Is there a better example of someone who can sit back, without producing, and continuously earn money?
Certainly. In any world where average return on investment is higher than inflation anyone can do this simply by investing randomly, then sitting back and waiting.
Toss darts at a wall-poster where you've drawn circles for the various stocks available, size of circle proportional to the market-cap.
Yes, sure, there'll be good years and terrible years, but what matters is the average. Chanses are if you inherit a million at age 20 and invest it like this, the payoff will be around $50K/year *after* accounting for taxes and inflation and whatnot. If you can live for this or less, you never need to do anything again.
There are around 7 million people in the world with a personal fortune over $1 million. All of those can stop working, and never work again. Same is true for any and all of their descendants.
Energy consumption. Muscle burns more calories per kg than most other body-tissue, even when at rest.
You should remember that 99.9% of our evolution took place in an environment where getting enough to eat was a struggle, and starvation was a real problem that killed lots and lots of people.
More muscle is good, if you need it. Thus muscles do grow if used. But a lot more muscle than your body "needs" for what it's doing will only increase your energy-consumption and thus increase the chanse that you starve.
In general our bodies are rather poorly adapted for the current condition where overfeeding is a couple of magnitudes more common than underfeeding.(I'm talking rich people like 99% of those reading slashdot here, I know thats not globally true.) A lot of things your body do make no sense in the actual situation you're in now, for example:
The body tries to store away energy from the food for getting you over worse times. That's counterproductive for a modern person who *are* at risk for heart-disease or other problems of overweigth, but who will probably never in its life experience a single week without food. More sensible would be a body that does this only aslong as BMI is under say 25, and then simply lets any extra energy after that go straigth trough, or get wasted.
If it's cold, your body tries to preserve heat in central important organs *without* resorting to shivering by shutting down blood to extremities, making you freeze on your fingers and toes. Shivering is essentially wasting energy to produce heat. Excess shivering typically would lead to starvation. Today pretty much everyone would consider it a *double* bonus if the body would simply burn whatever is needed to keep you warm, making you a) warm and b) slim. It's not as if it's a *problem* to the typical westerner if he needs to provide the body with a 1000 calories extra today because of the cold.
Energy content, aswell as weigth of chocolate bar is printed in metric. Though I've seen some products also listing the equivalent in calories in parenthesis thereafter, I guess as a courtesy to those still thinking in calories.
I think you're being a little bit disingenious by claiming that you see no advantage to either system because both can be implemented effectively by a computer. By that logic *any* self-consistent system is equally good as any other and the entire discussion is moot.
In summary, metric is *much* easier and more convenient if you want human beings to actually comprehend and deal with the relations between different entities.
You also contradict yourself. You say that you use metric for science, but also claims that since noone would manually deal with units, metric poses no advantage for science. If it poses no advantage, why do you do it ?
The sums I don't know about, they won't be enough to finance the thing, but migth be enough to give a push to something that migth be worth doing anyway.
I'd advocate making more smaller-step prices though. For example, between the current X-Price and a reusable, manned LEO orbiter there's a hell of a long way. How about the following stepstones ?
Orbit a 10pound radio-repeater in LEO the thing doesn't need to come back down in one piece.
Orbit a 100 pound satelite in synchronous orbit.
Orbit a person, vehicle does *not* need to be reusable (i.e. a apollo-style capsule is ok)
You've talked basically only to Americans then. The entire rest of the world uses metric officially, and most of the rest of the world uses it also informally. Some countries where traditions are strong, like for example UK use metric only "officially" while everyone still thinks in pints and gallons and cubits and whatnot.
Other countries, like Scandinavia and Germany abandoned imperial in favour of metric so long ago that noone uses imperial for anything, and many people don't even have a clue what is what. (though most will have some vague notion of the size of the most common imperial units)
Base 12 over base 10 is fine. Essentially the only advantage base 10 has, beyond the fact that everybody is used to it, is that we've got precisely 10 fingers. (absent rare mutations or accidents)
But this has very little to do with metric versus imperial, the example I provided of the advantages of metric would wokr *precisely* as well in a base12 number-system (or any other base you care to name)
The horribly bad thing about imperial ain't that they use strange counting like 12 inches to a foot, 5280 feet to a mile and so on.
The real horror is the fact that none of the units are meant to work with any of the other. Logically volume should be equivalent to length^3, but still there's no easy way to convert feet^3 to gallons, for example.
