Typically, solar panels pay for themselves in 10 years, but if you read the article, you'd find that they haven't decided how much to do with photovoltaic cells and how much to do with turbine-based systems. The latter is quite profitable, and there are many commercial power providers that operate in this space.
I'm assuming, therefore, that most of this money will be spent on solar turbines, in which case it would be a very good investment. The typical ROI on solar turbine systems is close to 100% in the first year, so if you reinvest in new solar turbine systems in other places every year, until you hit market saturation, you have the potential for nearly guaranteed exponential growth.
Even if they go with PV, though, I should note that I wasn't comparing solar to other investments, only to spending the money up front. And even with PV cells, going solar has some nice side effects---as someone else noted, in the long term, reducing our environmental impact reduces the amount of money needed to feed the hungry. It's hard to say whether PV cells would be a good idea or not. It isn't throwing money away by any stretch of the imagination, but solar turbine systems would be much, much smarter.
No, Catholics don't leave it out, or at least not when used as part of the mass. They just say it a little differently. The problem is, the Catholic form, "For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and forever," didn't allow me to end with the word "power" and have the fragment make much sense....
You and the GP are both looking at it wrong. It costs $660 million dollars now, but it cuts the Vatican's power bill to zero, and the spare power can be sold to Italy at the market rate, resulting in a significant financial win for the Vatican. The money saved is money that can then be spent on humanitarian projects around the world. Over the expected life of the panels, the money the Church could spend should be far greater and can do far more good than spending the $660 on humanitarian causes up front.
It's like the people who suggested that the Church should sell all its properties (which some have estimated at on the order of $1-2 trillion dollars) and spend the money on the poor. The problem is that there are an estimated 963 million people in the world who are hungry, so even if you could feed them all for a net cost of only a dollar a day, the assets would last only about 3-6 years. Given the scale involved, a more realistic cost estimate would put that closer to 6 months. And, of course, when the money runs out, those hungry people would still be dirt poor, but there wouldn't be any more money coming in without congregants putting money in the collection basket every week. Thus, beyond a very short term view, that would be a foolish thing to do.
This is what happens when sloppy programmers fail to do sanity checks on sample rates and frame counts before playing clips. You'd think codec writers would have learned their lesson after the Canon XL1 fiasco, but apparently some people never learn. Fixing these problems is relatively simple math (multiplication and division), and it is appalling that we're still seeing such sync problems almost a decade later....
I've seen that behavior several times with the Flash video player on several different Macs (never tried Windows, but I'd expect the same behavior). If you haven't seen it, odds are you aren't watching enough videos or aren't watching the right videos (or, one might reasonably argue, you are watching precisely the right number/right videos...).
The flash videos I particularly love are the ones where the video lags a half second behind the audio. What an unholy mess.
The latest crop of flash ads fairly consistently hang both Safari and FireFox on my (Intel) Mac laptop, too. It has gotten so bad that I've resorted to the clicktoflash WebKit plug-in. And flash is the #1 most common cause of browser crashes for me, too. Nearly every crash I've ever seen in Safari contains Flash plug-in symbols in the backtrace. I have seen two or three non-Flash Safari crashes in all the years I've used Safari, versus about two or three crashes per week that are directly attributable to Flash, so at least anecdotally, it seems to be at least two orders of magnitude more common than all the other Safari crasher bugs put together.
The day Flash appears in a TV I buy is the day I stop watching TV. Period. I'd rather stab myself repeatedly with an icepick than buy a TV set infested with that miserable crapware. I'd rather shove toothpicks under my fingernails and go swimming in a pool filled with lemon juice than buy a TV set with that lousy software. I'd rather send death threats to the President than run Flash on my TV. I would rather go the rest of my life with only a Discover card in my wallet than let that fetid piece of pestilence anywhere near my TV set. I think that about sums it up.
I'd like to believe that TV set manufacturers couldn't possibly be stupid enough to fall for this. I certainly hope so, anyway. The absolute last thing the world needs is broader Flash adoption. Heck, I'd even take Java over Flash, and that's saying something....
