Hell, NASA should consider offering one-way trips. They'd have enough volunteers to crash their Web server. Most people aren't doing anything that important or interesting with the rest of their lives, are they? Send one old guy with a shovel, a microscope, and a carbon-monoxide canister, and we'll learn more than we would from the next hundred years' worth of robots.
Good news, then, that China has entered the space race! If any modern country could rustle up a suicide mission or two, it's China.
The reason, one could argue, that art in the Soviet Union ended up in the doldrums is not that there was too much freedom, but not enough.
If "everything is in the public domain", that by itself implies that there are no copyright or IP laws to constrain creativity. It is intellectual freedom.
What killed creativity in the USSR was, instead,the censorship. They had great artists (in all media), but the only ones to ever be allowed to flourish were those that towed the party line. Plenty of great artists undoubtedly withered on the vine in that environment.
If you could find a society with no legal or authoritative restraints to creativity, then we can talk about comparisons. Otherwise it's just variations of the same.
Tomorrow's older hardware won't need to run such cut-down OSs, though. He says it's about computers that can "barely run Windows 2000"- and I can't think of many Win2k-era computers with the capability to boot from USB.
Tomorrow's older hardware (that is, stuff designed to run XP) should be able to run a more feature-rich OS than the one in TFA. Most XP-era computers should be comfortable enough running the not-particularly-slim Ubuntu, for god sake.
You must remember who cowboys were in the US, as far as I know the Brits didn't have anything like it really, or at least not much like it. To educate yourself, watch some old John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies for the acme of cowboy romanticism. Note that they are -highly- romanticized versions of what the cowboy was. James Bond would actually be a decent substitute, like a really classy, charming cowboy.
We just have to dig a little further back for our "wild frontier" days. Medieval period gives us some interesting characters- Robin Hood, and the whole stereotype of the peasant brigands. Frontiersmen by any other name...
It's been said more times than bears mentioning: there's no accounting for tastes. Also: each to their own.
This is part of why having many distros is a good thing. If you want stripped-down bare basics, there's a distro for that. If you want the full eye-melting experience, there's a distro for that. Arguing about which way is better is a pointless game.
If you're using Ubuntu (and would prefer not to switch your entire OS), you could just try switching GNOME/KDE for something like XFCE, LXDE or something even lighter still. Ubuntu supports a whole swathe of different GUIs, and a lot of them are more resource concious than the big two.
Obviously that doesn't help with anything other than graphics-related battery drain, but having a good cull of background tasks and similar can yield good results too.
Equally though, I'm fairly certain Apple don't design or manufacture laptop batteries- it's a hugely specialised task, completely unsuited to Apple. Bearing in mind they outsource the manufacture of the laptops themselves (to Asustek) and any other complicated parts (to Intel, SIS, IBM, whoever), it's probably a fair bet that they outsource their battery design to someone, too.
And whoever it is that makes their batteries probably make batteries for other people too.
On the other hand, it's completely 100% plausible that, since Apple only release software for a very limited number of very specific computer designs, the software itself may be optimised to run extremely efficiently on Apple brand hardware. Both Windows and Linux have got a whole lot more hardware to code support for, and that makes specific power-saving techniques very difficult to implement.
Seriously, I doubt you can get a prepaid SIM card easily/without giving your identity in Iran... I'm not even sure that in France, where I'm currently writing, we can do it. I will check, it may be interesting.
If by prepaid we mean what I'm familiar with as "pay as you go" (that is, you charge it with some money which you then spend, as opposed to being on a fixed contract) it is possible. You used to be able to get them off the shelf in Virgin Mobile shops (and wherever else, I'm sure). And if in doubt, eBay. http://shop.ebay.co.uk/items/?_nkw=SIM+card&_sacat=0&_trksid=p3286.m270.l1313&_odkw=SIM&_osacat=0
My neighbour's got a nice Rover 75, he's been using it for years after it was built, and it still serves nicely as a mid-sized full featured hothatch. That doesn't mean Rover didn't go bust.
I always tended to favour AMD, this computer I'm on now is some flavour of Duron, and I always preferred Athlons in their prime. But that doesn't stop me acknowledging that their offerings haven't been great in the last few years. As a consumer, I'm always going to buy whatever product is the best at any given time, and it seems at the moment that it always seems to be Intel.