This problem stays regardless of what number-base you use
Only if you can produce actual examples of how exactly changing to metric is "fucking up" road systems or grocery stores. And no "it's different" ain't really reason enough by itself.
For your information, the rest of the world uses metric. Sure, from the change it typically takes a generation or so before people start "thinking" in metric, but that's just a case of old habits die slow as far as I can see.
Having two different systems, one for John Doe and one for "science and engineering" has real costs by the way. For example it tends to alienate people from the sciences, make them understand less of it, make teaching physics harder, force people to constantly convert this and that way according to with whom they're speaking.
Besides "normal people" do plenty of unit-conversion too. How much water will fit in the 10 meter by 5 meter by 2 meter pool ? How much energy is in this bar of chocolate, and how far will I have to bike to loose that weigth again ? How much paint must I buy to paint this room when the room is 5*4*2.5 meter and the paint says 10m^2/liter ?
Re:It's not just that the poster is a moron
on
Our Friend, The Meter
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Silly. One minor point is true; all other being equal, it's an advantage to work with numbers that have many small factors. "12" for example is nice in being dividible by 2,3,4 and 6 where our familiar 10 is only dividible by 2 and 5.
This advantage is real, but it's in no way enough to even begin to compensate for all the other advantages of metric.
I could give a long list of advantages, but instead I'll say this;
To accelerate 1kg by 1m/s you need a force of 1N. If you push with a force of 1N over a distance of 1m you've used 1joule. If you did this in 1s then your power is 1watt. If you prefer to have an electric motor doing this work for you, it can produce this 1watt by drawing, for example, 1A at 1V. For 1A to flow at a volate of 1V, this means your motor will have an internal resistance equal to 1ohm
Not really 62 times the energy. I suspect you considered only the kinetical energy in being 100km up, as compared to that of being 350km up and travelling at orbital velocity.
This ignores the significant energy-expenditure needed to push away atmosphere. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to hear that 75-90% of the power in the propulsion of SS1 went to dealing with atmospheric drag.
Besides, so their proprietary, what di you want to do, take your hardware and move to some other linux-native VoIP provider? Wait...there aren't any.
Rather clueless, aren't you ?
The alternative to closed proprietary protocols from Skype ain't "linux-native" VoIP providers. The alternative is using providers that use open, published, documented standards.
Probably the best one at the moment is SIP, implemented by literally dozens of programs for most platforms you can think of, including Windows, Mac, Linux and the various BSDs.
SIP is supported by tons of providers, such as oh, for example pulver.com telio.no and sipgate.de to mention examples from the three countries I phone the most. Additionally there's multiple free (as in beer and as in speech) implementations of sip-servers, so any organisation or individual that wishes to do so are free to run their own.
Before you ask, yes all of these can communicate with eachothers. Yes, if I have a sip-phone I can talk with any other user of a sip-phone, regardless of which provider we both use, which OS we both use, which software or hardware is employed and so on.
What Skype has to offer that would make anyone consider changing from sip to this I honestly don't have a clue. That sip is extendable and thus capable of supporting calls of any type (text, audio, video, whatever) rather than being hardcoded to do audio-only is a mere bonus.
We're in the same industry, but in different ends of it. I see the problem as starting much MUCH earlier than with college.
Where I studied (Uni of Bergen, Norway) at the bachelor-level in computer-science I'd say something like 1/3rd of the students enrolling where female. That's not too bad. Problem is, that does not at all lead to 1/3rd of say the people with a masters being female. As far as I can tell for two reasons;
The average female enrolling had *far* less experience and knowledge than the average male. In a class where the average male would have some experience with 3-5 OSes and atleast have programmed hello world, half of the females or so had no experience whatsoever beyond "knowing how to write a letter in MS-Word", this means that though 1/3rd of the students are female, no more than 1/10th or so of the top quartile ended up being female.
Secondly, even among those few women who did qualify as well as the best of the men, for some reason or other hardly any of them choose to go on to a masters degree. Why I honestly can't say. The child-issue ain't it, in Norway the *average* age of a woman at first child is something like 29. A master takes 5 years, and given that women don't do military service and thus can start a year earlier they'd be done by 23 unless they took breaks or needed more time. That leaves 6 full years of time before having a child. And even this is a pessimistic estimate because I'm willing to bet that the average age of academicly educated mothers is even higher. (yes, I am fully aware of fertility sinking and risks associated with pregnancy increasing as the mother pushes 30 or 35).
