I was choosing between a Corolla and a Prius 5 years ago. When I realized that I'd need to drive 100k miles to break even on the Prius due to its higher price, EVEN WITH the better gas mileage, I went with the Corolla. Then, I ended up getting better mileage with the Corolla than advertised, meaning it would be even more than 100k miles before I'd break even. And gas prices dropped back down.
I have no idea how much money I saved by going with a Corolla at this point. It's probably easily in the $5k-$7k range, including the interest saved from a smaller loan and the ability to pay if off earlier. You're spot on with your assessment, I believe.
Except that the US auto industry doesn't do that. If a car starts at $40k, it will stay at $40k. Then, when the auto companies don't sell enough of them, they'll get the government to tax the you and bail them out.
As I posted above, porcelain cracks. Once it does, it's broken for good.
Treat your kid like something that's self-healing and has an immune system, and they're likely to figure out that they can heal from just about anything. I've got some good physical and a few mental scars from childhood. And you know what? I'm far, FAR less neurotic than most of my peers.
Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death?
Yep. It's totally worth it. Ballpark estimate of the number of bike riders in the US: 80,000,000. Ballpark estimate of the number of serious injuries to bike riders: 30,000. (Both based on some quasi-legitimate internet stats.) That's roughly a 0.04% chance of being hospitalized for a serious injury due to bike riding. That's 4/10,000 riders. 90% of those are hit by cars, as well.
If you can get your kid riding somewhere where they aren't likely to be hit by a car, fuck a helmet. If you're riding on busy streets, wear one. Panicking about a freak accident that happened to the friend of your mother is really a major issue in the US today. Just as important an anecdote, my mother did NOT have a friend who died after riding their bike into a pole.
There are plenty of pretty important things to worry about in the world. If we worry every last unlikely thing, we become neurotic, overprotective, and totally unable to function. That's what the parent poster was saying.
When I rode ATVs and snowmobiles, I wore a helmet. When I rode in cars, I wore a seatbelt. Those are places where you're far, far more likely to get hurt than riding a bike. It's hard (not impossible, but hard) to kill yourself doing 20 mph on a bike. If you're around cars, wear a helmet. If you're not, don't. Pick up some scars, get some stitches, cry washing gravel out of road rash, and live life.
You're far more likely to come out of that emotionally healthy than if you are treated like a precious china cup all your life. If that's how you grow up, at the first nick or crack, you're broken.
Can you point me to malware that engages in only spurious network activity? All that I've seen are either mass mailers, which is pretty easy to spot, or ad-based, which by definition need to be visible. I've never seen malware that sent out an email an hour, only when the network was active.
(I've also never heard of one which modifies the blinkenlights on my router and modem. If I'm not using the internet, and they are flickering away, that'd be a problem.)
That's not malware. That's a targeted attack. We're talking about garden-variety, drive-by download, infected porn site malware here. We're talking about flies, you're talking about a unicorn.
Can you point me to some malware that does so little, that it can remain undetected by a fairly savvy computer user?
I'm serious here - there's always a troll in these threads that makes the comment you just made. However, in my experience, I've never run into malware which was "stealth". Its entire purpose is to send mail, pop up ads, and propagate. All of that is damn easy to spot if you're reasonably well versed in how your computer normally runs.
I tend to believe a competent person when they say "zero instances of malware". If you don't have spurious network activity, you don't have pop-up ads, a changed browser, new favorites, etc., is it even malware? What would it be doing?
It's actually pretty complicated - most of a raindrop's life is spent bobbing up and down in a cloud, picking up water vapor. There are times that they are spherical, but I think that most of the time, when they are large enough to fall out of a cloud, they are also large enough to parachute down. It's pretty unlike lead, as you'd have to have it falling through a cloud of lead vapor to have the same sort of environment.
Nope. I just finished an Atmospheric Physics class. They generally come down flattening into a plate, and deforming into a cup due to air resistance. Like this.
It's not. Peer reviewed means that some of your peers reviewed it before it was published. That is, it's passed a bare minimum of screening to make sure it's at least semi-legitimate. This journal might take a well written article from me on the subject. I'm nowhere near a legitimate researcher in this area.
Peer Review is the ability to throw out the completely bogus articles before eyeballs land on them. Technically, could more eyes read this? Sure. Realistically will they? Probably not.