Of course we can blame that on Intel's flagrant anti-trust abuses and can hope AMD can get back in the game now that the playing field is being re-evened. And AMD do seem to be holding up OK on the low-end market, which shows they still have some of their former flair still intact.
I'm not sure that Presidential interference would be particularly productive. In fact, it's almost certainly counter-productive.
The main opposition in Iran is doing it's very very hardest to portray itself as again the President, but not against the Supreme Leader or the Islamic Republic itself. All their rivals need is some proof that they're really no-good collaborators with an invasive foreign power, and suddenly the opposition's more moderate supporters back the flip off.
The Western world needs to do it's absolute best to keep the common people or Iran safe and free, but it can't interfere. This is one of those things that'll need to sort itself. If the best thing we can do is keep avenues of communication open to prevent people being locked down and suppressed, that's what needs to be done.
Much kudos, incidentally, goes to Google Translate and Facebook for both rushing out Persian language versions of their respective sites.
At least we Westerners get to play Choose Your Own Tyrant.
Being denied the right to even have a nominal input into who controls everything in your life, that's a terrible thing. Even if it doesn't seem like you have much variety of choice, ANY choice is better than no choice.
There are employees expected to spend 6 months in every year away from home in budget hotels? Who? And why would they do that to themselves?
I highly suspect that anyone expected to spend protracted periods of time away from home has accommodation provided to them- and not just money for a budget hotel.
Again, I favour the dormitory method. You build a big building with adequate rooms for all the MPs. They're given the keys when they're elected, and kicked out as soon as they leave office. It's far more cost effective (and less morale sapping) than a hotel, yet avoids allowing MPs to expand their property portfolio at taxpayer expense (which you rightly highlight as being ridiculous).
Where I live (UK) a working phone line is the prerequisite for a broadband package, whether it be over BT's ADSL network or Virgin's fibre-optic cable network. I get a working phone line and phone number whether I want it or not, as long as I want internet access.
Of course I could choose to not plug a handset into it and never give out the number, but I still do own a landline. As local call rates tend to be cheaper over landline than mobile, plugging a cheap handset in seems like a sensible idea for most.
GV seems like a nice idea if you do make use of said landline and also have a mobile phone. Throw an office number in there too and there are definitely going to be some benefits.
I tend to read The Independent, which is fine as long as you can stand to wade through the preaching. The actual reporting tends to be reasonably solid (taken with the same salt all news should be taken with), and it does tend to pick up stories that the others don't.
I don't think British papers as a whole are any worse than papers anywhere else in the world. Ultimately though, I wouldn't read any of the papers if I had internet access on my lunch breaks. For me, it's either papers or I'm forced to interact with the world on my hour off.
Putting MPs up in a hotel would be pretty much as expensive. Even the cheapest Travelodge in London is liable to set you back £50 a night and up (and good luck getting anyone to live for any protracted amount of time in a place like that without going crazy).
Renting a home doesn't seem that crazy an alternative, and works out at a similar cost for much better living conditions. Building a big dormitory seems like the best alternative- you could provide decent living conditions for every MP for a much more reasonable cost than you could on the open market, and prevent abuse by making it uniform.
Fact is that non-London MPs do need two homes. They're expected to spend more than half the year in their constituency, while at the same time turning up almost daily to their office in Westminster. You try telling a Glasgow MP that he should be commuting it every morning for 6 months. You wouldn't expect it of a private employee, so there's no reason to expect it of a public servant. And then try seeing what kind of people actually end up in charge of the country.
What I can't understand is why the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
If I own a house, and my company agrees to rent me a second place as they wish me to spend half my time elsewhere, that's fine and legitimate. If I then charge the company expenses to redecorate my original house, they'd be mad. I'd be forced to pay back every penny. If I were to already have a house 1 mile from the rented apartment, which I proceed to live in, letting my brother run a small business out of the rented apartment, they'd be mad. I'd get fired. If I then lie to the Inland Revenue that the rented studio apartment is my main home, so that I can sell my original home without paying capital gains tax, they'd be mad. I'd go to prison.
That there is even the slightest question that they should pay back illegitimate claims, be fired for employee fraud, or criminally prosecuted for tax evasion (whichever applicable) is what is so outrageous about all this. People may or may not be natural scammers, but that's exactly what the rules are there to reign in.
