But I suspect is has to do with a large stack of paper with pictures of presidents on them. You'd be amazed out how well such things work when the stack is large enough. The key is to make sure that your get them into the right hands. Elected officials are particularly partial to them, and hold a great deal of sway over what is and what isn't allowed.
I don't know; unlike IP "theft" (which the summary implies), what was stolen was somthing which the victim (1) clearly worked to achieve, and (2) was deprived of following the theft. In other words, the taking was of a scarce resource. Had they stolen a copy of his MP3 collection (thus not depriving him of the use of the collection), I suspect the assault would probably have been the correct prosecution.
No, it's more appropriate to say it will be invisible to people who use the media in the ways the creators envisioned as the only legitimate uses. Those of us who are legitimate users who want to do something out of the mainstream (say, a home built media server; or putting a selection of titles on an inexpensive portable drive to take on vacation) are screwed.
Just as there is no way to determine what all the end users will want to do with the products they purchase, there is no way to place restrictions on a system without inhibiting some users.
It's not much different than the firearms issue in the US. There are people out there who will abuse the rights, but that shouldn't prevent the vast majority of users from exercising the right.
All it takes is for train service to get popular, and it will become a terrorist target. Well, at least our friends in Washington will fear it and you'll get to the hour waits in a TSA line and a Soviet era "your papers please" request at every ticket counter. Think of it like windows and Linux - you can write a virus for the latter, but it's not worth the effort when windows is so popular. Make trains a critical part of the passenger infrastructure and they'll be considered a target - at least by our own government.
(yes, I chafe at the annoying and pointless checks through airport security.)
Aside from selling your soul to the devil and having to be nice to people waaaay too often, it's just too damned expensive to get elected. Though, to be honest, "become elected to the Senate" was my choice when a bunch of colleagues were discussing what you'd do if you won a $200M lottery, after you'd bought all the houses, cars, and other toys you wanted. Funny, most people expected I'd choose to be a space tourist.
Now, though, I think I'd just blow it all trying to change IP laws, both in the court system and in the legislature.
I was curious because the article didn't expand on what novel addition they had added. It sounds like they simply determined why/how the tape emitted x-rays, but that the actual discovery of the effect is more than 50 years old. Creating a viable, reproducible c-ray source based on their findings may be the answer, but it doesn't sound like they've gotten that far. Interesting, yes. New, no.
On the contrary, where can you find a job doing anything legal which nets you $83k after taxes and lets you (a) work from home (b) not bother to work when you don't want to and (c) only requires a few hours a month (which is all they probably did). If the 83k were taxable, it would put them in the top 23% of wage earners in the US, and if you account for taxes on top of their (untaxed) 83k (i.e. payroll and income), you're solidly in the top 15% in take-home.
Trust me, being a criminal is far less time intensive than a steady job at the same wage. Most of these guys would probably struggle to hold down a $22-30,000/yr service position in the "real world".
Besides, now it looks like they'll get free room and board for several years.
I just tried it; there's a flight from NY to Boston for $159 leaving in 2.5 hours, one way. Actually, there are three or four flights at that price today. Some aggregators (like expedia) don't do 6 hrs from departure, but tomorrow there are several flights for less (135 range one way) on several airlines.
Now, that's not a Friday, admittedly, but it is on short notice. Oddly, it's about the same price to fly to Los Angeles from NY as it is to fly to Boston.
Cell service is still poor when compared to landlines, for one thing (I'm speaking of quality here, though availability is true during high-volume call times), and a cell phone for everyone in the family is generally more than land service. It's also expensive in many areas to get dry-loop DSL or cable internet service (for me, it's $17-40 more for internet without a land-phone, depending on speed and provider).
Also, with the DNC list, we get maybe 1 call per month which is a telemarketer. My wife got more wrong-number dials on her new cell number in the first 6 months.
Land lines are convenient for several reasons, though some admittedly fall into the old-codger realm. The biggest is a phone that never moves. For those who have ever a) misplaced a cell phone or b) had an emergency in the house (i.e. 911*), there is a good use for them.
*yes, in theory they can get your location from your cell. In most of the US (by area, not population), though, the only information a 911 center is going to get inside of 10 minutes is your address which is linked in their internal database to your phone number. Even e911 isn't universal - or close to it. If you have a stroke or a heart attack, it may make the difference between recovering and being dead. Remember - Not everyone is 20-something and single.
