That never works. When I tried to cancel TiVo by phone, their CSR claimed he was only authorized to suspend accounts, not cancel.
Rather than waste my time and theirs, I sent them a certified letter, and they cancelled my service promptly. Just search around for an address for customer service, or failing that, the legal department.
The last time I cancelled Comcast, I had to return the box, which is another definitive way of terminating business with them, in fact I'm pretty sure a click-to-cancel provision is pointless if you have any equipment.
Either way, I look forward to the antics at border crossings when Chinese nationals try to bring Chinese hardware running China OS into the USA. I'm sure there will be no issues there with device searches!
I think this will change the market if it integrates with Google Voice and allows VoIP calls. The unlocked Google phone plus data plan would be totally worth it if I could use it on Wi-Fi at home or my office and only use data on the road.
The FCC and FTC definitely need to step in the the wireless market. Policies like this promote stagnation and high prices.
Why should the customer be bound to a wireless contract when this doesn't apply to landlines? I've said before that wireless contracts are keeping prices artifically high, allowing providers to charge quite similar rates for similar plans, because it is so difficult to switch. If customers were not tied to contracts, the ensuing price war might bring wireless rates down closer to prices that I have seen outside the USA.
Speaking of other countries - Why is the USA one of few countries where I can't just pop the SIM or UICC card out of my handset and put it into a new one? Why did it take intervention by the Chinese government to force device manufacturers to standardize chargers to minimize electronic waste?
It would be nice if they would do something about consolidation in the telecom market. I think it's a little suspicious that, of the four remaining major wireless carriers, there's a significant trend towards uniformity among plan features, hardware, and especially pricing. In fact, one might even suspect price fixing. I remain shocked every time I travel abroad at how little people pay for wireless outside the USA.
All the government would need to do is do away with early termination fees for individual consumers, as well as mandate easy portability by forcing adoption of SIM or UICC cards, so users could quickly switch when a better deal came along.
This is not an example of computers sucking at math.
This is an example of engineers and developers failing to draw up valid requirements, failing to develop to specification, and failing to test against real-world use cases.
Management undoubtedly shares an equal if not greater portion of the blame here. This is typical military-industrial complex, lowest-bidder contractor mentality at work, just another form of corporate welfare if the government doesn't turn around and punish shortfalls like this.
I used to work in sponsored research into new drug entities. There are a couple other reasons that placebo may be becoming more effective, which is a clever way of saying new drugs are less effective.
First, developing a new drug is a very high-risk undertaking. Even if you don't buy the oft-cited US$800million figure for developing a new drug, it's still a tough sell to the MBA's who manage R&D and production operations. None of these managers wants to lose their jobs for missing quarterly numbers, so even though it often takes several years to recognize return on R&D investment, there is little incentive to strike out into something completely new. A number of new drugs I have seen are merely tweaks of existing compounds (e.g. Lexapro) that promise only marginal improvement over the existing compound (Celexa), but extend patent protection over the brand name. Truly novel compounds are being developed, but lately these are very specialized compounds in "hot" fields like cancer.
Speaking of cancer drug development, another reason that placebo effect may seem stronger is that the patients who might benefit the most may be excluded from trials for liability reasons. The Vioxx lawsuit has spooked everyone in the field. When a new compound shows even the possibility of cardiac side effects, it won't even be offered to patients with cardiac complications. It's becoming safer to let them die naturally of leukemia than offer them a novel treament that might risk scuttling a study and possibly an entire project because of a small possiblity of side effects that could expose the sponsoring company to a lawsuit.
I figured that cell phone plans were more expensive because of "free" phones, where the cost is really amortized over the length of your contract. If you keep your phone long enough (e.g. Verizon's "new every two" plans, where you keep your "free" phone for two years on contract), they more than recoup the cost of the hardware. But Americans don't think that way, they only care about the upfront freebie. You likely won't see a serious price drop until we get a SIM-based system with shorter or no contracts, or more pre-paid options, that allows hardware and carrier swapping and thus increased competition; perhaps that's why we don't have such a system here?
