The difficulty in synthesizing sound is getting the models right. You can't simulate each atom so you need a simplifying model that allows you to reduce the work. And that model has to be accurate in the areas where it matters.

While moving stuff to a GPU gives more computing power (but in a more constrained fashion than a CPU) and certainly helps, the models aren't there yet.

The people researching physical modelling continue to make progress, but I think that if you put state of the art in a game, you'd perhaps have more lively sounds, but they'd probably sound worse than sampled sounds.

Debt is far more complicated than "oh, shit, we'll surely end up like Greece!"

Agreed. Do read at least some of it. It puts an interesting perspective of Julian Assange. That dude has some deep thoughts and he's seen some really scary stuff.

I disagree. Python 3 uptake has been really slow. The result is that a lot of the good stuff in the Python 3.x series isn't in wide-spread use yet, and if you're writing reusable library code, you can't really assume the majority of your users will have access to it yet.

Guido should have said: we'll break these things we have to break, and for the rest add shim layers with deprecation warnings instead of just opening the gates. That would probably have seen much faster adoption rates.

The gradual approach has worked pretty well for the 2.x series - if you use something deprecated, you get a bunch of really visible warnings you can then fix as you go along. I see no upsides in turning these warnings into hard errors, especially not when some of them happen in library code out of your immediate control.

Valve Corporation has an interesting setup.

Prompted by your observation, I read the interview and have to agree it was very interesting. Alan Kay is obviously thinking completely different from the crowd.

Actually, you laugh, but Vestas, the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world, bought a supercomputer two years ago.

They use it to run simulations of wind conditions back in time. In some sense terrain-aware interpolations of existing measurements.

The thing is that when you're trying to figure out the economics of putting up a wind turbine, it doesn't really help you terribly much that you know the wind conditions 20 miles away in the nearest town. They've built a tool on top querying the simulated data so they can instantly tell their customers what the ROI would be for a specific location. Beats raising a long pole and waiting a year or two for the results.

Fiber is being rolled out in Denmark too, mostly in the country-side because the old electric utilities (owned by the residents) decided to have a go at it. So I too have been wondering about this. But if you have 3 TV sets/house streaming on demand in a good quality, you're going to need more than 20 Mbit/s. And with most of the ADSL solutions, it's a hit or miss whether they can actually deliver up to what they promise.

I have a friend who moved to the middle of a 300k residents city and his 20 Mbit ADSL couldn't actually deliver more than about 7 Mbit. So if his girlfriend is watching a SD channel, the line is so bogged down that it's more or less useless.

Also I have an online backup of our family photos, and working with even 40 GB of data over ADSL is sloooooow.

So more juice is definitely needed in the not-so-distant future.

Quote from Wikipedia:

The reason stated on Wikipedia for exempting these things in the first place was being cautious until enough experience had been collected, considering that they only constituted only a small part of the electronics garbage pile anyway.

This is discussed in TFA:

How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing

(I'm not going to repeat the long explanation afterwards backing up the above claims.)

Hey, if you are interested in nuclear power, do read the article Unknown Lamer links to: How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing. It has nothing to do with Japan, but offers an explanation to why there's little development of nuclear in the US. Excerpt:

And:

... and huge subsidies to pay for it.

Maybe that would be worth it, maybe not.

I'm sorry, but you are misinformed. Even without hippies etc., new nuclear plants are expensive. They are not competitive. Look it up if you don't believe me.

People are proposing new designs - but how's having to work out the kinks of new designs going to cut already high capital costs?

Now where would that place be? I don't think it's anywhere on earth.

(Hint: a new nuclear power plant needs to deliver near constant output to be cost-effective, but consumption is far from constant. You can only use 100% nuclear with storage or heavy, heavy subsidies.)

I'm not particularly against nuclear power plants (as long as I don't get to live near one) but you're downplaying capital costs. Operating costs etc. are irrelevant if the initial capital costs are too high. It's the same with fusion power - so the energy source may be cheap but unless the actual reactor ends up being cheaper to build than a fission reactor, are we really going to see any commercial fusion plants? No.

What you call stupidity is really economics 101. Old power plants have been paid of many years ago so are now virtually impossible to compete against. If you want to change that you need subsidies. That's true of many renewable power plants too.

You can claim that the costs are caused by unnecessary regulation. But AFAIK regulations are determined by nuclear engineers, not green nuts.

Sounds like you need a new freezer.

Great comment.

Also keep in mind that what is once built, tends to stay up for a long period. So shortsightedness in city planning can have long-lasting consequences.