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Will they ever learn? By now we could all have had a Content Box (tm) paying $10 a month to watch any TV show or movie ever made. Instead, we have the content industry investing billions into making better shackles and electronic jails.

if nothing else, there will be HDCP downgrade units. a downgrade unit wouldn't actually be circumventing DRM and thusly still be legal. however, without significant influx 4k content or a considerable boost in GPU speed, i think we will be maxed out at 1080p for at least the rest of the decade.

I meant Sea Water --> Purify to 95% --> Pour into limestone/sand/similar filtering system to feed into aquifer. Some places boil water through systems to effect this. Very interesting setups can be done with natural heat ala lava

In other parts of the world, fresh water is pumped down into underground salt formations. Then brought back up and the water evaporates out of the brine in big shallow ponds--it's one way to mine salt.

You COULD do that, but you're wasting a lot of energy pumping it back up to the surface from the depths of the aquifer, for no good reason.

Is there a reason why we couldn't desalinify water to pour into rock/sand filters so the water ends up in the aquifers?

I just started reading Neal Stephenson's Seven Eves so this is news that resonates with me. As I am reading Seven Eves I find myself *really* wanting to hear about space exploration successes instead of failures.

We are getting a water desalination plant in San Antonio, where I live. Even though we are pretty dang far from the coast, the bottom half of our aquifer is brackish and too salty to drink. The desalination plant will clean up the (slightly) too salty water so that we can suck the rest of the aquifer dry that we otherwise had to ignore. :)

Wow, everything looked fine until it didn't. Announcer even said "vehicle on course, on track" a second before it went poof and disappeared.

Direct YouTube link.

More people coming in means more tax revenue. And when purifying wastewater, you can save money that would otherwise need to be spent on sewage treatment plant upgrades.

Tell me, where do you think the money to build that would come from? Wouldn't be cheap, and from I hear, the Australian economy is faltering somewhat.

There are a couple options:
http://pipedot.org/story/2014-09-22/largest-desalination-plant-in-the-hemisphere-to-supply-7-of-san-diegos-water

Often there are calls from people abroad to increase the migrant intake for Australia. You have lots of land, they say. Size of a european country or three, they say. Farms bigger than cities. Waste of space, they say. Get more people! Wonderful. Where will the water for these people come from?

Ok check list:

Drugs? Yup
Money? Yup
Corruption? Yup
Murder for hire? Yup
Sex? No.
Rock and roll? No
Oliver Stone Work up? No Dammit!

So we stil have a way to go

All just patsies.

You don't even know, bro... :)

Boy, you conspiracy theorists sure have gotten harder to please... We've got a Secret Service and DEA agent going down for grand theft, money laundering, informing, and more, and still it's not enough for you?

I remember LSD. It was great.

So he funneled it through Mt. Gox before it exploded? Or while it exploded? Or he caused it to explode while he was there? The little tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist that lives inside me wants to it be the latter.

i think thats part of the point - we are getting to a place where systems can be so complex the output is unpredictable (i.e, dumb brain); this neural network looked for familiar shapes, similar to creatures looking at clouds. you might be able to step-by-step backwards and determine why it made the choices it did at that moment/step, but i can't imagine you could predict with any accuracy what it will do.

hopefully someday we can take a look at the code, if it hasn't already destroyed society.

Plus, the processed images look neater than the original artwork.

That was an interesting read. Though it's not really obvious how you go from the input to the output...

Unfortunately there are many, especially those interested in selling fossil fuels, who have insisted that climate change isn't real... perhaps they'll realise that it is when they get thirsty.

New York is one of the Great Lakes states, and a pretty thirsty one at that.

Any of the many states through which a water way to/from the Great Lakes passes (e.g. the Mississippi) has a solid claim to a significant fraction of the water in the Great Lakes, by proxy, which can be enforced by the federal government, if bordering states don't want to cooperate.

No matter how upset they may be, money is still a good motivator, and some major cities offering good money for almost no work, will probably get a deal. Even if most of the Great Lakes states holds out, only one needs to cave to get a deal through, and undermine the others.

The Great Lakes states are not going to give up their water easily. Ever since they have been lumped with the rest of the center of the USA as part of "flyover country" there is no love lost for the east and west coasts.

To be fair, the climate is changing, yes. But those projections also include increased population using that water too. Its not a static projection.

You shouldn't worry about him. There are always malcontents who will complain about anything and everything, as if they're being personally harmed by something they can easily skip over.

As far as news value: First in Washington with plans to build several more is notable, something that most people probably haven't heard about, not to mention it's news just because it hasn't been covered by pipedot before.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the end game will be. More investment in the great lakes reigon, or more diversion of water from the great lakes.

Don't worry, I frequently need to rewrite submissions. It'll just have to wait a bit until I have more time.

submission is awkwardly written, i'm not happy with it, and a rewrite would be nice, if someone would offer - just put another in the pipe and i'll vote it up

Great Lakes.