It makes plenty of sense economically, but we Americans do not understand amortization of costs. Two examples: cell phones and electric cars. In the former case, people feel they are getting a great deal on a free phone but in fact the carrier is merely splitting the cost over the term of your contract (this is the principal reason for contracts and the early-termination fee, I think). In the latter case, you pay a large sum up front, but consider that gas costs about $4 a gallon, so let's consider a more reasonable example: Chevy Malibu = $20,000 Gas for 36K miles over 3 years (standard lease term) = (36000 / 22-30 mpg) * 4 = $4800 - $6500 Converted Chevy Malibu (aka "Volt") = $27,000 - $30,000 Electricity to power, assuming no fuel and 40 miles / 16 kWh charge = $1440 (= $.10/kWh) So the Volt has a higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), but not by much. Extending this to 8 years, the expected warranty life of the Volt, the TCO becomes: Malibu = $ 32,800 - $37,000 Volt = $ 33,840 So even if fuel prices stay low (they won't), you are only paying a slight premium for the Volt over the life of the vehicle. We can only assume that electric cars will become cheaper over time as well, whereas the gas guzzler really won't, bringing greater price parity. So using the above numbers, is it worth $125/year to cut emissions and dependence on foreign oil? I think so! You can easily save $125/year in energy costs by switching to CFL's, putting better insulation on your hot water heater and in your attic, and making your next file/print server a VIA-based Mini-ITX system.
First, $20B > zero, which is what the government gets now from the drug trade.
Second, as other posters pointed out, it would also reduce police spending by several biilion dollars and allow them to focus on crimes that might actually affect you!
In the past 20 years, we saw a number of surgical and radiologic techniques reach clinical use. When I was doing cancer research, I worked on projects using Gleevec and Zolinza, both now FDA approved. However, both of these drugs currently have very narrow uses; Gleevec is only effective against CML, for example, and Zolinza [aka vorinostat or SAHA] is currently only approved for certain types of leukemia.
I am skeptical of anyone who says they have any 100% Cure For Cancer. As other posters have noted, cancer describes a single overall pathology, uncontrolled growth of cells, that breaks down into many subtypes based on tissue type and further based on the underlying genetic fault. Immunology, in particular, is guilty of following trends (so it's granulocytes this week, huh guys? Have you given up on Tregs, vaccines, etc.?) and pushing for the ultimate single cure.
While it's true that cancer is a disease of the old, and it's increasingly well known that the composition of immune cells changes as you age, I suspect that someone would have noticed by now if it was as simple as transplanting granulocytes. How about a retrospective study of blood transfusion recipients? Shouldn't this population, on average, have a lower incidence of cancer relative to a comparable control population?
I've wondered why they don't put datacenters in old textile industry centers like Lowell, MA and Augusta, GA. Both of these places have canals that once supplied the mills with running water that drove turbines. You could rebuild the turbines to generate electricity and draw water off the canal for cooling. Plus mill towns tend not to be too far away from fiber, if there isn't already enough capacity there.
Or, you could start the reactor with thorium, which is much more abundant, and breed U-233, which isn't stable enough to build into a bomb anyways (it would likely decay before you could shape it properly, let alone try to use it), and not even produce plutonium. But we wouldn't want to do that, wouldn't want evil nuclear tech to proliferate, so we'll likely have to import the tech from India or China where thorium fuel cycle reactors are being developed without any help from the USA.
TMI is located very close to a significant population center: Harrisburg, PA. Go put in Three Mile Island, PA into Google Maps and zoom out a couple clicks.
American Cancer Society and NIH/NCI statistics over the past 29 years failed to show a statistically significant change in cancer rates in the region relative to all of Pennsylvania or all of USA, not even thyroid cancer or leukemia ordinarily associated with radiation exposure.