And West Virginia here in the states. I am presuming that "being green" and "clean" with coal means simply removing the toxic chemicals which would normally be spewed into the atmosphere as part of the burning process. I haven't quite figured out how they are claiming to be "carbon neutral." That one must have required some pretty creative accounting.
If we put as much thought into addressing the problem rather than the symptoms, we'd be a good deal further along. And although I'm happy to be paying less at the gas pump these days, a part of me is unhappy that the drop in oil prices will mean that many new technologies which would had become cost-competitive with fossil fuels are going to struggle to become viable.
Seriously...look it up. If you've got only 3 drives it's free, but go ahead and pay for the normal version. Mine works amazingly well; I have about 2.5GB of data including my DVD and CD collections. It runs great, is expandable, and fails more gracefully than RAID5. If one drive fails, you rebuild; if two drive fail you'll only lose one drive worth of data. Bad, but not as bad as losing the whole array. I haven't kept up with the software (it works, therefore I don't mess with it), but there were plans a few months ago to implement a hot-spare option in case of drive failure.
You'll need a separate PC box, but for just a few drives they can be had fairly cheaply.
I have about 2.5TB of home data. Of course, at least 2.2TB of that is backed up on commercially pressed CDs and DVDs, and another 0.2TB is in media without originals (by is available on the net, carefully retained by others with similar tastes in music and video). If my drive fails, I'm looking at several days to recover from the originals, but at least unrecoverable "core" things I have to really worry about backing up can be put on about 4-5 DVD-DLs. I don't of course. I have two external drives I swap between home and the office, each carrying a recent backup of both. I have also uploaded to ADrive, though I have my doubts that they are really a long term, reliable solution.
As for the main array, it's something like RAID4, if I read the unRaid docs properly. Single parity drive; once drive failure gets repaired, two drives failed loses one drive worth of data. Actually, now that I some to think of it, I'm not sure which drive I would lose if I lost two data drives, or if I get a choice. BRB...
None that I can pull up. Typically, a death, to a corporate defendant, costs less than a significant but not life threatening injury. I recall something from a decade ago or so about the cost of a death, on average, being somewhere between $100k and $200k in general litigation. Larger numbers of deaths tend to be purchased by corporations "in bulk" and receive a discount.
My GP post was, indeed, hyperbole, but I am somewhat concerned that if they really did catch the perpertator of 1/3 of the worlds spam, and that he may have turned over that network to someone else, then "advanced interrogation techniques," if not torture by name, would be in the realm of consideration. If it were several hundred children held hostage, would it be reasonable?
Besides, I'd be okay if the torture were simply to make him read and respond to spam emails. One email with a single line of "please remove me from your mailing list," hand typed, for each spam he has ever sent should be sufficient. Naturally, we'd be humane and offer 20 minute breaks every 4 hours for meals, and 7 hours for sleep each night.
A "typical" PC, of which there are none, will likely pull 125-200W at startup. It runs full out, afaik, until power management kicks in. For my laptop, it takes nearly 5 minutes* from power switch to useful (as judged by both disc activity and inability to accept keystrokes in realtime). So 1/12 hr x 125W = 10 watt-hours. That's ten hours in standby if standby is 1W over hibernation/off.
It has a huge benefit to usability, though. Being able to "turn on" the machine and have a working browser over a wireless link in less than 10 seconds is quite a feature. It's the difference between flipping on the machine to check the weather (standby) and knowing that you can probably wait for "weather on the 8s" on the weather channel faster (cold boot).
* Yes, that sucks royally. Thanks, Microsoft, et al., for your inability to load programs efficiently. About 4 minutes of that time is _after_ I login. In comparison, I can come out of hibernation (i.e. - transfer 2GB from the disc back to memory) in about 30 seconds.
Courts have determined that a life has a monetary value, I think in the mid 6 figures. So, if it's worth it to torture to save $500M in lives, it seems logical that the billions of lost dollars to spam would justify torture to get the "keys" of this system back, or to take over and eradicate it.
I say we torture them slowly, excruciatingly, until we have every last bit of knowledge we can get. And once they've give up everything, we go ahead and kill them. Slowly, of course - they are spammers, after all.
Yes, but not for $175. I think the price point is the breakthrough. I've got a TyTn, and certainly wouldn't trade it for this. Actually, I'm not sure what I'd do with this. It's too small for surfing, to big to carry in addition to my phone (even a small, non-pda phone), and the resolution isn't really any good for surfing. It might work as a media player or text-mode remote (telnet), but an iSomehting would probably do better at both those tasks for little extra money, and far less than a 9000 or TyTn (or touch Pro).