I pretty much agree with you, with a couple of caveats. I don't think the water analogy is really all that good for two reasons:
Water is cheap to extract up to a point, and then you hit an absolute maximum beyond which the price of extraction jumps up by orders of magnitude (desalinization plants, condensing towers, and so on). For networking infrastructure, by contrast, the cost for adding new trunk lines tends to be fairly linear assuming you divide the cost of each long haul link up among the more local links that it feeds. There's not a capacity wall (at least as long as the backbone router technology is able to keep up with demands on it).
You don't pay a $50 connection fee to your water company in addition to the per-unit costs. Outside of the telecom industry, charging a base fee on top of per-unit fees is unheard of. Your power company doesn't do that, your gas company doesn't do that, your water doesn't do that. Your sewer company doesn't do that. Just telephone/ISP service (and to a limited degree, cable TV, except that most of the content they provide isn't metered).
So if the ISPs want to charge $2 per gigabyte across the board and not charge a base fee, that's their prerogative, but I guarantee they'll make a heck of a lot less money that way. I think they should have to choose flat rate or metered---not both.
Why can't we? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the enviro-nazis and NIMBY bastards successfully stymied the construction of new plants back in the 70s and 80s and in so doing left zero incentive for American industry to retain the plant and equipment to build reactors?
The NIMBY folks were actually right. The current U.S. nuclear power plants are very expensive to operate because of all the safety systems that are needed and because they can't rapidly adjust to changing energy needs, making further construction of such poor designs a relatively poor solution to our energy problems. Unfortunately, a side effect of the protestations of the NIMBYites was that the U.S. stopped approving new power plant designs, too, so there's a lot of bureaucratic red tape in the way of any company building a more modern reactor design such as a pebble bed reactor.
What do you mean solar and wind aren't ready? Solar and wind are already being used heavily on the power grid. Last year, about 2.5% of California's power came from wind energy (6,802 GWh). Solar was only about 0.3%, but PG&E just started a new program to add 500 MW of solar capacity (times say 7 full-sun-equivalent hours is 3500 MWh per day, or about 1,277.5GWh per year, give or take), which means by the end of that five year program, that will be up to about 0.8% even if nobody else in California adds any solar installations at all. That's not exactly small scale power generation....
That person with something inappropriate tattooed on his forehead would be just as distracting whether he was getting something accomplished like sweeping the sidewalk or merely wandering the streets doing nothing. At least you're keeping the person busy. Being given something to do reduces the risk of the people you consider undesirable committing crimes. There have been numerous studies showing that giving criminals jobs reduces the risk of recidivism. I see no reason that would be any less effective at reducing the rate of undesirable activity among the general population. Idle hands are the devil's playthings.
As for people stealing from job sites, if they don't steal there, they are just going to steal something else somewhere else. At least on a city construction project, they are more likely to get caught.
Regarding people with anger management issues, people who inappropriately touch their coworkers, and people who are violent by nature, just put them in a job where they don't have to deal with other people. Send them to do roadside clean-up duty along the highway. Give them a bag and one of those pointy sticks and send them to a mile-long strip of highway eight miles out of town.
We already covered people who simply refuse to show up. Those folks should get canned just like with any other job.
No, I'm not. I'm suggesting that suing a 12-year-old for hundreds of thousands of dollars is immoral and cruel, regardless of guilt or innocence, and that before you sue someone for committing an act who is multiple standard deviations away from the norm of people who commit such acts, you'd better make darn sure you have your facts straight or else you will come out looking like the biggest moron in the known universe....
First, I'd expect anything approaching a child care facility to have more than one person with the kids at all times, making that argument pretty unimaginable. Second, I do recall saying that people would be assigned work based on their skills. A laid-off teacher or nurse would be a good choice for providing child care, not a laid off exotic dancer.... You don't just randomly throw darts and say, "Little Billy. you get to be the fireman today." This isn't kindergarten.