I honestly don't know the reason, but I suspect it's something of a image-thing "girls don't do science" kinda thing, coupled with a lack of positive role-models. I mean, it's not as if you as a girl studying comp.sci are likely to have even a single female professor, for example.
But lack of time, or lack of skill ain't the reason, girls (atleast here in Norway) seem to easily (more easily than the males) find the time to become medical doctors, for example. (yes, among older doctors there's still a majority of males, but among the ones being educated *now* the females are coming.)
It's a good idea, and not only because the games are likely to be better, the work-environment is typically better in a more healthily mixed environment too.
But one serious problem is that to be able to hire female game-designers, there needs to actually be some of those available. Before women can start taking a big role in design, artwork, story and coding for games, women need to start getting an education and experiences that makes them qualified for those kinds of jobs.
Sure, there are some exceptions, but not very many. I've *been* on the employer side of the table, trying to hire more mixed. We put in ads explicitly requesting women and minorities to apply. Inspite of this less than 10% of the applications we got where from women, and to add insult to injury, the average qualification of those few women who *did* apply was abysmal. Not "sligthly lower than average of the males", but more like the best qualified of the females would still be in the last quartile of the men. Hiring unqualified workers won't help produce quality anything.
Sorry, but that's not true. Atleast not in most jurisdictions. It's true that the store does not have to ensure you know all the facts. But it does have to honor returns on defective merchandise.
A sale is an agreement with two sides. You agree to pay money. And they agree to hand over a product. Expressively, or implicitly, this product is expected to have certain properties. Such properties can be communicated in writing (like for example advertising) or implicitly. In the lack of explicit writing the product is assumed to have properties similar to those common for products of that type, the price being one factor.
For example, if you buy a pair of jeans, they are assumed to *not* disintegrate on contact with water. If they *do* disintegrate on water-contact, and the seller did not inform you of this in a reasonably obvious way, it's a defect, you'll be able to return it if the seller likes it or not.
Similarily, I would argue that if you buy a round plastic-thing, stacked in the music-section, packed in a casing indistinguishable from those of normal CDs and with a price similar to what is common for a CD, then it's not a stretch to imagine that people who buy that plastic-disc imagine they're getting a CD.
Today, the typical PC-buyer does not even have a clue how much energy the pc will use, nor any practical way of comparing different ones.
For quite a few household appliances there's a standard labeling system for energy-consumption. It labels energy-use, measured in a standard way from "A" for the best equipment to "E". Consumers see, and care about these labels.
For example, if you go looking for a new fridge, or a new dishwasher, or a freezer, here in Germany, you'll see prominent labels saying: "A - 105 KWH/year", or "B - 1.2KWH/washing"
There's no reason why new computers couldn't be labeled similarily: "B - 350KWH/year"
The first step for customers to start caring about some aspect or other is that those customers must *know* about it.
But even *if* we accept your figure, which is only reasonable with a very high-end PC that is never turned off and a CRT that never goes into powersave-mode or is turned off, even then, the laptop doesn't make sense from a purely economical POV.
You say in this (rather extreme) example, the laptop saves $29/month in power. That works out as $348/year. Assuming you change your computer every 3 years, can you get a comparable laptop for $1000 more than a normal PC ? Probably. But the thing is, it would make a *lot* more sense to simply turn off the screen on your PC the 3/4th of the time when you're not using it, and get a more reasonable PC that consumes say 150 Watts.
If you need the PC on 24/7, you'd then need to get equivalent laptop for $500 more every 3 years. Not likely. And if you can also turn off the PC when it's not used, the available "budget" for getting a laptop sinks to something like $150 extra every 3 years.
So, while you're rigth that a laptop can be better than the most horribly inefficient alternative, that's a bit like saying that the 3 ton SUV for driving you to work and back makes economical sense, because it is better than the 5 ton SUV.
Absolutely. And this is something that will never cease to amaze me; Why do so many people seemingly blindly accept the sellers arbitrary decision ?
Just because a sellers claims you can't return opened merchandise, doesn't mean it's true.
You bougth something, expecting it to be a standard CD. (reasonable, given that the copy-protection is typically poorly marked, and the CDs stacked up on racks intermixed with the non-CDs) That is, you gave away money, reasonably expecting to get a CD for it that would play in any machine capable of playing CDs.