There may be a niche market out there somewhere, but at $175 it may be too much for the average geek trinket.
Windows does very little well, but is has some very good, built in features (offline files is a good example - it's not perfect, but for road warriors it is indispensable).
What windows does well has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but rather with momentum. The major, established, and - dare I say - standard applications are written for Windows. While it's all well and good to say that there are alternatives out there, the cost is absolutely astronomical. The cost of the OS software and all the applications combined are a minuscule fraction of the cost of software usage. The bulk of the cost is in training. Most workers know MS software enough to get around, that means no re-training. Start talking about alternatives, like Photoshop or AutoCAD, or Word (yes, Word), and you have not just the retraining costs and temporary productivity loss of thousands upon thousands of dollars per employee but the cost of converting your entire legacy files to the new format or risk incompatibility. When I talk legacy files, I mean templates - macros, custom scripts, actual file templates, etc. In my office alone, discounting the cost of retraining, I probably have $25-50k in files that would have to be converted just to operate. I could easily spend half of my business' annual gross receipts in transition.
So it has very little to do with how well MS does. They can absolutely suck, and they're still cheaper than switching.
This could be a very useful site...
on
Web Singletons?
·
· Score: 1
I recently got bent over by Getty Images over two thumbnails which were placed on my site (by my designer) about 4 years ago. Actually, she'd used several images on several websites from a compilation CD she though was fully licensed for the use (the language was intentionally misleading). Getty contacted her two years ago and asked for damages for the images they license. She gave them the information she had, and agreed to remove all of the Getty images mentioned immediately. Since she works from several sources for images, she also asked if they would check the rest of the images on her sites. It may sound odd, but to try and match up images to the massive catalog Getty has without automated software is a monumental task. They either didn't reply to her request or didn't find any. Well, I got the $2000 thank you letter in the mail from Getty for two images that weren't scrubbed. They were genuine assholes about it this time, despite the previous discussion and immediate action. FWIW, the actual licensing fee for the images would have been less than $200 total.
Needless to say, I will never use Getty Images, and generally recommend against them due to their tactics. This, however, might have been useful to do a web site scrub for images.
I find it unlikely that the cottage industry which surrounds filesharing of **AA files wouldn't just end up writing a plugin - or standard coding - to flip an innocuous bit on transmission. I don't doubt it would require some thought to ensure that you wouldn't accidentally end up with a codec hiccup, and that it would have to be aware of the underlying file structure, but there are ways around it.
I don't have the link, but in the literature or on the forums somewhere there's a curve of the "efficiency" of the hybrid. The curve is asymptotic at about 110-120mpg, which would be your gasoline-only efficiency. Even with gas prices coming down a bit, the plug-in portion is still a fantastic economic deal compared to gasoline. The 10kWh battery will get you nearly 80 miles at real highway speeds, that's about $0.75 in electricity for me. And compared to the 13mpg I get around town in my F150, it's quite a bonus. Of course, I don't have $30k to spend on one, and if I did they wouldn't sell one to me 'cause I don't live in CA. On top if it, it still wouldn't pay me to buy one for economic reasons - I spend $3000 a year in fuel, and about 25% of the miles really do require a more rugged vehicle. At 6% interest, it would take 40 years to break even.
Being a long time/. reader, I naturally didn't RTFA, but unless the summary misquoted:
The test had two groups, young people who used the Internet, and older people who had never been online.
In doing the Internet search task, there was much greater activity, but only in the Internet-savvy group. (my emphasis)
Looks like only young brains, or young brains who understood the medium, got the extra stimulation. It seems they've got one equation and two variables. By this study, all they've shown is a correlation between young brains using the internet. To do this properly, a group of old,internet savvy people would have to be included to show that there is actually increased activity in the older group. Unfortunately, you'd need to engage these older people in training to do this - those who "naturally" use the internet might already have better habits for brain function. You need to take the older set who has no extra brain activity beyond a text book search and see if you can get them to show enhanced brain activity through computer interaction.
Slashdot Mirror
But I suspect is has to do with a large stack of paper with pictures of presidents on them. You'd be amazed out how well such things work when the stack is large enough. The key is to make sure that your get them into the right hands. Elected officials are particularly partial to them, and hold a great deal of sway over what is and what isn't allowed.