Indeed- they'd have to upgrade their network. And that costs money. And how do you think they're going to raise the money for upgrading their networks, if not with price rises?
I actually don't mind download caps, as it happens, as long as they're well labeled. With my power company, I pay for the amount of electricity I use; I use more, I pay more. Same goes for water, and for phone calls, and for petrol. Why shouldn't it be the same with internet? My ISP promises to sell me 40GB of data download a month, inclusive of my monthly subscription fee. If I need to use more, they'll sell me some more for a reasonable top-up fee. As long as they tell me the terms at the start, I'm fine with that.
There are a few things that aren't cool though. Offering someone the chance to "upgrade their bandwidth from 4mb/s to 8mb/s", but keep their bandwidth throttled to 3mb/s regardless, is a dirty trick. Offering someone "unlimited downloads", then throttling the bandwidth of anyone who makes full use of their internet connection, that's a dirty trick too. Arbitrarily throttling popular sites at peak times just because they produce a lot of network load, that's downright filthy.
Banning download caps seems ridiculous in comparison to other utilities, if that's what we want to compare ISPs to. Banning the dirty tricks and mis-selling that is widespread with ISPs would be a major victory.
I don't know how it works in the US judicial system, but here in the UK the default position is usually "loser pays all costs". Judges are free to split the costs differently if they see fit (as they probably would if one side has paid a disproportionately large amount), but they'll still try to weight it an appropriate amount in the winners favour, with the loser paying as much of their opponents costs as is reasonable.
And the real sad thing for the RIAA (and I use the term "sad" very loosely) is that the longer they fight against it, the more people get used to downloading music instantly for free. And once someone is used to instant, free, on-demand music, it's very difficult to persuade them they want to pay for it again.
All the teenagers, middle-aged mums and variously techno-illiterate are slow to learn, very slow to forget. Once they've been shown a particular method of doing something on a computer, it takes a lot to persuade them to do something different. If their techie friends have shown them the wonders of free P2P filesharing, it's going to be difficult to get them moved onto a different platform. Particularly if that platform is more expensive, less flexible, or DRM encumbered. If they'd got their own business models off the ground quicker and filled the market gap themselves, all those people would already be loyal customers.
It's basically the same force that keeps Windows, Google, McDonalds and prime-time TV afloat. Once you've got them, it's easy to keep them.
The best solution would be to simply spread the load a little bit.
Every energy source has it's draw backs, but they're all specific and different problems unique to the energy source. Combustion fuels create waste gasses like CO2. Nuclear creates toxic waste. Dams create huge flooded areas. Solar casts shadows over ecosystems reliant on sunlight. Wind kills birds. If we use a spread of different sources, each problem remains relatively minor and not widespread.
Our problem seems to be putting our faith into single universal methods, creating BIG side effects. We've been getting energy almost exclusively from burning fuels for centuries now, and those waste gasses are now a huge problem. On a smaller scale, China hasn't just built a dam, but built the biggest dam it was possible for them to build- creating a huge environmental impact.
If we'd spread our energy uses among the different sources, none of these impacts would be so disastrous.
Most (all?) advertising is click-based, not view-based.
I've never knowingly clicked on a banner add, in all the many years before I found Adblock. Whether I see them or not makes no difference if I don't click on them anyway.
As an aside, I don't have a huge problem with reasonably sized static ads on websites. Text-based ads are even better. If they were just these, I might even be inclined to pay attention to them and consider clicking. If they take up half the page, have resource-crunching animated graphics that take an age to load, pop-up windows, or, worst of all, have audio, they deserve nothing but scorn. It's ads like these that have caused so many people to flock to Adblock and similar, the advertisers have only themselves to blame for it.
I've never understood why console manufacturers don't try to make their consoles last longer. They're hugely expensive to make, hugely expensive for the consumer to buy, and have frequently made the manufacturer a net loss on sales.
Where the big money for the manufacturers has always been is game licensing, game retail, peripherals, upgrades and associated services. The making and selling of a new console generally seems to take a big chunk out of this core business model.