The people who would be interested will turn to the peer reviewed journals first, because they weed out a lot of the cruft. If an article makes it there, it's at least got a minimum QA attached to it.
It's on par with National Enquirer type newspapers vs normal newspapers. Sure, the NE types may get a story semi-correct before anyone else does. But the signal to noise is so low, it's not worth going to if you want real news.
When I tag that picture of the guy laying face down in his own puke "ModernGeek", it gets harder. When someone on Assbook does the same, and you haven't heard of the site, and never go there, it is even worse.
If you look at all the pictures taken of me in the last 6 months, 95% of them are me at parties. Why? Because even though I hit a party a month, at the most, 30 other days a month I don't take a picture of me working diligently, acting professionally, performing open heart surgery or feeding starving orphans. If you look through the photos tagged as me in Facebook, they're almost all party photos, despite my minimal amount of partying.
It's not what YOU put on sites like this - it's what others put.
If there were pictures I only wanted certain friends to see, I wouldn't use facebook to share them.
Yes, but they might use Facebook, or some other social networking site to share those same pictures.
Those of us old and stable with solid friends in good relationships don't have to worry too much about that. But for your average teenager, it's a mire of backstabbing and petty revenges. Add in the rest of the population in messy relationships, with automatic login and openly known passwords, and it's a huge issue.
A touch-screen in a car, at least for the driver, is a terrible idea.
I got to drive a Prius around christmas, for the first time ever. In the dark, in the snow. The touchscreen was AWFUL. The climate controls are all touch-screen based, and as you so insightfully put it:
If you want to cause accidents, put in a touch screen that's stateful, so the driver has to look. Then give it a timeout, so it goes back to the ground state if the driver doesn't give it undivided attention.
That's the Prius' touchscreen! It kept hopping back to the fuel efficiency graphs from the climate controls. As I had to adjust heat, turn on defrost/defog stuff, I kept having to completely take my eyes off a dark, slippery road, and focus on a glowing screen which changed every few seconds.
I was not at ALL impressed with that. It was a horrible, horrible interface.
If you're spending an hour a day in your car, you need to spend that DRIVING, not fucking around on the internet.
If you're traveling at highway speeds, you're a menace to society if you're distracted. If you're stuck in stop-and-go traffic, you're just going to make the gridlock worse if you miss either the gos or the stops.
I don't understand how people can fuck around while driving a car. When I drive, the radio is low, my phone doesn't get answered, I'm not eating, putting on makeup, texting, shaving, or doing any sort of stupid shit. I think that's part of the reason I haven't ever had an accident or a ticket.
I'm definitely not an apple fanboy, owning no apple products, but you're spot on.
Apple pretty much has the tablet foundation in place with the iPod Touch and iPhone. They have fantastic touch sensitivity, all the software already written, a solid underlying OS, the media codecs, browsers, etc.
How the HELL does MS think they can compete with that? What do they possibly have under wraps which comes within 20% of what Apple already has?
I hear "Apple Tablet", and think, "2.5x the size of the iPhone, stylus, handwriting recognition, yeah, it'd be pretty sweet". I hear "Microsoft Tablet" and think...... OS? Not any I can think of would be good for a tablet. Good touch screen? None that I can think of. Good mobile software? None that I can think of.
If MS is seriously considering competing with Apple on a tablet, the only way I can see it happening is if they buy Palm, pump a ton of money into R&D, keep their hands off, and slap their name on it when it's done. Trying to pump out some original hardware and software on a short time-frame is stupid to begin with. "Not in five years" indeed. Trying to do so in less time than that, as a response to a pretty mature line of handhelds which are already approaching tablet functionality is just plain stupid. They'll get eaten alive.
It's things like this that keep my 7-8 year boycott of anything stamped EA alive. I've pretty much forgotten which games started my boycott, but EA keeps giving me examples to work with.
You can play games as long as you can insert a disk and push the power button.
PCs have all sorts of complicated stuff like installing and registering and downloading drivers and hardware requirements and resolutions and OS requirements and stuff. The big advantage of a console is that it's an entertainment appliance.
For a lot of us on slashdot, that's not an advantage. For the vast majority of joe lusers in the world, it is.