And I don't believe there are very many people out there who are not capable of doing anything. Even someone with very low intelligence and very poor education can pick up litter along the side of the road or sweep the sidewalks downtown or.... These don't all have to be highly skilled jobs here. They don't even have to necessarily be essential jobs that would have been done otherwise. They just have to provide some benefit to the community.
And, as far as I've read, the laws and precedents support this.
No, they don't. They don't support hiring an unlicensed private investigator to collect evidence for a civil suit, for one thing, which makes every bit of evidence the lawyers introduced completely worthless. The way I see it, there are two possible ways to interpret that action:
If they knew the evidence was illegally gathered and knowingly brought meritless charges based on that evidence, that is barratry.
If they unknowingly introduced this evidence without bothering to check where it came from, that is incompetence.
Either of the above is grounds for disbarment, and barratry is grounds for criminal prosecution in some states. Either way, the laws definitely do NOT support their actions by any stretch of the imagination.
I disagree that welfare should be a transition program. We have a transition program. It's called unemployment. And for people who physically can't work, we have disability. You pay into them out of your paycheck every month. If that's what welfare is doing, then we should just extend the duration of unemployment benefits and get rid of this redundant vestigial system and the huge government bureaucracy required to maintain that redundant system.
The historical purpose of welfare, at least prior to about 1996, was to provide a safety net for people who could not find work for an extended period of time due to the great depression. It was a program that should have ended soon thereafter, and should kick back in when unemployment levels exceed some set threshold. It should not be a check in the mail for doing nothing, but should instead be a part-time job appropriate for the recipient's skill level, whether that's serving as a pack mule at a government construction site, doing web design for the DOJ, or even being a babysitter for some of the other workers, with the requirement that you must spend the rest of your time looking for a permanent job. Repeated failure to report should result in termination of benefits just as with any other employer.
If welfare transitioned completely into such a program, there would be no reason to limit the duration of benefits at all. Not counting the administrative overhead, as a country, we would be getting out of it what we put into it, or very nearly so, and if you design the program to be administered by the local communities, the overhead would also be very low. Add to that the benefits of being able to use the government-run credit unions and ATMs for payment instead of mailing physical checks (lower risk of fraud, lower cost of operation, etc.) and the overall cost of the program could be pretty minimal.
Lawyers are not required by law to take cases except possibly as public defenders. You're right that we shouldn't paint lawyers who defend people with the same brush as their clients. However, when the client in question is filing the charges, when their lawyers are knowingly (or unknowingly and completely incompetently) introducing illegally-obtained evidence, etc., then yes, we should paint the lawyers with the same brush.
There's no grey area here. You either have a sense of morality or you don't. If you choose to represent somebody in suing a 66-year-old grandmother, an 83-year-old dead person, and a 12-year-old girl for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, then you have the morals of a jellyfish.
We're not talking about going after commercial music piracy---one corporation suing another corporation (or nearly so). We're talking about companies that maliciously use laws intended to prosecute commercial piracy against ordinary people, that frequently sue completely uninvolved people, that have gross disregard for the legal process, etc. The lawyers themselves either hired unlicensed investigators (in which case the lawyers behaved illegally) or accepted evidence from them without looking into the background of the investigators (in which case the lawyers are completely inept). Either way, introducing such evidence should be grounds for disbarment in and of itself, but instead of throwing these dirtbags out on the streets where they belong, Obama is hiring these leaches on society as the highest lawyers in our land....
There's a point at which someone shows such reckless disregard for the law, for right and wrong, and for humanity in general that we can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. RIAA lawyers crossed that line many, many years ago and have been sinking progressively farther below that line with every passing day.... I'm appalled that Obama would choose people like this to head the DOJ. You cannot hire people who knowingly violate the law to win cases as our nation's highest lawyers. That's like hiring Hitler to head up the anti-defamation league. It just doesn't make sense, and it is this very sort of practice that causes sleazebags like Ted Stevens to be let off the hook due to prosecutorial misconduct. Unless Obama wants the same crap as the last administration, he needs to seriously rethink his hiring strategy.