If a manufacturer would make a console that would last longer than the usual 5 year cycle, the manufacturer would probably benefit. And the consumer would be happy too, since no-one likes to pay GBP200-GBP500 for a new toy, if the old one would still work. The closest we've had to that in a long time, the PS2 (still seeing new releases nearly a decade after launch), has proved hugely popular (it's the best selling console of all time), so why not try to replicate it?
The Wii has proved good money can be made out of low-spec hardware, and the PS2 has proved an appetite for longevity. So why do the manufacturers keep torturing themselves?
It serving no purpose is debatable- it denotes gender, which is a purpose unto itself. It's exactly the same purpose that is served in other languages; again, arguably an outdated and archaic purpose, but still a purpose all the same.
The lady in TFS calls herself a "geekess", not a "geekette". If she were calling herself the latter I'd see the point of discussing whether she's really calling herself a diminutive sub-geek. But she isn't, so I don't really understand the discussion. She's using a suffix that always denotes femininity, so the meaning is pretty clear.
Presumably she is using "geekess" as an analogue to "godess"- quite a favourable and glamorous use of the -ess suffix to denote gender. It would probably be sexist if being applied to her externally, but I'll defend her right to call herself whatever the hell she wants, if that's what she wants.
I feel that the UK has done/is doing the whole digital switch-over thing better.
Here, each region (roughly equivalent to each local-news region) has it's own switch-off date, with the whole thing spread over about 4 years (and this in a country with a smaller population, more densely packed, meaning the switch-over would probably be easier anyway). This means that, for one, the broadcasters and government agencies only have to worry about nurse-maiding small numbers of people over at once. For two, it gives people a lot longer to get used to the idea and upgrade (I just happened to need a new TV a year or so ago, and it just incidentally happen to be DTV-ready, without me needing to worry about it). For three, it means that the odds of broadcasters in any given area being up to speed with full-power transmissions is very high, meaning less chance of down-time or missing channels.
Why a large, sparsely populated country of ~300 million people would decide to do the switch-over all at once I can't figure out. Maybe THAT'S the easier way and the UK is doing it awkwardly, but it just doesn't seem like that to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, NASA should consider offering one-way trips. They'd have enough volunteers to crash their Web server. Most people aren't doing anything that important or interesting with the rest of their lives, are they? Send one old guy with a shovel, a microscope, and a carbon-monoxide canister, and we'll learn more than we would from the next hundred years' worth of robots.
Good news, then, that China has entered the space race! If any modern country could rustle up a suicide mission or two, it's China.
The reason, one could argue, that art in the Soviet Union ended up in the doldrums is not that there was too much freedom, but not enough.
If "everything is in the public domain", that by itself implies that there are no copyright or IP laws to constrain creativity. It is intellectual freedom.
What killed creativity in the USSR was, instead,the censorship. They had great artists (in all media), but the only ones to ever be allowed to flourish were those that towed the party line. Plenty of great artists undoubtedly withered on the vine in that environment.
If you could find a society with no legal or authoritative restraints to creativity, then we can talk about comparisons. Otherwise it's just variations of the same.
Tomorrow's older hardware won't need to run such cut-down OSs, though. He says it's about computers that can "barely run Windows 2000"- and I can't think of many Win2k-era computers with the capability to boot from USB.
Tomorrow's older hardware (that is, stuff designed to run XP) should be able to run a more feature-rich OS than the one in TFA. Most XP-era computers should be comfortable enough running the not-particularly-slim Ubuntu, for god sake.
You must remember who cowboys were in the US, as far as I know the Brits didn't have anything like it really, or at least not much like it. To educate yourself, watch some old John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies for the acme of cowboy romanticism. Note that they are -highly- romanticized versions of what the cowboy was. James Bond would actually be a decent substitute, like a really classy, charming cowboy.
We just have to dig a little further back for our "wild frontier" days. Medieval period gives us some interesting characters- Robin Hood, and the whole stereotype of the peasant brigands. Frontiersmen by any other name...
It's been said more times than bears mentioning: there's no accounting for tastes. Also: each to their own.
This is part of why having many distros is a good thing. If you want stripped-down bare basics, there's a distro for that. If you want the full eye-melting experience, there's a distro for that. Arguing about which way is better is a pointless game.