I don't know; unlike IP "theft" (which the summary implies), what was stolen was somthing which the victim (1) clearly worked to achieve, and (2) was deprived of following the theft. In other words, the taking was of a scarce resource. Had they stolen a copy of his MP3 collection (thus not depriving him of the use of the collection), I suspect the assault would probably have been the correct prosecution.
No, it's more appropriate to say it will be invisible to people who use the media in the ways the creators envisioned as the only legitimate uses. Those of us who are legitimate users who want to do something out of the mainstream (say, a home built media server; or putting a selection of titles on an inexpensive portable drive to take on vacation) are screwed.
Just as there is no way to determine what all the end users will want to do with the products they purchase, there is no way to place restrictions on a system without inhibiting some users.
It's not much different than the firearms issue in the US. There are people out there who will abuse the rights, but that shouldn't prevent the vast majority of users from exercising the right.
It's the things that didn't happen which she spontaneously "remembers" that cause just as much trouble.
All it takes is for train service to get popular, and it will become a terrorist target. Well, at least our friends in Washington will fear it and you'll get to the hour waits in a TSA line and a Soviet era "your papers please" request at every ticket counter. Think of it like windows and Linux - you can write a virus for the latter, but it's not worth the effort when windows is so popular. Make trains a critical part of the passenger infrastructure and they'll be considered a target - at least by our own government.
(yes, I chafe at the annoying and pointless checks through airport security.)
Aside from selling your soul to the devil and having to be nice to people waaaay too often, it's just too damned expensive to get elected. Though, to be honest, "become elected to the Senate" was my choice when a bunch of colleagues were discussing what you'd do if you won a $200M lottery, after you'd bought all the houses, cars, and other toys you wanted. Funny, most people expected I'd choose to be a space tourist.
Now, though, I think I'd just blow it all trying to change IP laws, both in the court system and in the legislature.
www.grainger.com
you can usually find in there what you can't get at McMaster-Carr (and there's a lot of overlap too).
Of course, there's always teh google - the top spoonsored link for "machine elements" is http://www.ganter-griff.com/ and it looks promising.
Small stuff you might try smallparts.com
I was curious because the article didn't expand on what novel addition they had added. It sounds like they simply determined why/how the tape emitted x-rays, but that the actual discovery of the effect is more than 50 years old. Creating a viable, reproducible c-ray source based on their findings may be the answer, but it doesn't sound like they've gotten that far. Interesting, yes. New, no.
On the contrary, where can you find a job doing anything legal which nets you $83k after taxes and lets you (a) work from home (b) not bother to work when you don't want to and (c) only requires a few hours a month (which is all they probably did). If the 83k were taxable, it would put them in the top 23% of wage earners in the US, and if you account for taxes on top of their (untaxed) 83k (i.e. payroll and income), you're solidly in the top 15% in take-home.
Trust me, being a criminal is far less time intensive than a steady job at the same wage. Most of these guys would probably struggle to hold down a $22-30,000/yr service position in the "real world".
Besides, now it looks like they'll get free room and board for several years.
I just tried it; there's a flight from NY to Boston for $159 leaving in 2.5 hours, one way. Actually, there are three or four flights at that price today. Some aggregators (like expedia) don't do 6 hrs from departure, but tomorrow there are several flights for less (135 range one way) on several airlines.
Now, that's not a Friday, admittedly, but it is on short notice. Oddly, it's about the same price to fly to Los Angeles from NY as it is to fly to Boston.
What are you doing taking a hamster on vacation?
On second thought, don't answer that.
The claims for the patent are, of course, not really indicated, but since the article itself states
Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass.
I hope that either they've invented something truly novel to do with this effect or they get a big, fat denied letter in the mail from the USPTO.
Cell service is still poor when compared to landlines, for one thing (I'm speaking of quality here, though availability is true during high-volume call times), and a cell phone for everyone in the family is generally more than land service. It's also expensive in many areas to get dry-loop DSL or cable internet service (for me, it's $17-40 more for internet without a land-phone, depending on speed and provider).
Also, with the DNC list, we get maybe 1 call per month which is a telemarketer. My wife got more wrong-number dials on her new cell number in the first 6 months.
Land lines are convenient for several reasons, though some admittedly fall into the old-codger realm. The biggest is a phone that never moves. For those who have ever a) misplaced a cell phone or b) had an emergency in the house (i.e. 911*), there is a good use for them.
