Look, the protocol could be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It could have free orgasms built into it. It might even have the cure for cancer.

But it can't overcome latency, or shannon's law regarding just how much data you can shove over a given network link. You can cheat by using lossful compression, you can employ predictive algorithms, but at the end of the day it'll only be as good as the network lets it. That's why there haven't been any big advancements in this area: There's none to make. Remote desktop will be varying degrees of shitty for the forseeable future, because our network links are shit. ISPs purposefully sabotage remote desktop and VPN because it's a threat to their business model. You can't "protocol" that away. Believe me, people have tried.

At best, we'll be able to trade one variety of crap for another, but remote desktop will never come close to the experience of actually using the computer at the same location. Human beings start to notice lag between their own actions and computer responses in as little as 50ms. The network links typically take longer than that to send the data. Especially over wifi.

You know, I'm sure everything you said is right, nevermind the lack of citations or supporting logic for why this would actually be the case, instead of wishful thinking. Let's say it's all true.

The whole point being made here is that bacteria evolve very quickly, and trade genes with each other as a part of that. Bacteria doesn't reproduce sexually like we do; In fact, they happily cannibalize each other for genetic material. It doesn't do this intelligently, but it does do it very, very quickly. So the bacteria in your mythical "animals only" sphere of influence can and are cannibalized by the "humans aren't animals" category of bacteria. They cheat, see... they don't follow your nice little boxes you've built here.

Bottom line is your distinction is arbitrary and does not exist in nature. And antibiotic resistance isn't a 1:1 parity either... if it's even partially effective against, say, penicillin, it probably is effective against others as well. And as more of these genetic markers come together, not only does the bacteria become stronger against antibiotics as a whole, but because more and more of the bacteria has those markers now, there's a greater chance of transcription, mutation, etc., that will create an even greater resistance.

The fact is the biological clock is ticking. Even in the most optimistic case where everything you say is true and then some, it only delays the inevitable. What your post amounts to is basically apologism for the overuse of antibiotics to drive profits in unrelated fields, when they should have been kept strictly for use as humans, and not animals or livestock. The very day the first antibiotic was created, the so-called "miracle drug" of the 20th century, we knew this would happen.

We just didn't give a fuck. We ignored science because it meant prosperity today... but a terrible price later. And if anything defines western civilization today, its short-term gratification at the expense of long-term growth and prosperity.

No, but we do enjoy programming them to put knives in humans we don't like. That's actually been a reason for much of the development of robotics: Programming them to kill for us. Scifi authors of the 50s and 60s imagined robots helping us in our daily lives -- cooking, cleaning, and today even driving us around. But whereas many have viewed the development of robotics as beneficial for mankind, the truth is much of the investment in robotics has been because of its military applications. It's just a happy accident that we've been able to declassify and repurpose much of this for private use. The google car for example, is based on technology first developed for DARPA as a way of creating vehicle that could deliver cargo to soldiers in the field.

So the NSA has been sitting on intelligence reports that people are being sold into slavery... and of course dutifully passed this on to the appropriate government agencies who... proceeded to do nothing. And yet the story here is "teh nsa iz evilz!"

... Soo, Indonesia was previously helping Australia with their human smuggling operation? In either event, what does having your corrupt officials mismanaging things have to do with ceasing humanitarian endeavors? This is like saying "After we got busted doing evil things, we're going to just go all in on that whole evil thing, while insisting that you spying on us doing our evil things is wrong and you should stop."

Dice doesn't have dedicated slashdot editors anymore. They are editors of a dozen or so sites. Really now, what kind of quality do you expect now that they've sold out and now monetize the web synergies to create a new market paradigm of customer-focused informational advertisements?

I'm willing to come out and speak my mind, and more often than not, others agree. Whereas you... all you can do is snipe at someone who's earned their reputation for being insightful and strives to look beyond superficial appearances. Right, wrong, at least I'm putting my name on what I say. You... on the other hand, are so lacking in confidence about your own opinion you won't tell us who you are. Because the truth is, you're a coward. An anonymous coward. And I'm not. I'm the girl on slashdot everybody knows, and whether you agree with me or not, most likely you respect me.