If you're using Ubuntu (and would prefer not to switch your entire OS), you could just try switching GNOME/KDE for something like XFCE, LXDE or something even lighter still. Ubuntu supports a whole swathe of different GUIs, and a lot of them are more resource concious than the big two.
Obviously that doesn't help with anything other than graphics-related battery drain, but having a good cull of background tasks and similar can yield good results too.
Equally though, I'm fairly certain Apple don't design or manufacture laptop batteries- it's a hugely specialised task, completely unsuited to Apple. Bearing in mind they outsource the manufacture of the laptops themselves (to Asustek) and any other complicated parts (to Intel, SIS, IBM, whoever), it's probably a fair bet that they outsource their battery design to someone, too.
And whoever it is that makes their batteries probably make batteries for other people too.
On the other hand, it's completely 100% plausible that, since Apple only release software for a very limited number of very specific computer designs, the software itself may be optimised to run extremely efficiently on Apple brand hardware. Both Windows and Linux have got a whole lot more hardware to code support for, and that makes specific power-saving techniques very difficult to implement.
Seriously, I doubt you can get a prepaid SIM card easily/without giving your identity in Iran...
I'm not even sure that in France, where I'm currently writing, we can do it. I will check, it may be interesting.
If by prepaid we mean what I'm familiar with as "pay as you go" (that is, you charge it with some money which you then spend, as opposed to being on a fixed contract) it is possible. You used to be able to get them off the shelf in Virgin Mobile shops (and wherever else, I'm sure). And if in doubt, eBay. http://shop.ebay.co.uk/items/?_nkw=SIM+card&_sacat=0&_trksid=p3286.m270.l1313&_odkw=SIM&_osacat=0
Dang, knew I was getting confused somewhere there. I was assuming it was one of those hatchbacks-that-are-supposed-to-look-like-a-saloon hatchbacks.
Consider me happily educated.
My neighbour's got a nice Rover 75, he's been using it for years after it was built, and it still serves nicely as a mid-sized full featured hothatch. That doesn't mean Rover didn't go bust.
I always tended to favour AMD, this computer I'm on now is some flavour of Duron, and I always preferred Athlons in their prime. But that doesn't stop me acknowledging that their offerings haven't been great in the last few years. As a consumer, I'm always going to buy whatever product is the best at any given time, and it seems at the moment that it always seems to be Intel.
Of course we can blame that on Intel's flagrant anti-trust abuses and can hope AMD can get back in the game now that the playing field is being re-evened. And AMD do seem to be holding up OK on the low-end market, which shows they still have some of their former flair still intact.
I'm not sure that Presidential interference would be particularly productive. In fact, it's almost certainly counter-productive.
The main opposition in Iran is doing it's very very hardest to portray itself as again the President, but not against the Supreme Leader or the Islamic Republic itself. All their rivals need is some proof that they're really no-good collaborators with an invasive foreign power, and suddenly the opposition's more moderate supporters back the flip off.
The Western world needs to do it's absolute best to keep the common people or Iran safe and free, but it can't interfere. This is one of those things that'll need to sort itself. If the best thing we can do is keep avenues of communication open to prevent people being locked down and suppressed, that's what needs to be done.
Much kudos, incidentally, goes to Google Translate and Facebook for both rushing out Persian language versions of their respective sites.
At least we Westerners get to play Choose Your Own Tyrant.
Being denied the right to even have a nominal input into who controls everything in your life, that's a terrible thing. Even if it doesn't seem like you have much variety of choice, ANY choice is better than no choice.
There are employees expected to spend 6 months in every year away from home in budget hotels? Who? And why would they do that to themselves?
I highly suspect that anyone expected to spend protracted periods of time away from home has accommodation provided to them- and not just money for a budget hotel.
Again, I favour the dormitory method. You build a big building with adequate rooms for all the MPs. They're given the keys when they're elected, and kicked out as soon as they leave office. It's far more cost effective (and less morale sapping) than a hotel, yet avoids allowing MPs to expand their property portfolio at taxpayer expense (which you rightly highlight as being ridiculous).
If only.
Where I live (UK) a working phone line is the prerequisite for a broadband package, whether it be over BT's ADSL network or Virgin's fibre-optic cable network. I get a working phone line and phone number whether I want it or not, as long as I want internet access.
