Highrise buildings would install pipes under the roof surface & pump warm water through to warm the roof surface enough to melt the snow & drain the water away.

The thick glaciers from last time happened mostly because nobody even tried removing snow & ice, so it just slowly built up over thousands of years.

Colder winters in Canadian big cities are kind of like hotter summers in Miami... meh, because it's just more of the same stuff we already have infrastructure to deal with. It would suck more to go outside, but furnaces in Edmonton & air conditioning in Miami is a baseline non-negotiable requirement for civilized habitation there *already* and *anyway*.

There's also quite a bit of evidence that "the little ice age" was *actually* the natural start of the next/current glacial period, and it was only the arrival of the industrial revolution & rapid increase in fossil-fuel combustion that paused, then slowly reversed, the cooling.

Regardless, "the next ice age" (glaciation) will be nothing like the past, because this time around humans will interfere with it... indirectly, if not directly. Snow gets removed from urban areas & never really gets a foothold anymore. If glaciers come within a hundred miles of Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, etc, Canada will build nuclear power plants with "cooling" canals like Turkey Point in Miami whose added warmth will stop the glaciers in their tracks (and become very popular with wildlife, who'll ultimately come to depend upon the warm water for their continued existence).

Ditto, for Britain, Scandinavia, and areas near glacier-prone mountains.

Areas like Seattle will start actively melting Mt. Rainier's ice cap to reduce future lahar formation (from instantly-melted ice) during an eruption.

Today, glacier fields are protected & in retreat. Once they start growing instead of shrinking a few hundred years from now (partially neutralized by global warming or not), they won't be left alone to slowly cover North America & Europe the way they did last time. This alone will probably profoundly alter the "ice age's" (glaciation's) course, since we'll be actively disrupting the albedo feedback loop & preventing the development of permafrost in places that are "supposed" to develop it during a cold period.

Put another way, even if we don't try to actively melt glaciers, cities like Edmonton & Glasgow are now several thousand square-kilometer heat islands with black asphalt & actively-plowed roads. If push came to shove, the aforementioned nuclear plants would have their "cooling" canals extended into buried hydronic heat pipes under roads, the surrounding corridor, and entire metro areas if necessary to prevent permafrost & turn plowed snow into meltwater that gets pumped away.

Meat sealed in plastic can have the air inside purged with pure nitrogen or argon to keep it from turning brown before you open the package. Paper isn't airtight.

Americans don't shop for one meal at a time. We buy food by the pallet once or twice a month because it ends up costing roughly half as much to buy it that way. But to make single people to buy ground beef 5 pounds at a time, you have to package it in a way that won't cause half of it to go bad & end up getting thrown away.

Yep. Small grocery/Walmart bags (double-bagged, since one bag alone usually has at least one hole big enough to leak) are the perfect size for the immediate disposal of clumping cat litter & poop.

~15 years ago, I spent almost a Kilobuck on an iRobot Scooba floor-washing robot.

It was awesome. For about a year and a half. The rubber nozzle tore & I replaced it. And replaced it again about a year later. Then the pump died, and I replaced it. Unfortunately, by the third time the rubber nozzle tore, iRobot quit selling replacement parts for it.

I'll never buy another iRobot product. I can deal with tearing it down once or twice a year to replace de-facto consumable parts. I can not, and will not, spend another thousand bucks on an expensive robot with proprietary consumable parts that becomes unobtainable & effectively condemn it to a junk box a couple of years later.

Oracle is a multi-level marketing scheme that happens to offer a decent database as a side venture.

Most databases install with defaults that aren't optimal, but kind of work for development. Not Oracle. They want to *make sure* they have jobs for their tithe-paying vassals (in the form of expensive certifications that expire), so installing Oracle with defaults leaves you with a db that can't even boot. They *deliberately* make Oracle hard to administer.

The problem is, the federal government can't just declare itself the owner of something like 1/3 of Boeing... it would have to buy the shares at a premium price, as if it were a private equity firm attempting a hostile takeover via a leveraged buy-out. Even in its wounded state, Boeing stock is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Now, granted, the government could borrow the money for a near-pittance (relatively speaking), so it wouldn't be quite as handicapped as a normal LBO, and in a sense it would be an investment (though the federal government has a pretty piss-poor historic track record of making actual profitable investments, with the possible exception of pet projects started by the CIA that occasionally end up accidentally becoming profitable real companies). But unless Boeing stock tanks & the company is teetering on bankruptcy, I really don't think there's any real likelihood of partial nationalization.

In contrast, a forced break-up has both historical precedent AND can occasionally end up being win-win for both investors AND the country. Consider the breakup of AT&T. When all was said & done, and the dust finished settling, the new companies were collectively worth significantly more than AT&T alone formerly was... because pre-breakup AT&T was run more like a government bureaucracy than some actual government bureaucracies are. And 100% of that added value went straight to AT&T's original shareholders.

Granted, AT&T and Verizon are both still quite evil in their own slightly different ways, but the breakup also opened the door for T-mobile to grow (via its own indirect route) into a formidable opponent. T-mobile certainly isn't a saint... but all things considered, at least cares enough to try and *pretend* (to itself and the public) that it's non-evil, compared to AT&T and Verizon being loudly, proudly, and unapologetically evil.

The appropriate punishment to Boeing would be its forced division back into Boeing and McDonnell Douglass. Divide their manufacturing facilities more or less down the middle, with both new companies starting out with equal ownership of the present company's intellectual property.

Best-case, the US ends up with two vigorously-competing aviation companies. Worst-case, all of Boeing's present-day shittiness gets condensed into one of them and the bad one goes bankrupt, taking the rot along with it and leaving the other to once again become a world leader.