Nuclear is the best solution we have for now. To say that it's risky overlooks the hazards of coal: mining and moving 1 billion tons of coal, burning it and releasing particulates and heavy metals, acidifying the oceans by increasing atmospheric CO2 load. The relative risk of nuclear is probably overall lower than coal/oil/gas in terms of lives saved by reducing particulate and heavy metal emissions, and environmental benefit from reduced mining activity, reduced CO2 and metal emissions.
The first thing the incoming President will need to do to start the movement is rescind Carter's executive order against fuel reprocessing. Then, drive up the marginal cost of coal mining through changes in tax and land use policy. Third and most necessary, apply a sales tax to fossil and nuclear sources to fund development of the next energy source as well as improving efficiency of current consumers.
Fission is, at best, a stopgap over current problems with energy. We cannot neglect fusion, solar, etc. as well as improving efficiency of major electric consumers such as lighting, data centers, HVAC climate control systems, etc. Hopefully something better will come along in the next 50 years to replace these plants as they retire.
There are a number of biomass-to-fuel technologies in the prototype to production stage, many of which have been featured on Slashdot in the past. Here's a sample:
Changing World Technologies (http://www.changingworldtech.com/) -- high-pressure non-catalytic conversion of biomass to Diesel fuel -- prototype online in Missouri Range Fuels (http://www.rangefuels.com/) -- cellulose -> syngas -> blended alcohol -- proven, 20-million-gallon/year plant under construction in Soperton, GA AlphaKat (http://www.alphakat.de/) -- biomass/plastics -> Diesel fuel via metal-catalyzed high-temp, high-pressure reaction. Plants under construction across Europe MagneGas (http://www.magnegas.com/) -- sewage(!) -> natural gas + surplus heat via electrolytic conversion -- you can buy or rent a working production unit from their web site
I note that all of the above use a high-temperature, high-pressure reaction process to produce fuel. The GE process has the advantage over the first three in that it can handle water better than the first three processes above (IIRC, most Fischer-Tropsch type plants have a low tolerance for water in the reaction vessel, which is bad for biomass conversion unless you spend energy to dry it first. E.g. AlphaKat says their process doesn't work with more than 12% water by weight). The other major advantage is that fermentation typically occurs under more gentle and manageable conditions, i.e. near room temperature, near atmospheric pressure and aqueous rather than solvent/metal-catalyst based. However, the down side of their process is that it's not self-contained and not truly carbon-negative unless you use plant biomass as a feedstock, though if you grew algae in an adjacent tank you could probably use that as your feedstock and harvest CO2 from the air. Actually that would be an ideal solution because you could genetically tune your algae to have a specific composition and tune your fermenter bacteria/yeast to efficiently break down your algae. Hopefully that will be in the next phase of this project. Though we'll probably have to make do with catalyst- and pressure-converted biomass until these guys can perfect their process.
This has been going on for years, from soap operas to your favorite cartoons. If you saw The Biggest Loser with its prominent product placement, you already know NBC is leading the way in advertainment.
Google's newly acquired phone service, GrandCentral.com, was mentioned in the comments. I had not heard of it, but it sounds pretty amazing. It certainly explains Google Android and their bid for RF spectrum!
If you plotted funding versus publications, as suggested, you would find that publications plateau while funding increases, as the article says. This is misleading: a straight plot of funding shows slow but steady increases, but this does not account for inflation. The cost of research, especially in health sciences, is going up faster than the increase in NIH budget. For example, inflation as measured by CPI has outpaced growth in NIH budget for several years now, and the proposed increase for FY 2008 is only about 2% (that is the most optimistic estimate), somewhat less than projected inflation over the same time. One of the major cancer research societies (either ASCO or AACR) published that funding for cancer research has dropped at least 5% since 2000 after accounting for inflation.
I would be most interested in a plot of publications versus funding in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars. I suspect those curves would be the same.