Of course I could choose to not plug a handset into it and never give out the number, but I still do own a landline. As local call rates tend to be cheaper over landline than mobile, plugging a cheap handset in seems like a sensible idea for most.
GV seems like a nice idea if you do make use of said landline and also have a mobile phone. Throw an office number in there too and there are definitely going to be some benefits.
I tend to read The Independent, which is fine as long as you can stand to wade through the preaching. The actual reporting tends to be reasonably solid (taken with the same salt all news should be taken with), and it does tend to pick up stories that the others don't.
I don't think British papers as a whole are any worse than papers anywhere else in the world. Ultimately though, I wouldn't read any of the papers if I had internet access on my lunch breaks. For me, it's either papers or I'm forced to interact with the world on my hour off.
Putting MPs up in a hotel would be pretty much as expensive. Even the cheapest Travelodge in London is liable to set you back £50 a night and up (and good luck getting anyone to live for any protracted amount of time in a place like that without going crazy).
Renting a home doesn't seem that crazy an alternative, and works out at a similar cost for much better living conditions. Building a big dormitory seems like the best alternative- you could provide decent living conditions for every MP for a much more reasonable cost than you could on the open market, and prevent abuse by making it uniform.
Fact is that non-London MPs do need two homes. They're expected to spend more than half the year in their constituency, while at the same time turning up almost daily to their office in Westminster. You try telling a Glasgow MP that he should be commuting it every morning for 6 months. You wouldn't expect it of a private employee, so there's no reason to expect it of a public servant. And then try seeing what kind of people actually end up in charge of the country.
What I can't understand is why the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
If I own a house, and my company agrees to rent me a second place as they wish me to spend half my time elsewhere, that's fine and legitimate. If I then charge the company expenses to redecorate my original house, they'd be mad. I'd be forced to pay back every penny. If I were to already have a house 1 mile from the rented apartment, which I proceed to live in, letting my brother run a small business out of the rented apartment, they'd be mad. I'd get fired. If I then lie to the Inland Revenue that the rented studio apartment is my main home, so that I can sell my original home without paying capital gains tax, they'd be mad. I'd go to prison.
That there is even the slightest question that they should pay back illegitimate claims, be fired for employee fraud, or criminally prosecuted for tax evasion (whichever applicable) is what is so outrageous about all this. People may or may not be natural scammers, but that's exactly what the rules are there to reign in.
Indeed- they'd have to upgrade their network. And that costs money. And how do you think they're going to raise the money for upgrading their networks, if not with price rises?
I actually don't mind download caps, as it happens, as long as they're well labeled. With my power company, I pay for the amount of electricity I use; I use more, I pay more. Same goes for water, and for phone calls, and for petrol. Why shouldn't it be the same with internet? My ISP promises to sell me 40GB of data download a month, inclusive of my monthly subscription fee. If I need to use more, they'll sell me some more for a reasonable top-up fee. As long as they tell me the terms at the start, I'm fine with that.
There are a few things that aren't cool though. Offering someone the chance to "upgrade their bandwidth from 4mb/s to 8mb/s", but keep their bandwidth throttled to 3mb/s regardless, is a dirty trick. Offering someone "unlimited downloads", then throttling the bandwidth of anyone who makes full use of their internet connection, that's a dirty trick too. Arbitrarily throttling popular sites at peak times just because they produce a lot of network load, that's downright filthy.
Banning download caps seems ridiculous in comparison to other utilities, if that's what we want to compare ISPs to. Banning the dirty tricks and mis-selling that is widespread with ISPs would be a major victory.
I don't know how it works in the US judicial system, but here in the UK the default position is usually "loser pays all costs". Judges are free to split the costs differently if they see fit (as they probably would if one side has paid a disproportionately large amount), but they'll still try to weight it an appropriate amount in the winners favour, with the loser paying as much of their opponents costs as is reasonable.
And the real sad thing for the RIAA (and I use the term "sad" very loosely) is that the longer they fight against it, the more people get used to downloading music instantly for free. And once someone is used to instant, free, on-demand music, it's very difficult to persuade them they want to pay for it again.