Because I earned it. Now crawl back down your troll hole.

Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them.

Oops. Make that "loses 1600 times as much power". (Multiplied the 10s but forgot to multiply the 4s.)

When a board has several chips running at 10 or more watts apiece you can easily be dealing at currents where the heating of the board consumes more power than the heating of the chips. With a rack of electronics dissipating several KW you can pay for a LOT of tiny switching regulators to avoid more than doubling that.

Give me a call when those fuel cells are ready for deployment, then we can talk about all these wonderful uses. No talk about the carbon footprint of operating fuel cells?

Natural gas (methane) has the highest energy/carbon emission ration of any saturated hydrocarbon (gas or oil) and beats the HELL out of coal. If you're going to use fossil fuels (or renewable fuel from biodegrading vegetable waste, sewage, or cow flops), and a fuel cell is in the efficiency ballpark with a grid plant, why not put the fuel cell in the rack?

The article mixes the use of fuel cells as a power source with efficiency improvements. The only place that makes sense is with the minor savings that may be seen by eliminating DC converters, but you will still need DC regulators which will have some losses.

Fuel cells are not limited by the carnot cycle efficiency limt. They can be FAR MORE EFFICIENT than a heat-engine based power plant.

Modern circuit boards in servers ALREADY HAVE switching regulators near the chips. With the very low operating voltages of modern electronics, the supply currents are SO high that you lose less energy by running 48V on the power planes of the PC board and regulating it down at the load than you do running, say 3.3, 2.5, or 1.8 volts and a correspondingly higher current across several inches of thin copper.

Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them. It's like high-tension transmission lines in miniature. (They'd go higher except that over 50V gets you out of the easy part of the electrical code and into the region where electrocution becomes a major issue.)

Putting the switching regulator next to the chip also gives you much more stable voltage. When it's already there to save power, this makes good regulation "cheaper than free".

A major oversight of this article is the fact that fuel cells are major heat generators, not something you want in a data center. They would need to be installed in a separated structure, therefore idea that "Rack-level fuel cells would do away with data-centre-wide electricity distribution for servers" is hard to imagine.

They also need and external air supply and to have their exhaust removed rather than dumped into the room air. So you're going to give them their own plumbing. You want to SAVE that heat to keep the oxygen-transport style cells at operating temperature without wasting fuel or power to do it. So you insulate the box and run the ventilation plumbing like a stove pipe - coaxial, with the hot exhaust in the middle and the cool incoming air on the outside. This minimizes the heat loss to the room and acts like a counter-current heat exchanger to preheat the fresh air with the heat from the exhaust, while cooling the exhaust.

It's similar to what I did with my first unix box, back in the '80s or so: The thing put out as much heat as a space heater. So I hooked up a dryer vent hose to the 4" exhaust fan and dumped the hot air outside. Cooling problem solved. (In the winter I dumped it INSIDE to save on heating bills.)

Right now, if I don't have electric and gas, my water heater and furnace become inoperable.

In my remote house my heat and water heater both work fine on only propane. As long as the tank is not empty we're fine (and the tank only needs filling about three times a year).

The water heater is gas with a pilot light and no electric controls (except for the pilot light safety thermocouple, which generates enough power from the flame's heat to control the safety shutdown).

While the regular furnace has electronic controls and blower, I also have a backup: A propane "fireplace" stove in the great room, with a room layout that lets it heat the living area and keep the pipes from freezing.

Again it works with a pilot light, and the thermocouple's few millivolts also provide enough power, controlled by a mechanical-switch thermostat in the middle of the house, to operate the main gas valve as well. Though the stove's room blower will also fail in an outage, convection is more than adequate to circulate the heat in the big-open-space-in-the-middle house design. Kept things nice and comfy when we had a day-long outage in deep winter.

When away the stats are set to 55 for the furnace, 50 for the backup stove. This worked just fine one winter, when the furnace's draft sensor failed and the furnace was dead for weeks until we got there and discovered the issue. That definitely paid for the stove in one event.