It has lately been discovered that although nicotine is (probably) not a carcinogen in itself, it does promote tumor growth by stimulating nicotine acetylcholine receptors in tumor cells. here's one paper specific to lung cancer. Go search PubMed for "nicotine cancer" for some examples. It's all in the dose used, I suppose.
I don't believe any MS operating system has a built-in power on/off feature like Macs have that allows you to set the machine to turn on and off at specific times. At my workplace -- in fact, at every workplace and university I have ever attended -- computers were left on at full power 24/7. If MS pushed an update that set the default power settings to sleep or hibernate at 8 PM, that would probably help a lot. As far as making it Mac-like, turning back on at a given time, I suppose that would take BIOS support that most PC mainboards don't have. I don't think it would kill people to have to wait for startup in the morning, though: it would give me an opportunity to fix a pot of coffee and sort the junk mail, for example. I suppose you could combine short delays before hibernation with dedicated flash memory for saving the hibernation image for fast start/stop to make hibernation more practical for power saving, but that requires a hardware solution.
As far as being the "greenest" company -- no, this would help but IIRC lighting is a bigger consumer of energy. However, it would be much easier, cheaper and faster to change power settings than to change bulbs and install timers on lights worldwide!
There is a third and perhaps more favorable way: pass legislation to streamline beneficial behavior. For example, make the process for approval of new hydro/nuclear/wind/solar power more streamlined. It's simply easier to build fossil fuel plants; there is less resistance than, say, hydro (because one needs to do extensive environmental impact studies not needed when just releasing CO2!) or nuclear. I say this because taxes and prohibitive legislation are more likely to stifle economic growth. We need to promote solutions, not just punish bad behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it would be more inspiring if the doll was itself programmable? They'd learn a lot more with a Barbie that they programmed to talk or move!
That never works. When I tried to cancel TiVo by phone, their CSR claimed he was only authorized to suspend accounts, not cancel.
Rather than waste my time and theirs, I sent them a certified letter, and they cancelled my service promptly. Just search around for an address for customer service, or failing that, the legal department.
The last time I cancelled Comcast, I had to return the box, which is another definitive way of terminating business with them, in fact I'm pretty sure a click-to-cancel provision is pointless if you have any equipment.
Or Loongson (Dragon Core)...
Either way, I look forward to the antics at border crossings when Chinese nationals try to bring Chinese hardware running China OS into the USA. I'm sure there will be no issues there with device searches!
I think this will change the market if it integrates with Google Voice and allows VoIP calls. The unlocked Google phone plus data plan would be totally worth it if I could use it on Wi-Fi at home or my office and only use data on the road.
The FCC and FTC definitely need to step in the the wireless market. Policies like this promote stagnation and high prices.
Why should the customer be bound to a wireless contract when this doesn't apply to landlines? I've said before that wireless contracts are keeping prices artifically high, allowing providers to charge quite similar rates for similar plans, because it is so difficult to switch. If customers were not tied to contracts, the ensuing price war might bring wireless rates down closer to prices that I have seen outside the USA.
Speaking of other countries - Why is the USA one of few countries where I can't just pop the SIM or UICC card out of my handset and put it into a new one? Why did it take intervention by the Chinese government to force device manufacturers to standardize chargers to minimize electronic waste?
It would be nice if they would do something about consolidation in the telecom market. I think it's a little suspicious that, of the four remaining major wireless carriers, there's a significant trend towards uniformity among plan features, hardware, and especially pricing. In fact, one might even suspect price fixing. I remain shocked every time I travel abroad at how little people pay for wireless outside the USA.
All the government would need to do is do away with early termination fees for individual consumers, as well as mandate easy portability by forcing adoption of SIM or UICC cards, so users could quickly switch when a better deal came along.
This is not an example of computers sucking at math.
This is an example of engineers and developers failing to draw up valid requirements, failing to develop to specification, and failing to test against real-world use cases.
