> Its the lack of slack. The world runs on slack. Cameras have no slack.

I thought the slack was the amber light ?

> How about this: Set the speed limits sanely, then most people won't violate them.

How about this: stop seeing the streets as only for motor vehicles and you may see that the speed limits are sane !!

> In contrast, Germany has worked hard to make heatings and houses fit for the 21st century.

Yep: we are coming up to 10 years in our PassivHaus in central Germany: not only is there little need for active heating, but it is incredibly comfortable to live in: draught / sound proofing, no hot/cold spots, ...

(Not that I necessarily agree with your other statements.)

> What else is there?

Easy: reduce energy consumption: switch off / efficient devices / more local production / more human power / better designed communities / ...

Yet another reason to use a VT100 hooked up to the serial port !

FWIW our triple screen test machine is called 'hydra'.

(Well it was for many years, until the Windows admins took over our Solaris boxes, and started renaming them XXnnnn in sequential order :-( But 'hydra' is still an alias to it.)

Or it was a Dr Who reference ?

I vote for growing 3 extra fingers. Then we can use Base 13. The jokes are better.

The obvious missing part of the article is that anyone who uses GPS as their sole method of navigation is an idiot (I hope that no ship would reply solely on GPS, as the article seems to imply they may.)

(Of course some people do reply to much on it: and end up driving down tail tracks and into rivers.)

> Why block GPS? What do criminals gain from it?

Maybe to block trackers on stolen cars, or covert trackers on their own cars ?
To make trailing of themselves by the police more difficult, esp. once the police start to rely to much on GPS, and less on local knowledge, paper maps etc.

Hey, Slashdot poster: I love Bill Gates: I just wish people would stop taking the piss out of him.

> Religion still dominates most people's moral compasses (including those who claim ahtiest/agnostic) and it affects many facets of our lives.

Does religion have a monopoly on morals ? Just because I think I should be nice to other people does not mean that I got it from religion. Maybe it is just the way many people are, and religion just encompassed it. Also I am a vegan, primarily for moral reasons. I certainly did not get that from my upbringing, and certainly not from the Christian church !

> Hell, the western world is still effectively fighting the crusades.

Are they religious wars, or wars over resources ? Or the one disguised as the other ? If Kuwait and Iraq had exported carrots, would the West have intervened ?

Except most people who tick the "Christian" box do not believe in the bible: they just mix and match, and re-interpret to make it support what they want !

Point taken, although pure CPU load would not be the only measure: good reaction time is important for music, and useful for web browsing.
3 cores could support 1 for video, 1 for compiling, 1 for web/music. Except GCC already supports parallel building: I am not sure what the maximum useful number of cores would be !
I would also agree that "I have N cores" may become the new "my camera has N-megapixels" !

> Most desktop apps are still single threaded

Maybe tru, but I could easily be compiling, listening to music, recoding a video and browsing the web at the same time.