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Maybe we go from having CPU + GPU to having CPU + GPU + FPU, where FPU = "Fast Processing Unit".
The CPU in the CPU/GPU/FPU model becomes simpler. Any time we have to choose between performance and security we choose security.
The FPU goes the other way. It is for things where speed is critical and you either don't care if others on the machine can see your data, or you are willing to jump through a few hoops in your code to protect your secrets.
For most of what most people do on their computers most of the time, performance is fine without speculative execution or branch prediction and probably even with caches that are completely flushed on every context switch. (It will probably be fine to leave branch prediction in but just reset the history on every context switch).
The FPU memory system could be designed so that there is a way to designate part of FPU memory as containing secrets. Data from that memory is automatically flushed from cache whenever there is a context switch.
For most of what most people do on their computers most of the time, performance is fine without speculative execution or branch prediction
I think you underestimate the importance of branch prediction.
There are many people that place great value on being partially-off-the-grid, on (conspicuous) conservation, and enjoy DIY projects.
There are also legal ramifications. In New Mexico, it's not clear whether rainwater collection is legal. [2] The water falling on your property could be somebody else's water under the doctrine of prior appropriation.
[1] https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-it/C...
[2] http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2011/07/rainwater-harvesting-i...
once they got that rainwater harvesting system, the way they’re irrigating is completely different, and they’re paying a lot more attention to how they irrigate. It really changes behavior. Definitely people are more careful with how they use that rainwater than how they were using the potable water to irrigate beforehand.
The bummer is, even though you can now have rain barrels, it rains infrequently enough in Colorado that it's not terribly economical to buy 55-gallon rain barrels.
At $2.77 per 1,000 gallons from the utility, with infrequent rainfall it's pretty hard to ever recoup $176 for a 110 gallon system from BlueBarrelSystems. You're looking at 580 rains required to break even- while Denver, for example, sees only 40 days with "any measurable rainfall" a year.
https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/h...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew_Dube/publicatio...
Actually, it's maybe a little like spam filtering.
Plus, before skyscrapers and other sorts high density developments geography had an okay correlation with population density, but that is no longer the case anymore. There are often far more people in a single block in a city than on an entire knob out in the knobs, or an entire mountain in mountainous areas, etc. You can't easily "circle" just a floor or three of a single building on a 2D map with any accuracy, but to balance population density fairly you may have to consider problems like that.
With TV, radio, the internet, skyscrapers, and urban density, maybe we need a whole new solution for representative democracy than where physically you collect your snail mail?
I don't have any good theories on what should replace geography, but I do think geography is a problem we could eliminate by ignoring that variable.