. Now, I don't know how much energy a single credit card transaction uses, but given the transaction fees that processing companies charge, I'm willing to bet that it's far, far less than $35 worth.

OTOH, the traditional CPU/mobo setting is a little problematic; first you put the most heat-concentrating element in the middle of everything, and then later you realize it needs cooling.

The theory is that the exhaust air from the CPU heatsink spreads out to parts that are more heat-tolerant but still need active cooling, such as the voltage regulators. A VRM that can operate at 100C without trouble can be cooled just fine with a slow flow of 50C exhaust air from the CPU cooling system.

In practice, people have found that a front-to-back airflow, preferably ducted, is quieter and more effective than a mix of back-to-front, blow-down, and turbulent airflows. It does, however, require actual engineering work, rather than just attaching a bunch of fans to everything.

*Exterior* temperature? My current heatsink can manage a CPU temperature below that, with the fan at idle. Why would I want to downgrade to this thing?

Don't tell the HURD people -- they'll change which microkernel they're building around, again.

How big is big enough that nothing but Oracle will do? Facebook is on MySQL, Wikipedia is on MariaDB and Google is using Bigtable.

It's more the nature and size of access rather than the sheer volume of data. Facebook and Wikipedia both act on small portions of the overall dataset, Wikipedia additionally is a read-mostly workload, and Google's access patterns aren't suitable for a relational database.

I don't know about Los Angeles or San Francisco, but Phoenix's water usage has been dropping as a result of replacing citrus orchards with subdivisions.