In theory you could just let the emails sit there until you are back at work, but in practice sadly it is often expected that you check your email inbox every now and then.

Just make it so the work email account is unreadable from outside the office network, and any emails going to your personal account means an hour of automatic overtime pay. Then let the beancounters discuss whether the message really was so important it couldn't wait with the sender.

My world should not stop because you chose to get off.

Then you'd better make arrangements to have a backup contact, now wouldn't you? Just like you'd do with any other mission-critical system.

Troll is a person posting an inflammatory message with the deliberate intent of exciting readers into a controversial response. This is the exact definition.

The problem is, that makes trolls indispensable for meaningful discussion, since they draw the implicit assumptions and attitudes out into the open for all to see. Ghandhi, Martin Luther King and Jesus were all epic trolls by this definition. And the authorities of the day wanted to ban them all, which rises some questions about where, exactly speaking, does this apparent concern for the sensibilities of forum readers originate?

No one wants to talk seriously online to total strangers. Where's the value add?

You see no value in a chance to promote your viewpoint? Or hear others?

If there were a real-names policy (an actual, checked, real-names policy, not bullshit like what Google tried to pull), one would surely see less trolling.

One would also see less insightful posts, since any kind of insight typically steps on the toes of some entrenched interest. And even on Slashdot posts expressing unpopular opinions typically end up downmodded because, after all, if it provokes you, it's a troll.

A forum with real-names policy is basically worthless, which is precisely why the Powers that Be try to push them. Stripping people of the shield of anonymity makes dissenting opinions easier to silence through chilling effects. And of course this is marketed for our own good, after all we all know that having someone get away with posting something offensive on the Internet is the worst thing ever.

Whats all that got to do with the price of eggs?

Windows is my gaming system, from which I browse when I have been gaming (as I just finished a bit ago).

Linux is actually where I do most of my work already.

The chances of us wiping ourselves out before the asteroid arrives is better than the odds of the asteroid wiping us out.

Isn't that Ironic

lmao. Even the IT staff where I work, who are heavily pro-windows, MCSEs and such joke about the *reliability* of MS products. Yes, they complain about the relative complexity of setting up some things in Linux, but as of now, we are down two windows servers, replaced with one Linux server. The overall system utilization is almost twice as much, yet the system runs faster.

Yeah, I know, many will say they were doing something wrong, but they are not. MS just eats more resources and handles applications with problems far less well than Linux. The Linux machine has been running non-stop since it was put together early last year, the windows servers still need to bounce every month (which is better than the 2000s with every night). And before you blame the applications poor design, yeah its poor, but the OS is what needs to protect against that. If it can not then the OS has problems. MS just has more of those types of issues than Linux or BSD do.

You can call this whatever you want. It is just how it is.

But now let's totally eliminate the barrier between graphics, sound and all other processors. Instead of limited communications channels and local memory, have distributed shared memory (DSM) and totally free communication between everything.

This sounds a lot like NUMA. Which, I might add, absolutely requires differentiating between local and non-local memory, since the latter is much slower.

Thus, memory can open a connection to the GPU,

Like GPUs have done since the time of AGP? Or did you mean memory will simply send some random data for no particular reason?

the GPU can talk to the disk,

For what purpose? Do you plan to write a file system driver that runs on the GPU? To accomplish... what, exactly speaking?

Ethernet cards can write direct to buffers rather than going via software (RDMA and OpenSockets concepts, just generalized).

Haven't they done this a long time now? In fact, don't all devices that do significant IO use direct memory access?

What room, in such a design, for a CPU? Everything can be outsourced.

And the part that keeps track of the overall program execution state and issues these outsources tasks to other components is, for all intents and purposes, a CPU.

Have the router elements take care of heat and congestion issues, rather than compilers.

...What the heck are you talking about?

And this is marketspeak? Marketspeak for what? Name me a market that wants to eliminate complexity and abandon planned obsolescence in favour of a schizophrenic cross between a parallel Turing machine, a vector computer and a Beowulf cluster.

None does. It's the "schizophrenic" part that's the killer. Which is why, if you need to sell garbage anyway, you litter your product description with enough trendy buzzwords to convince technologically illiterate that it's cutting edge high tech. Which, if you are trying to polish a particularly smelly turd for a sale, can end up using almost all of them. And that can have great synergy with illusion-challenged human resources seeking a solution for cynicism management.

That right there is economist talk, and do not hold up to a reality check what so ever.

You have a very odd view of reality.

Idle production equipment is not wasted.

By definition that which is not used is wasted.

Idle workers are not wasted (unless they happens to still get paid).

Idle workers still need to eat, so either the factory pays them or the taxpayer will. But unfortunately, with all economic activity crippled by lack of energy, just like the factory was, there are no taxpayers any more, so there seems to be a small problem.

Sure, there is a "loss" of potential profits if the market is screaming for the widgets the factory is providing.

That, and people aren't getting the widgets. That's too bad if it's an iPhone factory, and worsel if it makes heart medicine.

But unless some book worm economist set up the whole gig, every damn widget produced, be at 0.01% production capacity or 100% capacity, is a profit earner once sold.

This might surprise you, but both buildings and machinery require maintenance. Furthermore, neither raw materials nor products simply teleport around, and the overhead of moving them is the greater the less you have. And finally, as I already noted, a lot of production processes can't simply be arbitrarily slowed - apart from chemical factories, how about things like casting molten stuff?

Your fridge can stand to shut down for five minutes to ride out a sudden but brief peak in demand. Those do happen.

My fridge can't shut down for days or weeks to ride out a period of calm and cloudy weather. Those also happen.

Also, are you suggesting the electric company gets an itemized list of every gadget I run? Because unless the fridge reports itself as such, I have a hard time imagining how you plan on cutting power to it without leaving me sitting in the dark.

The 'Corrie Break' is a very well-known example, occuring predictably during the mid-episode break of Coronation Street in the UK - it's caused by millions of people simutainously going to put the kettle on.

Indeed. So how do you suggest handling lunchtime? Should we just get used to treating warm food as a rare luxury in the green future?

If you're in an area that uses a water tower or top-of-building tank for pressure though, then the pump can be shut down during a deman peak.

I'm not, and if I was, I'd need to heat the tank to keep it from freezing. And of course pumping water needlessly high first and letting it down again means wasting power on friction.

You want real value for your real things.

The problem, of course, is that they're your chickens and land only because people agree so. Property rights are no less imaginary than currency.

The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination. Which is of course what allows people to value things differently, thus making trade possible. So it's only appropriate that we use a made-up concept of currency as an abstract representation for the made-up concept of value - or economic value, to precise.

In other words, there is not - and cannot even in theory be - non-funny money. Value being subjective is the very heart of the concept of economy. And that means any imaginable way of measuring it is ultimately just make-believe.

Gold and perhaps silver are credible currencies.

Well, no, because I have no convenient way of checking either the purity nor mass of any gold I might get, and a metal-backed currency can stop being so at any time. On top of that, gold is soft enough for wear being a problem, but still too hard to cut pieces off as needed, so we'd be stuck with precut gold pieces (coins) which can't be actually trusted to carry their nominal value due to wear and theft.

On a purely technical level, without getting into any economics or ideology, gold makes for a horrible currency.