All the teenagers, middle-aged mums and variously techno-illiterate are slow to learn, very slow to forget. Once they've been shown a particular method of doing something on a computer, it takes a lot to persuade them to do something different. If their techie friends have shown them the wonders of free P2P filesharing, it's going to be difficult to get them moved onto a different platform. Particularly if that platform is more expensive, less flexible, or DRM encumbered. If they'd got their own business models off the ground quicker and filled the market gap themselves, all those people would already be loyal customers.
It's basically the same force that keeps Windows, Google, McDonalds and prime-time TV afloat. Once you've got them, it's easy to keep them.
The best solution would be to simply spread the load a little bit.
Every energy source has it's draw backs, but they're all specific and different problems unique to the energy source. Combustion fuels create waste gasses like CO2. Nuclear creates toxic waste. Dams create huge flooded areas. Solar casts shadows over ecosystems reliant on sunlight. Wind kills birds. If we use a spread of different sources, each problem remains relatively minor and not widespread.
Our problem seems to be putting our faith into single universal methods, creating BIG side effects. We've been getting energy almost exclusively from burning fuels for centuries now, and those waste gasses are now a huge problem. On a smaller scale, China hasn't just built a dam, but built the biggest dam it was possible for them to build- creating a huge environmental impact.
If we'd spread our energy uses among the different sources, none of these impacts would be so disastrous.
Most (all?) advertising is click-based, not view-based.
I've never knowingly clicked on a banner add, in all the many years before I found Adblock. Whether I see them or not makes no difference if I don't click on them anyway.
As an aside, I don't have a huge problem with reasonably sized static ads on websites. Text-based ads are even better. If they were just these, I might even be inclined to pay attention to them and consider clicking. If they take up half the page, have resource-crunching animated graphics that take an age to load, pop-up windows, or, worst of all, have audio, they deserve nothing but scorn. It's ads like these that have caused so many people to flock to Adblock and similar, the advertisers have only themselves to blame for it.
I've never understood why console manufacturers don't try to make their consoles last longer. They're hugely expensive to make, hugely expensive for the consumer to buy, and have frequently made the manufacturer a net loss on sales.
Where the big money for the manufacturers has always been is game licensing, game retail, peripherals, upgrades and associated services. The making and selling of a new console generally seems to take a big chunk out of this core business model.
If a manufacturer would make a console that would last longer than the usual 5 year cycle, the manufacturer would probably benefit. And the consumer would be happy too, since no-one likes to pay GBP200-GBP500 for a new toy, if the old one would still work. The closest we've had to that in a long time, the PS2 (still seeing new releases nearly a decade after launch), has proved hugely popular (it's the best selling console of all time), so why not try to replicate it?
The Wii has proved good money can be made out of low-spec hardware, and the PS2 has proved an appetite for longevity. So why do the manufacturers keep torturing themselves?
It serving no purpose is debatable- it denotes gender, which is a purpose unto itself. It's exactly the same purpose that is served in other languages; again, arguably an outdated and archaic purpose, but still a purpose all the same.
The lady in TFS calls herself a "geekess", not a "geekette". If she were calling herself the latter I'd see the point of discussing whether she's really calling herself a diminutive sub-geek. But she isn't, so I don't really understand the discussion. She's using a suffix that always denotes femininity, so the meaning is pretty clear.
Presumably she is using "geekess" as an analogue to "godess"- quite a favourable and glamorous use of the -ess suffix to denote gender. It would probably be sexist if being applied to her externally, but I'll defend her right to call herself whatever the hell she wants, if that's what she wants.
I feel that the UK has done/is doing the whole digital switch-over thing better.
Here, each region (roughly equivalent to each local-news region) has it's own switch-off date, with the whole thing spread over about 4 years (and this in a country with a smaller population, more densely packed, meaning the switch-over would probably be easier anyway). This means that, for one, the broadcasters and government agencies only have to worry about nurse-maiding small numbers of people over at once. For two, it gives people a lot longer to get used to the idea and upgrade (I just happened to need a new TV a year or so ago, and it just incidentally happen to be DTV-ready, without me needing to worry about it). For three, it means that the odds of broadcasters in any given area being up to speed with full-power transmissions is very high, meaning less chance of down-time or missing channels.
Why a large, sparsely populated country of ~300 million people would decide to do the switch-over all at once I can't figure out. Maybe THAT'S the easier way and the UK is doing it awkwardly, but it just doesn't seem like that to me.