At this point, Boeing's reputation is so badly tarnished, forced-division would probably end up being a hidden blessing to Boeing's current stockholders.

My prediction about T-mobile's pricing for its upcoming satellite texting:

* Absolutely no requirement that the user sign up in advance or preemptively pay some monthly extra fee for the ability to use the service (though there might be some incentives to do so, which I'll mention in a moment). You'll need a special app to send and receive messages via satellite on a compatible phone, but it'll be one of the carrier apps that get installed by default unless you bend over backwards to decline/remove it.

* Sending one or two messages per month will be outright free. The next few after that will be cheap. After that, it'll get expensive... and for people who really want to use it A LOT, they'll have a premium plan that's not cheap, but is probably half the price of using a satphone for text messages today.

For me, the S3 '911 and its funky local-bus non-standard slot was the moment when Amiga decisively lost its graphics advantage. It didn't have sprites (well, besides the mouse pointer) or display lists, but it did have hardwarg BitBlt, and the bus was fast enough to bruteforce double-buffered graphics synchronized to VBLANK at 60fps, even at 640x480.

There was even a graphics demo put out by S3 that allowed you to whip around a 320x200 rectangle on a 640x480 screen using the mouse at full 60fps speed, without tearing or artifacts. Windows 95 did the same thing ~4 years later, but when a 486/33 with S3 '911 did it in 1992, on a *PC* no less, it seemed like an absolute miracle.

Then came the Gravis Ultrasound, erasing Amiga's sound advantage. Second Reality cemented it.

The first time I saw Comanche: Maximum Overkill, Amiga was dead to me forever (at least, as "the future", vs merely "retro nostalgia"). Comanche's voxel graphics finally realized what Amiga demos had teased & promised for years, but nothing short of an A3000 (or at least, an A2500/30) could have actually *delivered* in a playable game.

Ugh, finger grazed the damn submit button on phone & mobile slashdot has no preview-before-post :-(

anyway...

MO's true strength is its likely long-term readability. It works something like this:

* Disc is manufactured with magnetically-polarized particles

To write, the laser melts a spot, a magnetic field changes the orientation of the particles embedded in the temporarily-liquid plastic at that spot, and it hardens with the particles in their permanent orientation.

The advantage is, it doesn't darken or bleach over time, and the particles are basically frozen in their orientation "forever". In theory, MO media stored under even remotely-ok conditions should remain readable for decades... and MO media stored under ideal conditions might be readable for *centuries*.

As of today, the best long-term archival media available is non-LTO BD-R (which is harder to find than you'd think... most BD-R media is now dye-based "LTO", and no better than DVD+/-R). Even if *consumer* PCs don't have optical drives 50 years from now, so much is archived onto MO discs by governments, museums, universities, and libraries, they should remain readable by others at halfway-sane cost for a *long* time.

I don't think MO drives can really take advantage of holographic storage, multi-wavelengths, or even multiple layers.

Don't forget the LATENCY. Even with an active stylus and 60fps framerate, most people can "outrun" the screen update by an entire letter when writing via stylus.

To eliminate perceptible lag under a stylus in a system where you're updating the screen within 1 frame of detecting stylus motion, you need a framerate approaching 1000fps. At the present time, there isn't even a display cabling standard that can support something like 3840x2160 with 24 (let alone 30 or 36) bit color at a thousand frames per second, let alone any display a consumer can buy approaching that resolution and framerate.

It's not your imagination. Proper books have approximately 1200dpi resolution. The best printing approaches 2400dpi.

Try viewing two pages side-by-side on a 1920x1080 display. Assuming you can even make out the letters, they're REALLY hard to read... even on a 17-inch diagonal display that approaches the physical dimensions of a normal computer book opened to two facing pages.

At 3840 x 2160-2560, the problem isn't quite as bad... but it's STILL kind of like comparing shitty inkjet printing to a professinally-published book in terms of resolution and legibility. The diminished contrast and blockiness has approximately the same impact on legibility as a diopter of uncorrected astigmatism.

1. eBooks take a relative ETERNITY to flip between pages, compared to a book where you can hold one or more pages between your fingers and more or less instantly flip back and forth with no lag or latency.

2. one page vs 2-up view. For literally CENTURIES, the norm for technical books has been, "diagram on one page, text explaining it on the facing page". Most ebooks shoot that paradigm to hell, either by allowing you to see only one page at a time (with non-insignificant delay when flipping back and forth), or by making almost no meaningful attempt to keep facing pages coherent (in the name of reflowabilility).

3. Digital astigmatism. 1920x1080 (or worse) just doesn't cut it for heavy reading. Antialiasing small text has more or less the same impact on legibility as a diopter of uncorrected astigmatism... turning enclosed parts of letters into blocky gray mush, and increasing the cognitive load.

What we REALLY need to make ebooks not utterly and completely suck are tablets with 300+ PPI screens that are physically at least as large as two facing pages in a typical computer book by someone like Manning or Apress... combined with storage and a processor that can do a total page-flip in under 200ms, and a vastly improved mechanism for interaction that includes some direct equivalent to dog-earing a page, or grabbing a bunch of pages between your fingers so you can rapidly flip through the book.

It's not anyone's imagination. Ebooks ARE harder to read and comprehend than "real" books... and for the most part, utterly and completely SUCK for technical content where you AREN'T reading serially, from start to finish. Ebook readers have shitty hardware whose sole design criterion is "cheap to manufacture", and sloppy layout & editing (assuming the publisher even TRIES to lay it out with any kind of formatting beyond a single paragraph).