When the piece of plastic you got infact is not a CD, and infact is seriously inferior to a CD, by not playing in your computer, not playing in many car-stereos, not playing in your playstation, not playing in your DVD-player, not being rippable so that you can listen to it on your mp3-player and so on (all of which would work fine with a CD), then there's very little doubt that the merchandise you bougth is defective, and you have the rigth to return it.
I think your math is a bit off. The power-consumption migth be rigth, provided you leave your computer and CRT on 24/7, but a typical office-computer is only used 40 hours/week, which isn't even 1/4th of the time, so typical power-consumption is more like $6/month. (If your company leaves all computers and monitors on 24/7, then there's a much more obvious way to save energy and cost....)
Furthermore a modern laptop costs something like $1500 - $2500, I sincerely doubt you can lease such a laptop for $25/month. If you could, the owner would need to lease out the laptop for 5-8 years to recover the cost. The useful lease-age of a laptop is more like 2-3 years.
Sure, you can get a much cheaper laptop, say one in the $700 range, but then it's no longer remotely fair to compare it's power-consumption with a new state-of-the-art PC. If you're happy with a PII-300, a single low-rpm harddrive and a 15" monitor, that'll also drink a lot less juice.
I do use a "real" email-adress. But sure, it's "real" only in the sense that I am actually able to (if I choose to) read email sent to that address. It's not an adress that I read regularily, and any email arriving there is assumed to be spam by default.
I am certain this research would classify such email-adresses as "real".
Actually, I'd wager a bet that the email-adress put into such online registration-forms is more accurate than any of the other info.
That is because quite a few sites require you to actually enter a valid, working email-adress to be able to register, typically they'll send out a validation-email with a link for you to click on or something.
On the other hand, there's no reasonable way for a website to check any of the other info you put in, I am certain that more thouorugh research would show that though only 20% of the email-adresses where outrigth false (as in bounces), another significant part are "spam-only" or "throwaway" accounts, and even *more* of the info collected in all other fields is incorrect.
It'd not surprise me in the least if 75% lie when asked privacy-invading questions with no easy method of verification such as "household income", I know I do. This is more than enough to make the collected data complete junk, and negate any imagined positive effect of collecting it in the first place.
And don't forget, those that speak two languages have roughly double the vocabulary of someone that speaks only one.
This always cracks me up. I mean, not what you're saying, I agree with that, though most people, even those who write and talk completely fluently, don't have quite as large a vocabulary in their foreign languages as in their mother-tongue, thus the real factor is probably not *2, but more like *1.5 or something.
The reason it cracks me up is the intro, "those that speak two languages", you frequently hear such, almost exclusively from Americans.
Where I come from, "those that speak two languages" would be considered very weak in languages, certainly it'd be someone with no more than a basic education. 3 languages is the norm for those that do *not* study languages or cultures in higher education, those that do, offcourse know more.
I, for example, have Norwegian as my mother-tongue, speak and write english and german fluently, and have some knowledge of Swedish, Danish and French. (swedish and danish is a bit unfair, they're quite similar to Norwegian, so to a Norwegian I guess they only half count as "foreign languages", certainly the effort required to learn them is much smaller.)
My wife speaks fluently german, polish, english, and russian.
None of us studied languages, and none of us consider ourselves extraordinarily in any sense.
Why do you say "with circuitry" ? The language obviously applies to anything capable of doing elementary maths.
a class of 5th-graders equipped with pen and paper, and knowledgeable about addition and subtraction is obviously a system *capable* of *assisting* with decryption. So, such a class is outlawed, the teacher and parents being imprisoned for having participated in the manufacture.
Yes it's absurd, but the law as it stands there really *is* this absurd. It basically says: outlaw everything, let the lawyers and judges interpret it.
Hi, don't get so defensive. I'm not trying to diss BSD at all. I'm all in favour of a healthy ecosystem of OSes. My ideal would be a situation where no single OS has a dominant position, that would ensure *real* competition and benefit all.
Besides, would you stop trolling ? I fail to see why it's of any relevance whatsoever, but I live 2000 km from my parents basement, together with my lovely wife and our yet-unborn son. The kid living in his parents basement is a clichee no more true about Linux than the "4.7 users and dying" clichee about BSD. Get over it.
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Certainly. In any world where average return on investment is higher than inflation anyone can do this simply by investing randomly, then sitting back and waiting.
