Since there's no urgency here, it will be fine if it takes another generation or so to fully transition.

There are substantial costs involved in having to manage with two incompatible measurement systems. Never mind needing to convert between each one, how about every mechanic in the US needing to have two sets of tools for ever size, metric and SAE, doubling the cost. That's a huge, huge cost across the economy.

Since the rest of the industrialized world uses metric, the sooner the US completely switches over, the sooner we'll start seeing big savings from not having to be "multi-lingual".

And let's not mention the costs of spacecraft crashing into the faces of other planets.

No, a class action is the only way to go.

Except for the "no class action" clause in the AT&T's contract.

Well, we're screwed, then.

Those "no class action" clauses are likely unenforceable unless they give you a reasonable way to opt-out (and you're just too lazy to do so, like most customers).

Now let's just hope that the no-contract month-to-month plans don't disappear.

They won't... There's too many people on them, who would be willing to jump to the next provider at a moment's notice. If one of the big 4 dropped their contract plans, some tiny company would go around putting up cell towers, and trump them all.

Hell, WiFi tech is almost good enough that you could use APs to provide VoIP across whole metropolitan areas, for far, far less than the price of cell tower infrastructure. If competition doesn't get them, technology eventually will...

I pay like $78 per month for what on ATT or VZW now costs about $120 or so - I get a new phone and sign a new contract every two years

If that's for one phone, that doesn't sound like a good deal, at all.

Boost Mobile (Sprint) has unlimited voice/sms/data on Android at $55/mo, and has "shrinkage" which drops that by $5 every 6 months (if you pay on-time). After staying for just 18 months, you're only paying $40/mo, indefinitely, with no contract and no fees. And that's the TOTAL price... No surcharges, no taxes, no fees, etc.

As for phones, Boost has some decent ones for $80. Get a new one every 2 years, and you're adding just $3/mo on to your bill, for a grand total of $44/mo., or a bit more than half what you're paying for your wonderful grandfathered-in plan.

I wouldn't be caught dead signing a cell phone contract. If Boost/Sprint ever pissed me off, I'd switch to some other service immediately... No fees, no nothing. That's probably why they just DON'T DO THAT to their customers, ever.

You use KiB instead of KB, don't you?

KiBbles & bits? Absolutely!

In some ways, the great success of Ethernet is that it became the name we gave to whatever technology won out.

No, ethernet remained relevant because it was able to improve, while maintaining backwards compatibility along the way, so your investment was never wasted.

10Base-T cards still had BNC connectors on them, letting you transition smoothly from one to the other.

100Base-Tx was backwards compatible with 10Mbps hubs & NICs.

Gigabit offered backward compatibility with 100Base-Tx.

Switching between fiber and copper is just a matter of swapping the GBIC/SFP transceivers in a switch, with the underlying device having no clue that the media is different.

Newer standards retained backward compatibility with older, less robust cabling... From CAT-3 to CAT-5, to CAT-5e/6, to CAT-6a.

Even though ethernet of today doesn't look like it did, originally. The upgrade path was always simple, smooth, and inexpensive, so it is very much an unbroken chain back to the beginning, and hooking up a modern PC to one of the first ethernet devices is a simple matter of physical-layer conversion.

CONFIRMED:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Assembly_Building

I do like the idea of a nitrogen atmosphere.

We're 3/4ths of the way there!!!

I wonder what kind of atmosphere conditions you could use to accommodate better cooling? Would a vacuum work better, or would high pressure work better for removing heat from the systems? Are nitrogen, CO2, Oxygen, or other gases better at transferring heat?

A vacuum would mean absolute NO cooling. The denser the gas, the more heat it could haul away, so something like argon would probably be best.

However, you could do much better by submerging the whole thing in Fluorinert or other (cheaper) non-conductive and non-corrosive fluid. The downside to that, being both that traditional hard drives will cease to function, and the weight of a building full of fluid will be astronomical, and would also require extremely tighter tolerances and far more horizontal support.

The only way I could see that working, would be a huge subterranean datacenter... Basically a huge hole in the ground, or perhaps the world's deepest in-ground pool.

I've been in plenty of datacenters, and I don't see where you're getting any benefit with radical redesigns. They aren't exactly designed for human comfort in the first place...

Lighting? Sure, but motion sensors mean it's only on when someone is in that area. And you'll still need lights, because humans will surely still be going in there to fix the malfunctioning robots, and hiring old coal miners seems excessive.