Management undoubtedly shares an equal if not greater portion of the blame here. This is typical military-industrial complex, lowest-bidder contractor mentality at work, just another form of corporate welfare if the government doesn't turn around and punish shortfalls like this.
I used to work in sponsored research into new drug entities. There are a couple other reasons that placebo may be becoming more effective, which is a clever way of saying new drugs are less effective.
First, developing a new drug is a very high-risk undertaking. Even if you don't buy the oft-cited US$800million figure for developing a new drug, it's still a tough sell to the MBA's who manage R&D and production operations. None of these managers wants to lose their jobs for missing quarterly numbers, so even though it often takes several years to recognize return on R&D investment, there is little incentive to strike out into something completely new. A number of new drugs I have seen are merely tweaks of existing compounds (e.g. Lexapro) that promise only marginal improvement over the existing compound (Celexa), but extend patent protection over the brand name. Truly novel compounds are being developed, but lately these are very specialized compounds in "hot" fields like cancer.
Speaking of cancer drug development, another reason that placebo effect may seem stronger is that the patients who might benefit the most may be excluded from trials for liability reasons. The Vioxx lawsuit has spooked everyone in the field. When a new compound shows even the possibility of cardiac side effects, it won't even be offered to patients with cardiac complications. It's becoming safer to let them die naturally of leukemia than offer them a novel treament that might risk scuttling a study and possibly an entire project because of a small possiblity of side effects that could expose the sponsoring company to a lawsuit.
I figured that cell phone plans were more expensive because of "free" phones, where the cost is really amortized over the length of your contract. If you keep your phone long enough (e.g. Verizon's "new every two" plans, where you keep your "free" phone for two years on contract), they more than recoup the cost of the hardware. But Americans don't think that way, they only care about the upfront freebie. You likely won't see a serious price drop until we get a SIM-based system with shorter or no contracts, or more pre-paid options, that allows hardware and carrier swapping and thus increased competition; perhaps that's why we don't have such a system here?
It makes plenty of sense economically, but we Americans do not understand amortization of costs. Two examples: cell phones and electric cars. In the former case, people feel they are getting a great deal on a free phone but in fact the carrier is merely splitting the cost over the term of your contract (this is the principal reason for contracts and the early-termination fee, I think). In the latter case, you pay a large sum up front, but consider that gas costs about $4 a gallon, so let's consider a more reasonable example:
Chevy Malibu = $20,000
Gas for 36K miles over 3 years (standard lease term) = (36000 / 22-30 mpg) * 4 = $4800 - $6500
Converted Chevy Malibu (aka "Volt") = $27,000 - $30,000
Electricity to power, assuming no fuel and 40 miles / 16 kWh charge = $1440 (= $.10/kWh)
So the Volt has a higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), but not by much. Extending this to 8 years, the expected warranty life of the Volt, the TCO becomes:
Malibu = $ 32,800 - $37,000
Volt = $ 33,840
So even if fuel prices stay low (they won't), you are only paying a slight premium for the Volt over the life of the vehicle. We can only assume that electric cars will become cheaper over time as well, whereas the gas guzzler really won't, bringing greater price parity.
So using the above numbers, is it worth $125/year to cut emissions and dependence on foreign oil? I think so! You can easily save $125/year in energy costs by switching to CFL's, putting better insulation on your hot water heater and in your attic, and making your next file/print server a VIA-based Mini-ITX system.
First, $20B > zero, which is what the government gets now from the drug trade.
Second, as other posters pointed out, it would also reduce police spending by several biilion dollars and allow them to focus on crimes that might actually affect you!
Vetrolium is made out of people??? That explains why they're calling it a "green" fuel.
In the past 20 years, we saw a number of surgical and radiologic techniques reach clinical use. When I was doing cancer research, I worked on projects using Gleevec and Zolinza, both now FDA approved. However, both of these drugs currently have very narrow uses; Gleevec is only effective against CML, for example, and Zolinza [aka vorinostat or SAHA] is currently only approved for certain types of leukemia.