Toss darts at a wall-poster where you've drawn circles for the various stocks available, size of circle proportional to the market-cap.
Yes, sure, there'll be good years and terrible years, but what matters is the average. Chanses are if you inherit a million at age 20 and invest it like this, the payoff will be around $50K/year *after* accounting for taxes and inflation and whatnot. If you can live for this or less, you never need to do anything again.
There are around 7 million people in the world with a personal fortune over $1 million. All of those can stop working, and never work again. Same is true for any and all of their descendants.
You should remember that 99.9% of our evolution took place in an environment where getting enough to eat was a struggle, and starvation was a real problem that killed lots and lots of people.
More muscle is good, if you need it. Thus muscles do grow if used. But a lot more muscle than your body "needs" for what it's doing will only increase your energy-consumption and thus increase the chanse that you starve.
In general our bodies are rather poorly adapted for the current condition where overfeeding is a couple of magnitudes more common than underfeeding.(I'm talking rich people like 99% of those reading slashdot here, I know thats not globally true.) A lot of things your body do make no sense in the actual situation you're in now, for example:
I think you're being a little bit disingenious by claiming that you see no advantage to either system because both can be implemented effectively by a computer. By that logic *any* self-consistent system is equally good as any other and the entire discussion is moot.
In summary, metric is *much* easier and more convenient if you want human beings to actually comprehend and deal with the relations between different entities.
You also contradict yourself. You say that you use metric for science, but also claims that since noone would manually deal with units, metric poses no advantage for science. If it poses no advantage, why do you do it ?
*duh* you are offcourse absolutely rigth, mea culpa.
I'd advocate making more smaller-step prices though. For example, between the current X-Price and a reusable, manned LEO orbiter there's a hell of a long way. How about the following stepstones ?
That's easy to answer. All available evidence indicates NASA could not have built SS1 even given an order of magnitude more money. (i.e. $100 million)
Other countries, like Scandinavia and Germany abandoned imperial in favour of metric so long ago that noone uses imperial for anything, and many people don't even have a clue what is what. (though most will have some vague notion of the size of the most common imperial units)
But this has very little to do with metric versus imperial, the example I provided of the advantages of metric would wokr *precisely* as well in a base12 number-system (or any other base you care to name)
The horribly bad thing about imperial ain't that they use strange counting like 12 inches to a foot, 5280 feet to a mile and so on.
The real horror is the fact that none of the units are meant to work with any of the other. Logically volume should be equivalent to length^3, but still there's no easy way to convert feet^3 to gallons, for example.
This problem stays regardless of what number-base you use
For your information, the rest of the world uses metric. Sure, from the change it typically takes a generation or so before people start "thinking" in metric, but that's just a case of old habits die slow as far as I can see.
Having two different systems, one for John Doe and one for "science and engineering" has real costs by the way. For example it tends to alienate people from the sciences, make them understand less of it, make teaching physics harder, force people to constantly convert this and that way according to with whom they're speaking.
Besides "normal people" do plenty of unit-conversion too. How much water will fit in the 10 meter by 5 meter by 2 meter pool ? How much energy is in this bar of chocolate, and how far will I have to bike to loose that weigth again ? How much paint must I buy to paint this room when the room is 5*4*2.5 meter and the paint says 10m^2/liter ?
This advantage is real, but it's in no way enough to even begin to compensate for all the other advantages of metric.
I could give a long list of advantages, but instead I'll say this;
To accelerate 1kg by 1m/s you need a force of 1N. If you push with a force of 1N over a distance of 1m you've used 1joule. If you did this in 1s then your power is 1watt. If you prefer to have an electric motor doing this work for you, it can produce this 1watt by drawing, for example, 1A at 1V. For 1A to flow at a volate of 1V, this means your motor will have an internal resistance equal to 1ohm
Now you repeat that, in imperial units.
This ignores the significant energy-expenditure needed to push away atmosphere. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to hear that 75-90% of the power in the propulsion of SS1 went to dealing with atmospheric drag.
Rather clueless, aren't you ?
The alternative to closed proprietary protocols from Skype ain't "linux-native" VoIP providers. The alternative is using providers that use open, published, documented standards.
Probably the best one at the moment is SIP, implemented by literally dozens of programs for most platforms you can think of, including Windows, Mac, Linux and the various BSDs.