I hate to break it to you, but in the next 50-100 years, we're not going to transform the world into that of Mad Max. We're talking about small changes here.
If the climate changes such that it's harder to grow crops in parts of the US, we'll just import them. It will be a bit more expensive, but I'll be able to afford it. That was my point. A couple of degrees warmer during my lifetime isn't a big deal.
If you're a subsistence farmer reliant on one crop, it could destroy your entire society. It's not that they're soft - if their family has farmed for generations on the flood plains, and they become permanently flooded, then what? When you're impoverished, you likely don't have the means to move, nor the insurance to cover your losses, nor the deed to the land you're farming. When it's gone, it's gone. You then pack up and go live in a shanty-town on the outskirts of a city. There are numerous examples of this already. It's just going to get worse for the impoverished.
one of the fundamental physical principles of atmospheric CO2 is that each successive doubling of CO2 has a cumulatively smaller effect on temperature
Can you give me a respectable citation on that?
I agree with ocean levels - that's one of the things I HATE about climate scare-mongers. Insurance will do away with most of the issues in the developed world. Bangladesh is fucked in that regard, as is a bunch of the rest of the developing world. Everyone else will just move inland, when they can't afford to rebuild near the ocean.
As for the feedbacks, "(+- whatever feedbacks may occur)" is the devil's work. It turns out that the feedbacks are an order of magnitude more of an effect than anything else. Positive or negative. Getting those right is the crux of all climate science. More clouds can either cool the earth, or warm it, depending on where they are, how high up there, and the size of the water particles in it. Albedo is potentially the most influential thing in regards to climate change. Add more crops around the equator, and you reflect more sunlight back into space. Remove more ice from the poles, and you absorb more sunlight. Which is a dominant effect?
It's stuff like that which makes climate science very, very hard. Give us 50 more years of data collection and 50 more years of computing increases, and we'll have it down. But in 50 years, what we're doing NOW takes effect. The real question is what that's going to be. By all accounts, the answer is "not good". For us, it will be "eh, an inconvenience before we retire", at the most. The major issue is what happens globally, for future generations.
Yes, there is a ton of uncertainty. It's because climate science is a god damn baby compared to most sciences. Physics has a couple hundred years under it's belt. As does Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, and Engineering. Climate has about a hundred years, at the most. Instrumentation has about that much. Computing, half that much.
I fully recognize that there is a massive amount of uncertainty. However, there is one thing that makes me very concerned:
Our measurements of dissolved CO2 in the oceans are plateauing, while the atmospheric concentrations are increasing exponentially. Looking at the chemistry of dissolved CO2 in seawater, it's clear that we're reaching saturation. As the best estimates are that 50% of the CO2 that we've put into the air ended up in the oceans, if no more goes in, we're in deep shit.
From that standpoint, I tend to assume that our models for the next 100 years underestiamte the amount and effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Combined with the amount of deforestation we're doing, and the loss of albedo near the poles, we're most likely underestimating the effects of global warming.
That said, I'm looking forward to the next 50 years as a gradual warming, and a being a bit more expensive for me. The people in 3rd world countries are going to have some major issues. I've got a solid education, a good skill-set, insurance, and the ability to relocate. It won't be too bad for me.
I'm guessing you don't really want to see the data, and are just being disagreeable, but on the off chance you do, I'll point you to these posts of mine. I'm working on a PhD related to climate change and climate modeling. I've got a pretty good inside look at the process. It's a couple orders of magnitude more complicated than I had assumed going into it. Doom and Gloom? Only if you don't have insurance. If you have that, no worries. If you don't, you're in a fair bit of trouble in the next 50-100 years. Feel free to peruse, and ask me questions - I'll do what I can to answer.
It all depends on your phone, and what you use it for. My phone is a cheap, throw-away device. It cost $15. I have a list of family and friends on it, it makes calls, and it receives them. I average about 2 texts a month, so it has a normal keypad.
In short, it's the mobile version of my land-line with the important numbers scrawled on a sheet of paper and tacked to the wall above it.
Cost? About the same as my old land-line.
Not everyone wants a camera-tablet-netbook-gps-phone. I have good versions of all of those already. When one goes bad, or I want to upgrade one of them, I do.