I am skeptical of anyone who says they have any 100% Cure For Cancer. As other posters have noted, cancer describes a single overall pathology, uncontrolled growth of cells, that breaks down into many subtypes based on tissue type and further based on the underlying genetic fault. Immunology, in particular, is guilty of following trends (so it's granulocytes this week, huh guys? Have you given up on Tregs, vaccines, etc.?) and pushing for the ultimate single cure.
While it's true that cancer is a disease of the old, and it's increasingly well known that the composition of immune cells changes as you age, I suspect that someone would have noticed by now if it was as simple as transplanting granulocytes. How about a retrospective study of blood transfusion recipients? Shouldn't this population, on average, have a lower incidence of cancer relative to a comparable control population?
I've wondered why they don't put datacenters in old textile industry centers like Lowell, MA and Augusta, GA. Both of these places have canals that once supplied the mills with running water that drove turbines. You could rebuild the turbines to generate electricity and draw water off the canal for cooling. Plus mill towns tend not to be too far away from fiber, if there isn't already enough capacity there.
If someone has a couple million in venture capital to spare, I would like to attempt a project like this; I used to live in Augusta, and they already successfully converted an old mill building into a self-sustaining (using water power) small business center and lofts. The neighboring Sibley Mill and King Mill properties are just waiting for new tenants.
Or, you could start the reactor with thorium, which is much more abundant, and breed U-233, which isn't stable enough to build into a bomb anyways (it would likely decay before you could shape it properly, let alone try to use it), and not even produce plutonium. But we wouldn't want to do that, wouldn't want evil nuclear tech to proliferate, so we'll likely have to import the tech from India or China where thorium fuel cycle reactors are being developed without any help from the USA.
TMI is located very close to a significant population center: Harrisburg, PA. Go put in Three Mile Island, PA into Google Maps and zoom out a couple clicks.
American Cancer Society and NIH/NCI statistics over the past 29 years failed to show a statistically significant change in cancer rates in the region relative to all of Pennsylvania or all of USA, not even thyroid cancer or leukemia ordinarily associated with radiation exposure.
Nuclear is the best solution we have for now. To say that it's risky overlooks the hazards of coal: mining and moving 1 billion tons of coal, burning it and releasing particulates and heavy metals, acidifying the oceans by increasing atmospheric CO2 load. The relative risk of nuclear is probably overall lower than coal/oil/gas in terms of lives saved by reducing particulate and heavy metal emissions, and environmental benefit from reduced mining activity, reduced CO2 and metal emissions.
The first thing the incoming President will need to do to start the movement is rescind Carter's executive order against fuel reprocessing. Then, drive up the marginal cost of coal mining through changes in tax and land use policy. Third and most necessary, apply a sales tax to fossil and nuclear sources to fund development of the next energy source as well as improving efficiency of current consumers.
Fission is, at best, a stopgap over current problems with energy. We cannot neglect fusion, solar, etc. as well as improving efficiency of major electric consumers such as lighting, data centers, HVAC climate control systems, etc. Hopefully something better will come along in the next 50 years to replace these plants as they retire.