SIP is supported by tons of providers, such as oh, for example pulver.com telio.no and sipgate.de to mention examples from the three countries I phone the most. Additionally there's multiple free (as in beer and as in speech) implementations of sip-servers, so any organisation or individual that wishes to do so are free to run their own.
Before you ask, yes all of these can communicate with eachothers. Yes, if I have a sip-phone I can talk with any other user of a sip-phone, regardless of which provider we both use, which OS we both use, which software or hardware is employed and so on.
What Skype has to offer that would make anyone consider changing from sip to this I honestly don't have a clue. That sip is extendable and thus capable of supporting calls of any type (text, audio, video, whatever) rather than being hardcoded to do audio-only is a mere bonus.
Where I studied (Uni of Bergen, Norway) at the bachelor-level in computer-science I'd say something like 1/3rd of the students enrolling where female. That's not too bad. Problem is, that does not at all lead to 1/3rd of say the people with a masters being female. As far as I can tell for two reasons;
The average female enrolling had *far* less experience and knowledge than the average male. In a class where the average male would have some experience with 3-5 OSes and atleast have programmed hello world, half of the females or so had no experience whatsoever beyond "knowing how to write a letter in MS-Word", this means that though 1/3rd of the students are female, no more than 1/10th or so of the top quartile ended up being female.
Secondly, even among those few women who did qualify as well as the best of the men, for some reason or other hardly any of them choose to go on to a masters degree. Why I honestly can't say. The child-issue ain't it, in Norway the *average* age of a woman at first child is something like 29. A master takes 5 years, and given that women don't do military service and thus can start a year earlier they'd be done by 23 unless they took breaks or needed more time. That leaves 6 full years of time before having a child. And even this is a pessimistic estimate because I'm willing to bet that the average age of academicly educated mothers is even higher. (yes, I am fully aware of fertility sinking and risks associated with pregnancy increasing as the mother pushes 30 or 35).
I honestly don't know the reason, but I suspect it's something of a image-thing "girls don't do science" kinda thing, coupled with a lack of positive role-models. I mean, it's not as if you as a girl studying comp.sci are likely to have even a single female professor, for example.
But lack of time, or lack of skill ain't the reason, girls (atleast here in Norway) seem to easily (more easily than the males) find the time to become medical doctors, for example. (yes, among older doctors there's still a majority of males, but among the ones being educated *now* the females are coming.)
But one serious problem is that to be able to hire female game-designers, there needs to actually be some of those available. Before women can start taking a big role in design, artwork, story and coding for games, women need to start getting an education and experiences that makes them qualified for those kinds of jobs.
Sure, there are some exceptions, but not very many. I've *been* on the employer side of the table, trying to hire more mixed. We put in ads explicitly requesting women and minorities to apply. Inspite of this less than 10% of the applications we got where from women, and to add insult to injury, the average qualification of those few women who *did* apply was abysmal. Not "sligthly lower than average of the males", but more like the best qualified of the females would still be in the last quartile of the men. Hiring unqualified workers won't help produce quality anything.
A sale is an agreement with two sides. You agree to pay money. And they agree to hand over a product. Expressively, or implicitly, this product is expected to have certain properties. Such properties can be communicated in writing (like for example advertising) or implicitly. In the lack of explicit writing the product is assumed to have properties similar to those common for products of that type, the price being one factor.
For example, if you buy a pair of jeans, they are assumed to *not* disintegrate on contact with water. If they *do* disintegrate on water-contact, and the seller did not inform you of this in a reasonably obvious way, it's a defect, you'll be able to return it if the seller likes it or not.
Similarily, I would argue that if you buy a round plastic-thing, stacked in the music-section, packed in a casing indistinguishable from those of normal CDs and with a price similar to what is common for a CD, then it's not a stretch to imagine that people who buy that plastic-disc imagine they're getting a CD.
Today, the typical PC-buyer does not even have a clue how much energy the pc will use, nor any practical way of comparing different ones. For quite a few household appliances there's a standard labeling system for energy-consumption. It labels energy-use, measured in a standard way from "A" for the best equipment to "E". Consumers see, and care about these labels.
For example, if you go looking for a new fridge, or a new dishwasher, or a freezer, here in Germany, you'll see prominent labels saying: "A - 105 KWH/year", or "B - 1.2KWH/washing"
There's no reason why new computers couldn't be labeled similarily: "B - 350KWH/year"
The first step for customers to start caring about some aspect or other is that those customers must *know* about it.