*yes, in theory they can get your location from your cell. In most of the US (by area, not population), though, the only information a 911 center is going to get inside of 10 minutes is your address which is linked in their internal database to your phone number. Even e911 isn't universal - or close to it. If you have a stroke or a heart attack, it may make the difference between recovering and being dead. Remember - Not everyone is 20-something and single.
And West Virginia here in the states. I am presuming that "being green" and "clean" with coal means simply removing the toxic chemicals which would normally be spewed into the atmosphere as part of the burning process. I haven't quite figured out how they are claiming to be "carbon neutral." That one must have required some pretty creative accounting.
If we put as much thought into addressing the problem rather than the symptoms, we'd be a good deal further along. And although I'm happy to be paying less at the gas pump these days, a part of me is unhappy that the drop in oil prices will mean that many new technologies which would had become cost-competitive with fossil fuels are going to struggle to become viable.
Seriously...look it up. If you've got only 3 drives it's free, but go ahead and pay for the normal version. Mine works amazingly well; I have about 2.5GB of data including my DVD and CD collections. It runs great, is expandable, and fails more gracefully than RAID5. If one drive fails, you rebuild; if two drive fail you'll only lose one drive worth of data. Bad, but not as bad as losing the whole array. I haven't kept up with the software (it works, therefore I don't mess with it), but there were plans a few months ago to implement a hot-spare option in case of drive failure.
You'll need a separate PC box, but for just a few drives they can be had fairly cheaply.
I have about 2.5TB of home data. Of course, at least 2.2TB of that is backed up on commercially pressed CDs and DVDs, and another 0.2TB is in media without originals (by is available on the net, carefully retained by others with similar tastes in music and video). If my drive fails, I'm looking at several days to recover from the originals, but at least unrecoverable "core" things I have to really worry about backing up can be put on about 4-5 DVD-DLs. I don't of course. I have two external drives I swap between home and the office, each carrying a recent backup of both. I have also uploaded to ADrive, though I have my doubts that they are really a long term, reliable solution.
As for the main array, it's something like RAID4, if I read the unRaid docs properly. Single parity drive; once drive failure gets repaired, two drives failed loses one drive worth of data. Actually, now that I some to think of it, I'm not sure which drive I would lose if I lost two data drives, or if I get a choice. BRB...
None that I can pull up. Typically, a death, to a corporate defendant, costs less than a significant but not life threatening injury. I recall something from a decade ago or so about the cost of a death, on average, being somewhere between $100k and $200k in general litigation. Larger numbers of deaths tend to be purchased by corporations "in bulk" and receive a discount.
My GP post was, indeed, hyperbole, but I am somewhat concerned that if they really did catch the perpertator of 1/3 of the worlds spam, and that he may have turned over that network to someone else, then "advanced interrogation techniques," if not torture by name, would be in the realm of consideration. If it were several hundred children held hostage, would it be reasonable?
Besides, I'd be okay if the torture were simply to make him read and respond to spam emails. One email with a single line of "please remove me from your mailing list," hand typed, for each spam he has ever sent should be sufficient. Naturally, we'd be humane and offer 20 minute breaks every 4 hours for meals, and 7 hours for sleep each night.
A "typical" PC, of which there are none, will likely pull 125-200W at startup. It runs full out, afaik, until power management kicks in. For my laptop, it takes nearly 5 minutes* from power switch to useful (as judged by both disc activity and inability to accept keystrokes in realtime). So 1/12 hr x 125W = 10 watt-hours. That's ten hours in standby if standby is 1W over hibernation/off.
It has a huge benefit to usability, though. Being able to "turn on" the machine and have a working browser over a wireless link in less than 10 seconds is quite a feature. It's the difference between flipping on the machine to check the weather (standby) and knowing that you can probably wait for "weather on the 8s" on the weather channel faster (cold boot).
* Yes, that sucks royally. Thanks, Microsoft, et al., for your inability to load programs efficiently. About 4 minutes of that time is _after_ I login. In comparison, I can come out of hibernation (i.e. - transfer 2GB from the disc back to memory) in about 30 seconds.
Courts have determined that a life has a monetary value, I think in the mid 6 figures. So, if it's worth it to torture to save $500M in lives, it seems logical that the billions of lost dollars to spam would justify torture to get the "keys" of this system back, or to take over and eradicate it.
I say we torture them slowly, excruciatingly, until we have every last bit of knowledge we can get. And once they've give up everything, we go ahead and kill them. Slowly, of course - they are spammers, after all.