If you have a fuel cell that burns methane (i.e. Natural gas) or other fuels the fuel cell will have to reform it into Hydrogen (releasing CO2) before it's used.

And if you're ultimately running from fossil fuels, methane is the least carbon-emitting choice.

Burning the hydrogen atoms to water produces MOST of the power from fossil fuels. Burning the carbon to CO2 produces a little more. But in gas and oil it's mostly there to make the hydrogen easier to handle than H2.

Methane has four hydrogens per carbon (4:1), the best ratio of all hydrocarbons. Ethane: (6: 2 = 3:1), propane: 8:3 = 2.666..."1, and so on. As you transition from gasses to oil you're approaching the large saturated hydrocarbon molecule limit of 2:1.

Then there's coal, where you're JUST burning the carbon. All CO2, much less energy (though still plenty if you burn ENOUGH of it).

Tell me when they come up with a range of affordable, small, light weight, fuel cells that efficiently make a couple hundred to a couple thousand watts by burning odorized propane with ambient air. I want one for my car, one for my travel trailer, and one for each house.

Electrolysis is not cost effective and requires more electrical power than your fuel cell could produce.

By the same argument, power grids "are not cost effective" because they require more electrical power input than they deliver to the cu
stomer.

Electrolysis may be VERY cost effective. Just think of it as a different sort of energy distribution system, not as a conversion of fuel to electricity, and compare its costs to what it replaces.

(This is similar to the bogus argument against solar panels: "They take more energy to make than they deliver over their lifetime." First that's false - they reach energy breakeven very early in their life. Second, they produce post-carnot-cycle electricity, while most of the energy going into making them is pre-carnot-cycle heat. Third, you need to compare their energy consumption apples-to-apples: How much energy does it take to build and fuel the fraction of the power grid that would deliver the same amount of electricity to the same site - from melting steel to build transformers, to clearing trees and stringing poles, to building power plants and switchgear, to fueling the plants to make the electricity (digging for and transporting coal, drilling for and pumping oil, disposing of radioactive waste, ...) to losing a fraction of that to carnot cycle efficiency, transformer losses, corona discharge, resistive heating of transmission lines, ...)

Those so-called "Death Panels" already exist. Why is it alright for Insurance Companies to pick and choose who gets to live, and who must die, while bankrupting even more people in the process? I'd feel much safer if "profit" wasnt a primary variable in whether me or my loved ones get to live or die.

A rhetorical question deserves a rhetorical answer:

Because, with private insurance companies, you can either change policies or insurance companies, to get policy terms (and "death panels") more to your liking. Or you can dump the insurance company altogether and pay the hospitals as many buck as they ask to get as much health care as you both need and can afford.

With Obama care:
  - You're forced to buy insurance.
  - You're forced to buy a plan the government approved.
  - You're forced to buy a plan with some very expensive coverage that you may not need or want.
  - And the government picks your "death panel". Don't like that one? Find another country.

The "other" hand? You're going to take something that's inherently complex and risky even when done professionally by a company with hundreds of developers... and then roll your own? And that's less of a risk in your world?

I have learned that most people are utter shit at estimating risk. Especially people who think they're smart and are good at it, but don't actually do the math. We spend trillions to prevent terrorism, but next to nothing to prevent drunk driving. It's because people think that risks they have control over are far less than those they don't, so drunk driving is "Well, I'll be driving, and I'm a good driver, so the risk must be low", and terrorism is "I'll be strapped into the plane and not in control... so it must be much, much worse."

The same kind of thinking applies to rolling your own software, instead of buying it. People are not objective about risk. They flat out suck at it. As for me... what I've learned is to wear my goddamned seat belt, because I read the statistics and know that there's about a 1 in 5 risk of getting into a car accident every year, and the seat belt means a 90% reduction in probable injury -- Without it, I'm just hamburger through the window.

Which is like most companies when they decide to cook their own complex software... they usually wind up paying more, but because they never analyze their own decisions, they, like you, think it's actually less.