All the big sun belt development money that appeared (iirc) during Reagan presidency was bound to run up against water limits at some point. Meanwhile, the lack of investment in the "rust belt" states around the Great Lakes has left many areas short on infrastructure--but with plenty of water.

Fancy that. I wonder where they will get fresh water from

i read a bit more - the updates are supposedly for getting fresh word lists, and the like. and using another keyboard doesn't help, it still checks in the background.

why does it seem like some programmers go out of their way to ensure vulnerabilities can't be mitigated?

i voted it up in the pipe because it was something different, and it fit roughly in the environment category - and while maybe not technical, i figured it could start a discussion (point of this site), whether it be about the interesting design of the crossing (pretty low fence), or animal migration patterns; the latter being what interests me most.

where i am northeast, i don't ever see such structures; but ive heard of areas near me where the highways have trapped certain species in a relatively confined area, and the population is booming - sounds good, but not when its 50 coyotes backed against a neighborhood :)

Perhaps i'll consider the news factor more nexttime voting. appreciate the feedback.

As I said, I wasn't really making a "this isn't tech, shouldn't be on Pipedot" argument; I was making a "this isn't news, it shouldn't be on Pipedot" argument. It is a non-story because there is nothing new about it. It is about as exciting as learning that my hometown as built its first local sewage treatment plant (even though, yes, sewage treatment does requires some knowledge of science!). Animal overpasses are in no way a new development and these do not advance the art in any way. It's nice that they are doing it - truckers and deer will be thrilled, I'm sure - but it's also nice that my hometown is less likely to be pouring raw sewage into the waterways. It still doesn't make it newsworthy. It is extremely local and barely even worth mentioning for the residents.

Agreed. Canberra, as a city, is a "green corridor" for the local wildlife. Slamming into a roo at 80kmph on the freeway is normal. Dodging around the corpses too. Cyclists being wiped out and nearly killed by roos crossing through is new, or at least now this is being reported as news. This is sciency! The more animals that make themselves Darwin Awards For Animals contenders the better! Perhaps one day they will be smart enough to talk.

not sure what category this fits into...its slightly science, not hardware, is kind-of internet, vaguely robotics, hm? call it "robotics/ai"? not sure if i have seen enough topics to qualify a new category

All your complaints about this story are already IN THE SUMMARY.

If non-tech stories anger you, you'll have to ignore everything in the science, environment, anime, categories. This was even up-voted by readers while in the pipe, no down-votes, and there sure weren't any tech stories that got passed-over for it, anyhow.

As long as nearly all stories are submitted by me, it's going to be science/tech I find interesting... Even at that, |. still has a far narrower focus than any other sites. If you want more tech, then submit a tech story every few days...

The sad part is that right now, even with the broken permissions system and lack of default root access, Samsung Android phones beat everything on the market; YMMV. It does look like the PC evolution all over again this time with Cyanogenmod in place of Linux.

I mean, aside from the usual "why is this on Pipedot, it's not tech" comment, this still barely is worthy of being called news, at least on a national (or international) interest level.

Animal overpasses aren't a new idea. They have been in use for years. Most of the time the crossings are tunnels built beneath the roads but bridges over roads for the larger animals (especially big herd animals that might get spooked by the noise and constriction of a tunnel) have been built for decades. The only "new" thing about this is that it is apparently the first such structure being built in the state of Washington.

This is a non-story.

you can tell the google play not to auto update, but it will still check. But this looks like a builtin 'feature' of the keyboard, with no options to turn it off, so like other system updates, you can't stop it from checking; and being a system app you can't disable it, or turn it off. Its certainly concerning that an app is attempting to sideload its own updates instead of using the Play Store.

i miss being able to run AOSP roms, this would have been a 2 second uninstall...but all the Nexus devices are now stupid large, and my galaxy nexus classic finally bit the dust. S4 mini fits the size requirements, but without rootability (thank you KNOX...grr)

Are you sure that updates can't be turned off? My SO has a Samsung phone and claims that she has set it to not update anything.

Better solution than those problematic deer crossing signs! :)

i wonder how fast it will take predators to realize they can just wait at either end for their pray to come to them? and in the long term could that result in certain species being too afraid to cross, effectively trapped on one side?

certificates are too expensive. god only knows what my smarTv is trying to do right now :/ it runs java and hasn't had an update in a year :o

Perhaps you should replace your solar panels with a water-wheel...

The other 64% of Texas is getting record rainfall this year. Seriously, it seems like it has rained nearly every day this year (makes for crappy solar production on my rooftop panels!) I live in San Antonio, and we've gotten 3 inches in the last day alone. One of the lakes here has risen 70 feet in the last month or two.

Or what will happen eventually. Remember: Judgement day is inevitable. You can only postpone it.

Just in time for the movies to remind us of what could happen..

Developer in question has stalked no one, that would require bothering to go to debian functions rather than coding all day.

Oh no! We must find out what that payload actually is!