I think your numbers are a little low (and by that, I mean a lot low). Back in 1992, the U.S. had over 25,000 metric tons of the stuff in total, and more recent numbers say that the U.S. has declared 31,500 tons. The latest I've heard suggests the U.S. still has somewhere in the ballpark of 17,000 tons remaining, so the 45% is probably about right....
Clauses like these are usually more about liability than anything else. ("No, your honor, the murderer did not have a legal license to use our handgun because it is licensed, not sold, and using the weapon to kill another person is a violation of the terms of the EULA.") In light of the recent Kurdish lawsuits, I can see why such a clause would be prudent. Sure, one of those recent suits is about a chemical that is classified as being a chemical weapon in and of itself, so shipping that to Iraq was clearly bad. However, a second suit is about lab equipment that could presumably have a wide range of uses from something as dangerous as a chemical weapons manufacturing facility all the way down to something as benign as a high school chemistry class.
If product manufacturers are at risk of being held responsible for the idiotic and even malicious use of ordinarily benign products, it stands to reason that these sorts of clauses will pop up more and more frequently. What that has to do with iTunes, I have no idea. Maybe they're afraid somebody will use a visualizer to distract New Yorkers while they are being mugged....:-D
But seriously, I'm with John on this one. That clause has been in the Mac OS X EULA for ages, so they're probably just trying to reduce the number of unnecessary differences between their EULAs.
Unless their app is inefficient in its use of CPU power or RAM, you're almost certainly wrong about that. The iPod functionality of an iPhone can and does run in the background. Just start the music playing, then run the app. You can even control the iPod functionality while running other apps by clicking the headphone control once to pause, twice to skip to the next song, or three times to skip back to the previous song.
I think from a manufacturing POV, it's probably close to a wash. The product failures per million caused by cold solder joints that I've seen (about 0.1% according to a Google search) are about 10-100x greater than the failure rate of flash parts (double-digit-per-million failure rate on flash parts, depending on the flash manufacturer). If you could cut the solder joint failures in half by having half as many solder joints, that would make up for a 5-50x increase in initial component failures due to consolidating things onto a single chip. Based on how close the numbers are, I could easily see the balance going either way. I think the trend in the industry is to move towards single-chip solutions, though, so that probably tells us something.
Regarding retractable flash drives, the ones I've seen have the entire guts sliding, PCB and all. A ribbon cable would wear out in a week for some people.:-)
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Actually, on looking further, I think my source for that ROI figure is probably pretty unreliable. Does anybody have figures from broad deployments?
Typically, solar panels pay for themselves in 10 years, but if you read the article, you'd find that they haven't decided how much to do with photovoltaic cells and how much to do with turbine-based systems. The latter is quite profitable, and there are many commercial power providers that operate in this space.
I'm assuming, therefore, that most of this money will be spent on solar turbines, in which case it would be a very good investment. The typical ROI on solar turbine systems is close to 100% in the first year, so if you reinvest in new solar turbine systems in other places every year, until you hit market saturation, you have the potential for nearly guaranteed exponential growth.
Even if they go with PV, though, I should note that I wasn't comparing solar to other investments, only to spending the money up front. And even with PV cells, going solar has some nice side effects---as someone else noted, in the long term, reducing our environmental impact reduces the amount of money needed to feed the hungry. It's hard to say whether PV cells would be a good idea or not. It isn't throwing money away by any stretch of the imagination, but solar turbine systems would be much, much smarter.
No, Catholics don't leave it out, or at least not when used as part of the mass. They just say it a little differently. The problem is, the Catholic form, "For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and forever," didn't allow me to end with the word "power" and have the fragment make much sense....
You and the GP are both looking at it wrong. It costs $660 million dollars now, but it cuts the Vatican's power bill to zero, and the spare power can be sold to Italy at the market rate, resulting in a significant financial win for the Vatican. The money saved is money that can then be spent on humanitarian projects around the world. Over the expected life of the panels, the money the Church could spend should be far greater and can do far more good than spending the $660 on humanitarian causes up front.