You say in this (rather extreme) example, the laptop saves $29/month in power. That works out as $348/year. Assuming you change your computer every 3 years, can you get a comparable laptop for $1000 more than a normal PC ? Probably. But the thing is, it would make a *lot* more sense to simply turn off the screen on your PC the 3/4th of the time when you're not using it, and get a more reasonable PC that consumes say 150 Watts.
If you need the PC on 24/7, you'd then need to get equivalent laptop for $500 more every 3 years. Not likely. And if you can also turn off the PC when it's not used, the available "budget" for getting a laptop sinks to something like $150 extra every 3 years.
So, while you're rigth that a laptop can be better than the most horribly inefficient alternative, that's a bit like saying that the 3 ton SUV for driving you to work and back makes economical sense, because it is better than the 5 ton SUV.
Just because a sellers claims you can't return opened merchandise, doesn't mean it's true.
You bougth something, expecting it to be a standard CD. (reasonable, given that the copy-protection is typically poorly marked, and the CDs stacked up on racks intermixed with the non-CDs) That is, you gave away money, reasonably expecting to get a CD for it that would play in any machine capable of playing CDs.
When the piece of plastic you got infact is not a CD, and infact is seriously inferior to a CD, by not playing in your computer, not playing in many car-stereos, not playing in your playstation, not playing in your DVD-player, not being rippable so that you can listen to it on your mp3-player and so on (all of which would work fine with a CD), then there's very little doubt that the merchandise you bougth is defective, and you have the rigth to return it.
Furthermore a modern laptop costs something like $1500 - $2500, I sincerely doubt you can lease such a laptop for $25/month. If you could, the owner would need to lease out the laptop for 5-8 years to recover the cost. The useful lease-age of a laptop is more like 2-3 years.
Sure, you can get a much cheaper laptop, say one in the $700 range, but then it's no longer remotely fair to compare it's power-consumption with a new state-of-the-art PC. If you're happy with a PII-300, a single low-rpm harddrive and a 15" monitor, that'll also drink a lot less juice.
I am certain this research would classify such email-adresses as "real".
That is because quite a few sites require you to actually enter a valid, working email-adress to be able to register, typically they'll send out a validation-email with a link for you to click on or something.
On the other hand, there's no reasonable way for a website to check any of the other info you put in, I am certain that more thouorugh research would show that though only 20% of the email-adresses where outrigth false (as in bounces), another significant part are "spam-only" or "throwaway" accounts, and even *more* of the info collected in all other fields is incorrect.
It'd not surprise me in the least if 75% lie when asked privacy-invading questions with no easy method of verification such as "household income", I know I do. This is more than enough to make the collected data complete junk, and negate any imagined positive effect of collecting it in the first place.
This always cracks me up. I mean, not what you're saying, I agree with that, though most people, even those who write and talk completely fluently, don't have quite as large a vocabulary in their foreign languages as in their mother-tongue, thus the real factor is probably not *2, but more like *1.5 or something.
The reason it cracks me up is the intro, "those that speak two languages", you frequently hear such, almost exclusively from Americans.
Where I come from, "those that speak two languages" would be considered very weak in languages, certainly it'd be someone with no more than a basic education. 3 languages is the norm for those that do *not* study languages or cultures in higher education, those that do, offcourse know more.
I, for example, have Norwegian as my mother-tongue, speak and write english and german fluently, and have some knowledge of Swedish, Danish and French. (swedish and danish is a bit unfair, they're quite similar to Norwegian, so to a Norwegian I guess they only half count as "foreign languages", certainly the effort required to learn them is much smaller.)
My wife speaks fluently german, polish, english, and russian.
None of us studied languages, and none of us consider ourselves extraordinarily in any sense.
a class of 5th-graders equipped with pen and paper, and knowledgeable about addition and subtraction is obviously a system *capable* of *assisting* with decryption. So, such a class is outlawed, the teacher and parents being imprisoned for having participated in the manufacture.
Yes it's absurd, but the law as it stands there really *is* this absurd. It basically says: outlaw everything, let the lawyers and judges interpret it.
Thats bad law.
Besides, would you stop trolling ? I fail to see why it's of any relevance whatsoever, but I live 2000 km from my parents basement, together with my lovely wife and our yet-unborn son. The kid living in his parents basement is a clichee no more true about Linux than the "4.7 users and dying" clichee about BSD. Get over it.