[KaiserJeep]

Outcast_Searcher, I will refer you to my last post. Can you pass the SAME EXACT exam that 8th grade, junior high school age kids were expected to pass in 1895 in Salina, Kansas?

No? Why not? More importantly, what would it prove if you could, that is relevant today and here?

No, you are not the only one with no smart phone. I have never owned one. In fact for the last decade, I have not carried a dumb cellphone, either.

But be under no delusions, computers have transformed our world. I sit at a desk with two PCs, and an Android tablet. One PC is for work, one is for play, at places like PO.com. The tablet is used to read E-books. When I go out of town, there is a prepaid cellphone hidden in the Jeep, that nobody knows the number of. Even my landline is unlisted - because I alone decide with whom and for what I will communicate.

I'm guessing this is some sort of reaction to 37 years of E-Mail. My original E-Mail was on a "green screen" dumb terminal, that emulated a teletype machine while communicating with a mainframe computer that ran the E-Mail program. That program was compatible with the original ARPANET offerings and did evolve along with them through the USENET to the SMTP products of today.

Sometimes you can have too much communications. If I forget to shut off my speakers at the end of the day, that annoying chime of an incoming E-Mail message can wake me from slumber and have me walking towards the computer before I realize what happened.

That is why I don't carry around a smart phone. Sometimes I will go out into the world and actually speak to other people, by preference.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Outcast_Searcher, I will refer you to my last post. Can you pass the SAME EXACT exam that 8th grade, junior high school age kids were expected to pass in 1895 in Salina, Kansas?

No? Why not? More importantly, what would it prove if you could, that is relevant today and here?

I was intrigued by that test.

No, I most certainly could not score well on it (though I did manage a 4.0/4.0 in college in '77-'81, by dint of lots of hard work and a strong desire to get into my choice of programming jobs).

Why -- partly because the vocabulary has changed. I don't even know what a few of the words mean. Also, much of the subject matter is now (to 99% of people in the first world) irrelevant. (I have never worried about how much a "bushel" is, for example -- though I do prefer the metric system and moving around decimal points to remembering how many cups to a gallon, as one example).

But you don't have to go back to 1895 to run into this. I have failed to answer questions on "Are you as smart as a 5th grader?", not because I lack the ability to (for example) do arithmetic, but because the words they use to teach a CONCEPT may differ so much than 45 years ago with me in the 5th grade that I can't be clear on which concept they're asking about.

....

Please realize, I was NOT trying to demean the concept or promise of OPEN any more than I would demean spreadsheets or Khan acadamy. It just bugs me and (I think) detracts from credibility when an idea like OPEN is pushed with unrealistic benefits. The idea that ANY paradigm (by itself) implies testing is no longer needed for humans just was so silly it rubbed me the wrong way.

[hvacman]

the individual 2-CPU modules do not actually insert into the rack's two coolant loops, they utilize "heat pipes" from the CPU chip to the edges of the module, and heat is transferred via conductance and vapor/liquid phase change from the CPU to the coolant using water vapor in a partial vacuum (versus the ordinary heat pipe which has ozone-damaging Freon inside).

Need to correct KJ on a technical issue here. "Ozone-damaging Freon" has been phased out of US-manufactured air conditioning, heat pump, or heat pipe construction. They were banned by the Montreal Protocol. HVAC type heat pipes use R-134a, with zero ODP.

And regarding "ordinary heat pipes", Electronic cooling is the world's most common heat pipe application and water is the most common refrigerant for these heat pipes. This is not "new technology" at all - been around for decades, but if you want to sound "techie" when discussing a water-vapor-based heat pipe, just say it uses the cryptic "R-718" refrigerant. Note that "R-718" is not ozone-depleting, but is definitely a "greenhouse gas". And if you cool your spoonful of soup by blowing on it, you're cooling by using a blend of R-728/R-232/R-740 refrigerants - i.e. N2 + O2 + CO2.

One final thing on heat pipes, related to the oil industry. Those finned towers on the ends of the pipe supports for the Trans Alaska Pipeline are the cold condensing ends of heat pipes driven into the ground below to dissipate heat and keep the perma-frost frozen as the heat from the hot oil conducts through the pipe or supports into the ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System#mediaviewer/File:Heatpipes.JPG

[Karle]

Watch "Humans need not apply " on youtube to see what's coming. you don't need no education. If you are not 70 years old already you will experience how most jobs will just disappear. Not in a distant future but already today and accelerating.
That is how we will live in the future. Work we don't any more, and to learn we have lots of time since we don't need to work.
There is only one problem, you guess it?