I feel as you do that the crap hardware that's being put out is a travesty. But the god-damn rip-offs that are cell phone plans are far more onerous. I went pre-paid 8 months ago, and I'm in no way sorry I did. Every 6 months or so I drop $100 on my account. Yes, that's about $200 a year for cell service, for how much I use it. Pick a phone with a data plan, and you're looking at triple that, minimum.
I have good quality, well researched hardware for everything but one piece of equipment: My phone. It 's the most likely to get crushed, lost, dropped in water, etc. Since I'm working with an account with a balance, it doesn't matter what phone I have - when this one dies, I'll hit the mall and have a new one with the same number in a half hour, for all of $15-$20.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, this is Chevy. What did you expect?
I was choosing between a Corolla and a Prius 5 years ago. When I realized that I'd need to drive 100k miles to break even on the Prius due to its higher price, EVEN WITH the better gas mileage, I went with the Corolla. Then, I ended up getting better mileage with the Corolla than advertised, meaning it would be even more than 100k miles before I'd break even. And gas prices dropped back down.
I have no idea how much money I saved by going with a Corolla at this point. It's probably easily in the $5k-$7k range, including the interest saved from a smaller loan and the ability to pay if off earlier. You're spot on with your assessment, I believe.
Except that the US auto industry doesn't do that. If a car starts at $40k, it will stay at $40k. Then, when the auto companies don't sell enough of them, they'll get the government to tax the you and bail them out.
As I posted above, porcelain cracks. Once it does, it's broken for good.
Treat your kid like something that's self-healing and has an immune system, and they're likely to figure out that they can heal from just about anything. I've got some good physical and a few mental scars from childhood. And you know what? I'm far, FAR less neurotic than most of my peers.
Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death?
Yep. It's totally worth it. Ballpark estimate of the number of bike riders in the US: 80,000,000. Ballpark estimate of the number of serious injuries to bike riders: 30,000. (Both based on some quasi-legitimate internet stats.) That's roughly a 0.04% chance of being hospitalized for a serious injury due to bike riding. That's 4/10,000 riders. 90% of those are hit by cars, as well.
If you can get your kid riding somewhere where they aren't likely to be hit by a car, fuck a helmet. If you're riding on busy streets, wear one. Panicking about a freak accident that happened to the friend of your mother is really a major issue in the US today. Just as important an anecdote, my mother did NOT have a friend who died after riding their bike into a pole.
There are plenty of pretty important things to worry about in the world. If we worry every last unlikely thing, we become neurotic, overprotective, and totally unable to function. That's what the parent poster was saying.
When I rode ATVs and snowmobiles, I wore a helmet. When I rode in cars, I wore a seatbelt. Those are places where you're far, far more likely to get hurt than riding a bike. It's hard (not impossible, but hard) to kill yourself doing 20 mph on a bike. If you're around cars, wear a helmet. If you're not, don't. Pick up some scars, get some stitches, cry washing gravel out of road rash, and live life.
You're far more likely to come out of that emotionally healthy than if you are treated like a precious china cup all your life. If that's how you grow up, at the first nick or crack, you're broken.
Can you point me to malware that engages in only spurious network activity? All that I've seen are either mass mailers, which is pretty easy to spot, or ad-based, which by definition need to be visible. I've never seen malware that sent out an email an hour, only when the network was active.
(I've also never heard of one which modifies the blinkenlights on my router and modem. If I'm not using the internet, and they are flickering away, that'd be a problem.)
That's not malware. That's a targeted attack. We're talking about garden-variety, drive-by download, infected porn site malware here. We're talking about flies, you're talking about a unicorn.
Can you point me to some malware that does so little, that it can remain undetected by a fairly savvy computer user?
I'm serious here - there's always a troll in these threads that makes the comment you just made. However, in my experience, I've never run into malware which was "stealth". Its entire purpose is to send mail, pop up ads, and propagate. All of that is damn easy to spot if you're reasonably well versed in how your computer normally runs.
I tend to believe a competent person when they say "zero instances of malware". If you don't have spurious network activity, you don't have pop-up ads, a changed browser, new favorites, etc., is it even malware? What would it be doing?