There are a number of biomass-to-fuel technologies in the prototype to production stage, many of which have been featured on Slashdot in the past. Here's a sample:
Changing World Technologies (http://www.changingworldtech.com/) -- high-pressure non-catalytic conversion of biomass to Diesel fuel -- prototype online in Missouri
Range Fuels (http://www.rangefuels.com/) -- cellulose -> syngas -> blended alcohol -- proven, 20-million-gallon/year plant under construction in Soperton, GA
AlphaKat (http://www.alphakat.de/) -- biomass/plastics -> Diesel fuel via metal-catalyzed high-temp, high-pressure reaction. Plants under construction across Europe
MagneGas (http://www.magnegas.com/) -- sewage(!) -> natural gas + surplus heat via electrolytic conversion -- you can buy or rent a working production unit from their web site
I note that all of the above use a high-temperature, high-pressure reaction process to produce fuel. The GE process has the advantage over the first three in that it can handle water better than the first three processes above (IIRC, most Fischer-Tropsch type plants have a low tolerance for water in the reaction vessel, which is bad for biomass conversion unless you spend energy to dry it first. E.g. AlphaKat says their process doesn't work with more than 12% water by weight). The other major advantage is that fermentation typically occurs under more gentle and manageable conditions, i.e. near room temperature, near atmospheric pressure and aqueous rather than solvent/metal-catalyst based. However, the down side of their process is that it's not self-contained and not truly carbon-negative unless you use plant biomass as a feedstock, though if you grew algae in an adjacent tank you could probably use that as your feedstock and harvest CO2 from the air. Actually that would be an ideal solution because you could genetically tune your algae to have a specific composition and tune your fermenter bacteria/yeast to efficiently break down your algae. Hopefully that will be in the next phase of this project. Though we'll probably have to make do with catalyst- and pressure-converted biomass until these guys can perfect their process.
This has been going on for years, from soap operas to your favorite cartoons. If you saw The Biggest Loser with its prominent product placement, you already know NBC is leading the way in advertainment.
Google's newly acquired phone service, GrandCentral.com, was mentioned in the comments. I had not heard of it, but it sounds pretty amazing. It certainly explains Google Android and their bid for RF spectrum!
If you plotted funding versus publications, as suggested, you would find that publications plateau while funding increases, as the article says. This is misleading: a straight plot of funding shows slow but steady increases, but this does not account for inflation. The cost of research, especially in health sciences, is going up faster than the increase in NIH budget. For example, inflation as measured by CPI has outpaced growth in NIH budget for several years now, and the proposed increase for FY 2008 is only about 2% (that is the most optimistic estimate), somewhat less than projected inflation over the same time. One of the major cancer research societies (either ASCO or AACR) published that funding for cancer research has dropped at least 5% since 2000 after accounting for inflation.
I would be most interested in a plot of publications versus funding in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars. I suspect those curves would be the same.
It has lately been discovered that although nicotine is (probably) not a carcinogen in itself, it does promote tumor growth by stimulating nicotine acetylcholine receptors in tumor cells. here's one paper specific to lung cancer. Go search PubMed for "nicotine cancer" for some examples. It's all in the dose used, I suppose.
I don't believe any MS operating system has a built-in power on/off feature like Macs have that allows you to set the machine to turn on and off at specific times. At my workplace -- in fact, at every workplace and university I have ever attended -- computers were left on at full power 24/7. If MS pushed an update that set the default power settings to sleep or hibernate at 8 PM, that would probably help a lot. As far as making it Mac-like, turning back on at a given time, I suppose that would take BIOS support that most PC mainboards don't have. I don't think it would kill people to have to wait for startup in the morning, though: it would give me an opportunity to fix a pot of coffee and sort the junk mail, for example. I suppose you could combine short delays before hibernation with dedicated flash memory for saving the hibernation image for fast start/stop to make hibernation more practical for power saving, but that requires a hardware solution.
As far as being the "greenest" company -- no, this would help but IIRC lighting is a bigger consumer of energy. However, it would be much easier, cheaper and faster to change power settings than to change bulbs and install timers on lights worldwide!
There is a third and perhaps more favorable way: pass legislation to streamline beneficial behavior. For example, make the process for approval of new hydro/nuclear/wind/solar power more streamlined. It's simply easier to build fossil fuel plants; there is less resistance than, say, hydro (because one needs to do extensive environmental impact studies not needed when just releasing CO2!) or nuclear. I say this because taxes and prohibitive legislation are more likely to stifle economic growth. We need to promote solutions, not just punish bad behavior.
It's a great idea, until the girls start throwing themselves at you, blocking the panels and crashing your cluster. New tech is so fraught with peril!