Yes, but not for $175. I think the price point is the breakthrough. I've got a TyTn, and certainly wouldn't trade it for this. Actually, I'm not sure what I'd do with this. It's too small for surfing, to big to carry in addition to my phone (even a small, non-pda phone), and the resolution isn't really any good for surfing. It might work as a media player or text-mode remote (telnet), but an iSomehting would probably do better at both those tasks for little extra money, and far less than a 9000 or TyTn (or touch Pro).
There may be a niche market out there somewhere, but at $175 it may be too much for the average geek trinket.
Windows does very little well, but is has some very good, built in features (offline files is a good example - it's not perfect, but for road warriors it is indispensable).
What windows does well has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but rather with momentum. The major, established, and - dare I say - standard applications are written for Windows. While it's all well and good to say that there are alternatives out there, the cost is absolutely astronomical. The cost of the OS software and all the applications combined are a minuscule fraction of the cost of software usage. The bulk of the cost is in training. Most workers know MS software enough to get around, that means no re-training. Start talking about alternatives, like Photoshop or AutoCAD, or Word (yes, Word), and you have not just the retraining costs and temporary productivity loss of thousands upon thousands of dollars per employee but the cost of converting your entire legacy files to the new format or risk incompatibility. When I talk legacy files, I mean templates - macros, custom scripts, actual file templates, etc. In my office alone, discounting the cost of retraining, I probably have $25-50k in files that would have to be converted just to operate. I could easily spend half of my business' annual gross receipts in transition.
So it has very little to do with how well MS does. They can absolutely suck, and they're still cheaper than switching.
I recently got bent over by Getty Images over two thumbnails which were placed on my site (by my designer) about 4 years ago. Actually, she'd used several images on several websites from a compilation CD she though was fully licensed for the use (the language was intentionally misleading). Getty contacted her two years ago and asked for damages for the images they license. She gave them the information she had, and agreed to remove all of the Getty images mentioned immediately. Since she works from several sources for images, she also asked if they would check the rest of the images on her sites. It may sound odd, but to try and match up images to the massive catalog Getty has without automated software is a monumental task. They either didn't reply to her request or didn't find any. Well, I got the $2000 thank you letter in the mail from Getty for two images that weren't scrubbed. They were genuine assholes about it this time, despite the previous discussion and immediate action. FWIW, the actual licensing fee for the images would have been less than $200 total.
Needless to say, I will never use Getty Images, and generally recommend against them due to their tactics. This, however, might have been useful to do a web site scrub for images.
I find it unlikely that the cottage industry which surrounds filesharing of **AA files wouldn't just end up writing a plugin - or standard coding - to flip an innocuous bit on transmission. I don't doubt it would require some thought to ensure that you wouldn't accidentally end up with a codec hiccup, and that it would have to be aware of the underlying file structure, but there are ways around it.
I don't have the link, but in the literature or on the forums somewhere there's a curve of the "efficiency" of the hybrid. The curve is asymptotic at about 110-120mpg, which would be your gasoline-only efficiency. Even with gas prices coming down a bit, the plug-in portion is still a fantastic economic deal compared to gasoline. The 10kWh battery will get you nearly 80 miles at real highway speeds, that's about $0.75 in electricity for me. And compared to the 13mpg I get around town in my F150, it's quite a bonus. Of course, I don't have $30k to spend on one, and if I did they wouldn't sell one to me 'cause I don't live in CA. On top if it, it still wouldn't pay me to buy one for economic reasons - I spend $3000 a year in fuel, and about 25% of the miles really do require a more rugged vehicle. At 6% interest, it would take 40 years to break even.
Being a long time /. reader, I naturally didn't RTFA, but unless the summary misquoted:
The test had two groups, young people who used the Internet, and older people who had never been online.
In doing the Internet search task, there was much greater activity, but only in the Internet-savvy group. (my emphasis)
Looks like only young brains, or young brains who understood the medium, got the extra stimulation. It seems they've got one equation and two variables. By this study, all they've shown is a correlation between young brains using the internet. To do this properly, a group of old,internet savvy people would have to be included to show that there is actually increased activity in the older group. Unfortunately, you'd need to engage these older people in training to do this - those who "naturally" use the internet might already have better habits for brain function. You need to take the older set who has no extra brain activity beyond a text book search and see if you can get them to show enhanced brain activity through computer interaction.
Or you could get them to do crossword puzzles.