It's actually pretty complicated - most of a raindrop's life is spent bobbing up and down in a cloud, picking up water vapor. There are times that they are spherical, but I think that most of the time, when they are large enough to fall out of a cloud, they are also large enough to parachute down. It's pretty unlike lead, as you'd have to have it falling through a cloud of lead vapor to have the same sort of environment.
Nope. I just finished an Atmospheric Physics class. They generally come down flattening into a plate, and deforming into a cup due to air resistance. Like this.
It's not. Peer reviewed means that some of your peers reviewed it before it was published. That is, it's passed a bare minimum of screening to make sure it's at least semi-legitimate. This journal might take a well written article from me on the subject. I'm nowhere near a legitimate researcher in this area.
Peer Review is the ability to throw out the completely bogus articles before eyeballs land on them. Technically, could more eyes read this? Sure. Realistically will they? Probably not.
The people who would be interested will turn to the peer reviewed journals first, because they weed out a lot of the cruft. If an article makes it there, it's at least got a minimum QA attached to it.
It's on par with National Enquirer type newspapers vs normal newspapers. Sure, the NE types may get a story semi-correct before anyone else does. But the signal to noise is so low, it's not worth going to if you want real news.
When I tag that picture of the guy laying face down in his own puke "ModernGeek", it gets harder. When someone on Assbook does the same, and you haven't heard of the site, and never go there, it is even worse.
If you look at all the pictures taken of me in the last 6 months, 95% of them are me at parties. Why? Because even though I hit a party a month, at the most, 30 other days a month I don't take a picture of me working diligently, acting professionally, performing open heart surgery or feeding starving orphans. If you look through the photos tagged as me in Facebook, they're almost all party photos, despite my minimal amount of partying.
It's not what YOU put on sites like this - it's what others put.
If there were pictures I only wanted certain friends to see, I wouldn't use facebook to share them.
Yes, but they might use Facebook, or some other social networking site to share those same pictures.
Those of us old and stable with solid friends in good relationships don't have to worry too much about that. But for your average teenager, it's a mire of backstabbing and petty revenges. Add in the rest of the population in messy relationships, with automatic login and openly known passwords, and it's a huge issue.
A touch-screen in a car, at least for the driver, is a terrible idea.
I got to drive a Prius around christmas, for the first time ever. In the dark, in the snow. The touchscreen was AWFUL. The climate controls are all touch-screen based, and as you so insightfully put it:
If you want to cause accidents, put in a touch screen that's stateful, so the driver has to look. Then give it a timeout, so it goes back to the ground state if the driver doesn't give it undivided attention.
That's the Prius' touchscreen! It kept hopping back to the fuel efficiency graphs from the climate controls. As I had to adjust heat, turn on defrost/defog stuff, I kept having to completely take my eyes off a dark, slippery road, and focus on a glowing screen which changed every few seconds.
I was not at ALL impressed with that. It was a horrible, horrible interface.
That doesn't make any god damn sense at all.
If you're spending an hour a day in your car, you need to spend that DRIVING, not fucking around on the internet.
If you're traveling at highway speeds, you're a menace to society if you're distracted. If you're stuck in stop-and-go traffic, you're just going to make the gridlock worse if you miss either the gos or the stops.
I don't understand how people can fuck around while driving a car. When I drive, the radio is low, my phone doesn't get answered, I'm not eating, putting on makeup, texting, shaving, or doing any sort of stupid shit. I think that's part of the reason I haven't ever had an accident or a ticket.
You play Settler's of Catan too, eh?
The $300 card I bought around 2002 had enough driver issues that I've never bought another ATI card since. So you can add at least 7 years onto that.
I'm definitely not an apple fanboy, owning no apple products, but you're spot on.
Apple pretty much has the tablet foundation in place with the iPod Touch and iPhone. They have fantastic touch sensitivity, all the software already written, a solid underlying OS, the media codecs, browsers, etc.
How the HELL does MS think they can compete with that? What do they possibly have under wraps which comes within 20% of what Apple already has?
I hear "Apple Tablet", and think, "2.5x the size of the iPhone, stylus, handwriting recognition, yeah, it'd be pretty sweet". I hear "Microsoft Tablet" and think...... OS? Not any I can think of would be good for a tablet. Good touch screen? None that I can think of. Good mobile software? None that I can think of.