Temperature? No, the servers dictate the temperature the datacenter is kept at, while human comfort is completely secondary. The 15C degree air coming out of the floor vents below my KVM doesn't make for a comfortable experience, but nobody cares. Humans in the datacenter are the foreigners, who must adapt themselves, not the other way around. If Google could run their datacenters at 75C degrees, they WOULD do that now, and the humans would be sent in with ice packs strapped to their bodies.

Height? If a couple more feet of rack height were useful and cheap, I would be happy enough to keep a bit of scaffolding in my datacenter cages. As for the ridiculous heights predicted, it's not going to happen. Racks can't scale-up that easily (they'd need huge thick vertical supports to handle the weight)... and at some point, it's pretty easy to just install another "floor" for those pesky humans to walk on, install air ducts in, and also avoid the need for super-robust racks... and I can't even imagine that crazy air currents that would be happening with 100' of vertical servers pumping out crazy amounts of heat, not to mention problems like CLOUDS forming and potentially raining, INSIDE the building.

In general, the comparison needs to be made to warehouses... If Amazon/Walmart/etc. had fully-automated warehouses, I'd say automated datacenters would be just around the corner. But they don't... Humans are still very much in the loop, driving around on electrified forklifts or pallet jacks, and doing what the computer tells them to, and when. And if any business could benefit from vertical expansion, quicker response times, and less humans, it's warehousing, but it just doesn't work there, yet. That will be a lot closer to the model for future datacenters, not this pie-in-the-sky nonsense.

They don't want to force people to Google+.

Really? Because I'm unable to rate or review apps in the Android Market unless I have a Google+ account. This despite the fact that this all worked perfectly fine for years, before Google+ came along.

Try reading past the first sentence of my post, and get back to me with your clever plan to easily and transparently support both ASCII and EBCDIC format.

Compaq used to sell insanely expensive and over-engineered PCs. I seem to remember my company paying $30k for a desktop PC from Compaq in the early '90s.

Compaq had very good WORKSTATIONS and SERVERS, but their PCs have always been cheap. I distinctly recall their later 90's PCs, which were non-standard over-sized motherboards, with all (cheap junk) components integrated onto them. They were right along side companies like Packard Bell in the race to the bottom.

Their workstations and servers, however, were always very nice. They used large fans, with plastic ducting, multiple thermal zones, etc, decades ago. They got the benefit of all that DEC engineering expertise and experience when they bought up the remnants of the company.

The same should be said of HP as well. Their desktop PCs were junk, but their workstations were heavily over-engineered and well-designed. I remember late 90's ~200MHz HP Workstations with numerous slots for memory, and a riser card that gave 6 PCI slots, as well as 2 ISA slots, which kept those PCs expandable and relevant far after their expected shelf life. Little touches like only two levers to pull to completely remove the case made them a pleasure to work with, as well.

And to Compaq and HP's credit, when HP bough the company, they dropped their own Netserver line, and rebranded the Compaq Proliant as the HP Proliant server, and that has now become the best selling x86 server brand out there, so they did something right. Though I'm still fairly annoyed at the licensing, limitations and clumsy proprietary tools to interface with their iLo out-of-band management.

Could it be that Dell discovered the hard way that their servers are, in-fact, too expensive? Companies like Dell and HP are seeing declining server sales due to projects like OpenCompute that are bypassing 1st tier vendors and going straight to ODMs for simpler, cheaper servers. Some of the companies buying these cheap servers include cloud service providers like Amazon.

Obviously Dell can't do that with their own in-house offerings, so perhaps they just couldn't compete with vendors running on cheaper servers.

Im fairly certain that adding strawberry scent to soap does not remove its properties as a soap.

That depends... Are you using it to wash strawberries?

(Iodine has been deprecated for most things. It's not terribly effective.)

Iodine is quite effective (though not the best), but it's relatively expensive. Chlorine & Alcohol are much cheaper, so they've replaced Iodine in a number of places.

Betadine surgical scrub consists of:

Active Ingredients
Povidone-iodine, 7.5% (0.75% available iodine)

Inactive Ingredients
Ammonium Nonoxynol-4 Sulfate, Nonoxynol-9, Purified Water, and Sodium Hydroxide.

http://www.purduepharma.com/PI/NonPrescription/A6910B16.pdf