The price of the hardware would make ridiculous to just shut your miner off when it's not cold, so you'd only get this heating benefit for a part of the year and still have to cool it the rest of the time. Also, as has been said elsewhere, gas or a heat pump would be more efficient.

I wonder if anyone has tried this as an electric pre-heater for hot water though. A closed liquid (oil?) system that pre-heated a water tank that supplied your electric instant-on hot water would be able to run year-round. Adaptive CPU speed could slow it down as the water temp reached a level too high to properly cool the CPUs. The oil could also be circulated to heat the house in the winter or heat a pool in the summer.

If you were already using electric to heat your water, nothing lost--I don't think there is a "More efficient" electric water heater that leverages electricity and ambient temperature the way heat pumps do--at least not that I've seen on the market.

Seems too obvious, I'm guessing the actual implementation is much more problematic than it sounds.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the concept that a digital computer can't be conscious, but it sounds a LOT like the excuses people have used to mistreat other people and animals. There has been a lot of "They don't have a soul it doesn't matter ha we treat Them" in the past.

We can't even prove if another person has consciousness, of course. it seems pretty straight-forward if you are religious--you can just decide that your god assigns souls to a given platform or it doesn't, so this kind of statement makes sense and there isn't much to say about it... it's belief and personal interpretation though, you won't find agreement across all religions or even all people within a religion. The religious argument is often how we justified mistreating entire races/all animals in the past (and still today) though.

It's a more interesting discussion if you leave religion out of it though... For an atheist to say ai's can't ever be conscious implies that there is something--a physical, detectable, understandable structure in the brain/body--that can't ever be simulated in digital processing. I've only seen one thing that a sufficiently powerful computer can't simulate.without additional hardware-true randomness. In order to simulate true randomness we need additional hardware--but it can be done (The brain has true RNG built in to every decision, so that really could be a difference that might define consciousness, I don't know).

If your response is that a computer is digital and a human is some kind of magic analog that can't be simulated you might want to research our current understanding of how the brain works and how AIs were patterned after it. At the level we're simulating, synapses and neurons, the brain is basically digital--some bias+input+rng telling a neuron how fast to fire digital signals to other neurons. It's pretty well understood, why wouldn't we be able to simulate it?

At this point, any company that wants to remove phone integration is clearly trying to force something onto their customer that the customer doesn't want... Easy choice. The last couple years it's become the first question I ask when looking at new cars, it's a nice canary--does this car company care at all about it's customer?

Considering the quality of software from companies that don't focus on software I'd rather they minimize the amount of manufacture-created code in the car anyway. I mean when your TV software gets wonky you can reboot it or disconnect it from upgrades or just skip tonight's viewing and go buy a new TV tomorrow... when your car software gets wonky on the freeway it's a whole 'nother story.

Know how sometimes a company sends you a tiny box packed in a huge peanut-laded shipping box?

Sizing the internet and it's packaging is like that... but it's more like you packaged a strawberry in the Empire State Building.

But I'd really like to hear how more software-savvy firms do, in particular, Apple and Google have similar consumer grade hardware but I'd expect their software security to be significantly more advanced.

Are they making cars without steering-wheel locks requiring physical keys now? I thought it was federal law that you couldn't do that--but maybe that was just an assumption.

I have remote door locks and remote start, but getting into the car isn't that hard anyway (Brick authorized entry works as well as it always has)--getting past the steering wheel lock requires SOME kind of solution...

Why would anyone continue to use a device with physical $30 cartridges when they could be downloading $0.99 games without end (and often with free previews)?

Sure the DS games are deeper, but not 30 times deeper! Maybe 3x better in most cases.

As though that wouldn't be enough, my DS isn't a GPS or a phone and doesn't have internet connectivity in most cases (or a usable browser), all of which I'd need to have around as well.

I've got a few hundred $ in cartridges sitting around if anyone wants 'em (Actually, I probably have spent more in games for the DS than I would for a new iPod touch or maybe even an iPad)

Pretty obviously something the government knows about--otherwise with our current level of paranoia the number of bricks being shit would already be visible on google maps.

I remember a similar discussion when Microsoft added a TCP/IP stack to windows, the vendors like Winsock were really upset.

I'm not sure if I see a difference here, but anyone who used TCP/IP before it was added into the OS knows now what the correct choice was.

It works, bitches!

There you go mistaking a dedicated device for a generic computing platform.

Silly, you fell right into Apple's hands--thinking just what they wanted you to think, you are even holding the iPhone to a higher standard than other phones (which generally have a significantly more strict policy--few if any phones have been as open pre Android).

Next thing you know you'll be saying the iPad sucks for not being a general-purpose computer, something it was never intended to be. It's a web appliance that happens to allow you to run a pretty wide variety of applications, kind of like a router or cable box.

Well, no, my router is actually more of a general purpose computer than the iPad/iPhone since I can compile arbitrary apps, load them at will onto my router, share them with others and sell them without the approval of any third party.

Once you see it that way, hating the iProducts is pretty pointless, you either want what they have to offer or you don't, not what you think a Computing platform should offer.

All words are made up. Some have just been around longer than others. If we didn't make up words we'd still be calling everything "Uhhg"--well no that would be making up a word.

Making up words is a critical part of adapting our language to accurately reflect new concepts. You will occasionally see variation (Viruses vs Virii perhaps?) and eventually one will die out due to disuse and become quaint, the other will eventually make it into dictionaries--but neither is wrong. Calling them "Compuhurtthingies" isn't really wrong either, but it's not likely to be as widely recognized by the average person (Which is actually pretty important in a news story).

Even if something existed as close as the moon but with the resources of the earth, it wouldn't help.

I don't know the latest figures, but I'd guess you could march the human population of the earth into the sea 10 abreast for ever and the population would still grow due to births outnumbering deaths.

So you can't lift those people off the planet, and bringing stuff back will only help for a while (if at all, it's not really practical to run up and down the gravity well with any significant amount of stuff.

Essentially without cutting births down to about .001% of their current rate, we're kinda screwed--and I don't see that happening voluntarily.

Funny how people come up with observations like this but are so reluctant to follow them to their clear, obvious conclusion (or believe that conclusion when it's presented to them). Humans are funny.

The New version is doing the suspend/hibernate thing I mentioned in my post you were replying to--that's why it whirrs for a few seconds after you close the lid.

I think that can be disabled if you don't like it.

I'm kind of surprised they have opened up the networks as much as they have. When you look at these things, the terms "Bailing Wire" and "Bubble Gum" come quickly to mind. The only thing that keeps them from exploding and killing everyone in the area is the fact that they are very rigorously tested for a very specific and limited set of inputs.

Most of the technology has roots in the long-gone past and it evolves slower (and costs more) than you can imagine.

Honestly, most large systems are like this. As they open them up for traffic they are having to re-engineer huge parts of their networks to handle untrusted data/signals.

Think of what Kevin Mitnick could do with a few sounds over a normal telephone line. These guys do NOT think about security or reliability until they are forced to--but then I do have to admit that they integrate what they learned, redesign and rebuild. They are good at remembering stuff and once they have failed they generally won't fail that way again. "Evolution" has served them pretty well so far, but it's going to be hard to defeat when people start getting more inroads into their equipment.