It's like the people who suggested that the Church should sell all its properties (which some have estimated at on the order of $1-2 trillion dollars) and spend the money on the poor. The problem is that there are an estimated 963 million people in the world who are hungry, so even if you could feed them all for a net cost of only a dollar a day, the assets would last only about 3-6 years. Given the scale involved, a more realistic cost estimate would put that closer to 6 months. And, of course, when the money runs out, those hungry people would still be dirt poor, but there wouldn't be any more money coming in without congregants putting money in the collection basket every week. Thus, beyond a very short term view, that would be a foolish thing to do.
No, no, no. The correct joke is:
This gives new meaning to the phrase "For thine is the kingdom and the power...."
This is what happens when sloppy programmers fail to do sanity checks on sample rates and frame counts before playing clips. You'd think codec writers would have learned their lesson after the Canon XL1 fiasco, but apparently some people never learn. Fixing these problems is relatively simple math (multiplication and division), and it is appalling that we're still seeing such sync problems almost a decade later....
I've seen that behavior several times with the Flash video player on several different Macs (never tried Windows, but I'd expect the same behavior). If you haven't seen it, odds are you aren't watching enough videos or aren't watching the right videos (or, one might reasonably argue, you are watching precisely the right number/right videos...).
The flash videos I particularly love are the ones where the video lags a half second behind the audio. What an unholy mess.
The latest crop of flash ads fairly consistently hang both Safari and FireFox on my (Intel) Mac laptop, too. It has gotten so bad that I've resorted to the clicktoflash WebKit plug-in. And flash is the #1 most common cause of browser crashes for me, too. Nearly every crash I've ever seen in Safari contains Flash plug-in symbols in the backtrace. I have seen two or three non-Flash Safari crashes in all the years I've used Safari, versus about two or three crashes per week that are directly attributable to Flash, so at least anecdotally, it seems to be at least two orders of magnitude more common than all the other Safari crasher bugs put together.
The day Flash appears in a TV I buy is the day I stop watching TV. Period. I'd rather stab myself repeatedly with an icepick than buy a TV set infested with that miserable crapware. I'd rather shove toothpicks under my fingernails and go swimming in a pool filled with lemon juice than buy a TV set with that lousy software. I'd rather send death threats to the President than run Flash on my TV. I would rather go the rest of my life with only a Discover card in my wallet than let that fetid piece of pestilence anywhere near my TV set. I think that about sums it up.
I'd like to believe that TV set manufacturers couldn't possibly be stupid enough to fall for this. I certainly hope so, anyway. The absolute last thing the world needs is broader Flash adoption. Heck, I'd even take Java over Flash, and that's saying something....
I pretty much agree with you, with a couple of caveats. I don't think the water analogy is really all that good for two reasons:
So if the ISPs want to charge $2 per gigabyte across the board and not charge a base fee, that's their prerogative, but I guarantee they'll make a heck of a lot less money that way. I think they should have to choose flat rate or metered---not both.
The NIMBY folks were actually right. The current U.S. nuclear power plants are very expensive to operate because of all the safety systems that are needed and because they can't rapidly adjust to changing energy needs, making further construction of such poor designs a relatively poor solution to our energy problems. Unfortunately, a side effect of the protestations of the NIMBYites was that the U.S. stopped approving new power plant designs, too, so there's a lot of bureaucratic red tape in the way of any company building a more modern reactor design such as a pebble bed reactor.
What do you mean solar and wind aren't ready? Solar and wind are already being used heavily on the power grid. Last year, about 2.5% of California's power came from wind energy (6,802 GWh). Solar was only about 0.3%, but PG&E just started a new program to add 500 MW of solar capacity (times say 7 full-sun-equivalent hours is 3500 MWh per day, or about 1,277.5GWh per year, give or take), which means by the end of that five year program, that will be up to about 0.8% even if nobody else in California adds any solar installations at all. That's not exactly small scale power generation....
We can always produce plastics from other substances, too... like castor oil.
I thought it was the Judicial Array of Inexpensive Lockers that held the striped lawyers....
That person with something inappropriate tattooed on his forehead would be just as distracting whether he was getting something accomplished like sweeping the sidewalk or merely wandering the streets doing nothing. At least you're keeping the person busy. Being given something to do reduces the risk of the people you consider undesirable committing crimes. There have been numerous studies showing that giving criminals jobs reduces the risk of recidivism. I see no reason that would be any less effective at reducing the rate of undesirable activity among the general population. Idle hands are the devil's playthings.
As for people stealing from job sites, if they don't steal there, they are just going to steal something else somewhere else. At least on a city construction project, they are more likely to get caught.
Regarding people with anger management issues, people who inappropriately touch their coworkers, and people who are violent by nature, just put them in a job where they don't have to deal with other people. Send them to do roadside clean-up duty along the highway. Give them a bag and one of those pointy sticks and send them to a mile-long strip of highway eight miles out of town.
We already covered people who simply refuse to show up. Those folks should get canned just like with any other job.
No, I'm not. I'm suggesting that suing a 12-year-old for hundreds of thousands of dollars is immoral and cruel, regardless of guilt or innocence, and that before you sue someone for committing an act who is multiple standard deviations away from the norm of people who commit such acts, you'd better make darn sure you have your facts straight or else you will come out looking like the biggest moron in the known universe....
First, I'd expect anything approaching a child care facility to have more than one person with the kids at all times, making that argument pretty unimaginable. Second, I do recall saying that people would be assigned work based on their skills. A laid-off teacher or nurse would be a good choice for providing child care, not a laid off exotic dancer.... You don't just randomly throw darts and say, "Little Billy. you get to be the fireman today." This isn't kindergarten.
And I don't believe there are very many people out there who are not capable of doing anything. Even someone with very low intelligence and very poor education can pick up litter along the side of the road or sweep the sidewalks downtown or.... These don't all have to be highly skilled jobs here. They don't even have to necessarily be essential jobs that would have been done otherwise. They just have to provide some benefit to the community.
No, they don't. They don't support hiring an unlicensed private investigator to collect evidence for a civil suit, for one thing, which makes every bit of evidence the lawyers introduced completely worthless. The way I see it, there are two possible ways to interpret that action:
Either of the above is grounds for disbarment, and barratry is grounds for criminal prosecution in some states. Either way, the laws definitely do NOT support their actions by any stretch of the imagination.
I disagree that welfare should be a transition program. We have a transition program. It's called unemployment. And for people who physically can't work, we have disability. You pay into them out of your paycheck every month. If that's what welfare is doing, then we should just extend the duration of unemployment benefits and get rid of this redundant vestigial system and the huge government bureaucracy required to maintain that redundant system.
The historical purpose of welfare, at least prior to about 1996, was to provide a safety net for people who could not find work for an extended period of time due to the great depression. It was a program that should have ended soon thereafter, and should kick back in when unemployment levels exceed some set threshold. It should not be a check in the mail for doing nothing, but should instead be a part-time job appropriate for the recipient's skill level, whether that's serving as a pack mule at a government construction site, doing web design for the DOJ, or even being a babysitter for some of the other workers, with the requirement that you must spend the rest of your time looking for a permanent job. Repeated failure to report should result in termination of benefits just as with any other employer.
If welfare transitioned completely into such a program, there would be no reason to limit the duration of benefits at all. Not counting the administrative overhead, as a country, we would be getting out of it what we put into it, or very nearly so, and if you design the program to be administered by the local communities, the overhead would also be very low. Add to that the benefits of being able to use the government-run credit unions and ATMs for payment instead of mailing physical checks (lower risk of fraud, lower cost of operation, etc.) and the overall cost of the program could be pretty minimal.
Lawyers are not required by law to take cases except possibly as public defenders. You're right that we shouldn't paint lawyers who defend people with the same brush as their clients. However, when the client in question is filing the charges, when their lawyers are knowingly (or unknowingly and completely incompetently) introducing illegally-obtained evidence, etc., then yes, we should paint the lawyers with the same brush.
There's no grey area here. You either have a sense of morality or you don't. If you choose to represent somebody in suing a 66-year-old grandmother, an 83-year-old dead person, and a 12-year-old girl for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, then you have the morals of a jellyfish.
We're not talking about going after commercial music piracy---one corporation suing another corporation (or nearly so). We're talking about companies that maliciously use laws intended to prosecute commercial piracy against ordinary people, that frequently sue completely uninvolved people, that have gross disregard for the legal process, etc. The lawyers themselves either hired unlicensed investigators (in which case the lawyers behaved illegally) or accepted evidence from them without looking into the background of the investigators (in which case the lawyers are completely inept). Either way, introducing such evidence should be grounds for disbarment in and of itself, but instead of throwing these dirtbags out on the streets where they belong, Obama is hiring these leaches on society as the highest lawyers in our land....
There's a point at which someone shows such reckless disregard for the law, for right and wrong, and for humanity in general that we can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. RIAA lawyers crossed that line many, many years ago and have been sinking progressively farther below that line with every passing day.... I'm appalled that Obama would choose people like this to head the DOJ. You cannot hire people who knowingly violate the law to win cases as our nation's highest lawyers. That's like hiring Hitler to head up the anti-defamation league. It just doesn't make sense, and it is this very sort of practice that causes sleazebags like Ted Stevens to be let off the hook due to prosecutorial misconduct. Unless Obama wants the same crap as the last administration, he needs to seriously rethink his hiring strategy.
I think your numbers are a little low (and by that, I mean a lot low). Back in 1992, the U.S. had over 25,000 metric tons of the stuff in total, and more recent numbers say that the U.S. has declared 31,500 tons. The latest I've heard suggests the U.S. still has somewhere in the ballpark of 17,000 tons remaining, so the 45% is probably about right....
Clauses like these are usually more about liability than anything else. ("No, your honor, the murderer did not have a legal license to use our handgun because it is licensed, not sold, and using the weapon to kill another person is a violation of the terms of the EULA.") In light of the recent Kurdish lawsuits, I can see why such a clause would be prudent. Sure, one of those recent suits is about a chemical that is classified as being a chemical weapon in and of itself, so shipping that to Iraq was clearly bad. However, a second suit is about lab equipment that could presumably have a wide range of uses from something as dangerous as a chemical weapons manufacturing facility all the way down to something as benign as a high school chemistry class.
If product manufacturers are at risk of being held responsible for the idiotic and even malicious use of ordinarily benign products, it stands to reason that these sorts of clauses will pop up more and more frequently. What that has to do with iTunes, I have no idea. Maybe they're afraid somebody will use a visualizer to distract New Yorkers while they are being mugged.... :-D
But seriously, I'm with John on this one. That clause has been in the Mac OS X EULA for ages, so they're probably just trying to reduce the number of unnecessary differences between their EULAs.
I'm expecting "I KAN HAZ PIJUN". Give it time.
*sigh*
Unless their app is inefficient in its use of CPU power or RAM, you're almost certainly wrong about that. The iPod functionality of an iPhone can and does run in the background. Just start the music playing, then run the app. You can even control the iPod functionality while running other apps by clicking the headphone control once to pause, twice to skip to the next song, or three times to skip back to the previous song.
A lot of us like netbooks precisely because they don't have full size keyboards or screens.
I think from a manufacturing POV, it's probably close to a wash. The product failures per million caused by cold solder joints that I've seen (about 0.1% according to a Google search) are about 10-100x greater than the failure rate of flash parts (double-digit-per-million failure rate on flash parts, depending on the flash manufacturer). If you could cut the solder joint failures in half by having half as many solder joints, that would make up for a 5-50x increase in initial component failures due to consolidating things onto a single chip. Based on how close the numbers are, I could easily see the balance going either way. I think the trend in the industry is to move towards single-chip solutions, though, so that probably tells us something.
Regarding retractable flash drives, the ones I've seen have the entire guts sliding, PCB and all. A ribbon cable would wear out in a week for some people. :-)