If MS is seriously considering competing with Apple on a tablet, the only way I can see it happening is if they buy Palm, pump a ton of money into R&D, keep their hands off, and slap their name on it when it's done. Trying to pump out some original hardware and software on a short time-frame is stupid to begin with. "Not in five years" indeed. Trying to do so in less time than that, as a response to a pretty mature line of handhelds which are already approaching tablet functionality is just plain stupid. They'll get eaten alive.
It's things like this that keep my 7-8 year boycott of anything stamped EA alive. I've pretty much forgotten which games started my boycott, but EA keeps giving me examples to work with.
You can play games as long as you can insert a disk and push the power button.
PCs have all sorts of complicated stuff like installing and registering and downloading drivers and hardware requirements and resolutions and OS requirements and stuff. The big advantage of a console is that it's an entertainment appliance.
For a lot of us on slashdot, that's not an advantage. For the vast majority of joe lusers in the world, it is.
I hate to break it to you, but in the next 50-100 years, we're not going to transform the world into that of Mad Max. We're talking about small changes here.
If the climate changes such that it's harder to grow crops in parts of the US, we'll just import them. It will be a bit more expensive, but I'll be able to afford it. That was my point. A couple of degrees warmer during my lifetime isn't a big deal.
If you're a subsistence farmer reliant on one crop, it could destroy your entire society. It's not that they're soft - if their family has farmed for generations on the flood plains, and they become permanently flooded, then what? When you're impoverished, you likely don't have the means to move, nor the insurance to cover your losses, nor the deed to the land you're farming. When it's gone, it's gone. You then pack up and go live in a shanty-town on the outskirts of a city. There are numerous examples of this already. It's just going to get worse for the impoverished.
one of the fundamental physical principles of atmospheric CO2 is that each successive doubling of CO2 has a cumulatively smaller effect on temperature
Can you give me a respectable citation on that?
I agree with ocean levels - that's one of the things I HATE about climate scare-mongers. Insurance will do away with most of the issues in the developed world. Bangladesh is fucked in that regard, as is a bunch of the rest of the developing world. Everyone else will just move inland, when they can't afford to rebuild near the ocean.
As for the feedbacks, "(+- whatever feedbacks may occur)" is the devil's work. It turns out that the feedbacks are an order of magnitude more of an effect than anything else. Positive or negative. Getting those right is the crux of all climate science. More clouds can either cool the earth, or warm it, depending on where they are, how high up there, and the size of the water particles in it. Albedo is potentially the most influential thing in regards to climate change. Add more crops around the equator, and you reflect more sunlight back into space. Remove more ice from the poles, and you absorb more sunlight. Which is a dominant effect?
It's stuff like that which makes climate science very, very hard. Give us 50 more years of data collection and 50 more years of computing increases, and we'll have it down. But in 50 years, what we're doing NOW takes effect. The real question is what that's going to be. By all accounts, the answer is "not good". For us, it will be "eh, an inconvenience before we retire", at the most. The major issue is what happens globally, for future generations.
I've been digging into it. I'm required to... :)
Yes, there is a ton of uncertainty. It's because climate science is a god damn baby compared to most sciences. Physics has a couple hundred years under it's belt. As does Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, and Engineering. Climate has about a hundred years, at the most. Instrumentation has about that much. Computing, half that much.
I fully recognize that there is a massive amount of uncertainty. However, there is one thing that makes me very concerned:
Our measurements of dissolved CO2 in the oceans are plateauing, while the atmospheric concentrations are increasing exponentially. Looking at the chemistry of dissolved CO2 in seawater, it's clear that we're reaching saturation. As the best estimates are that 50% of the CO2 that we've put into the air ended up in the oceans, if no more goes in, we're in deep shit.
From that standpoint, I tend to assume that our models for the next 100 years underestiamte the amount and effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Combined with the amount of deforestation we're doing, and the loss of albedo near the poles, we're most likely underestimating the effects of global warming.
That said, I'm looking forward to the next 50 years as a gradual warming, and a being a bit more expensive for me. The people in 3rd world countries are going to have some major issues. I've got a solid education, a good skill-set, insurance, and the ability to relocate. It won't be too bad for me.
I'm guessing you don't really want to see the data, and are just being disagreeable, but on the off chance you do, I'll point you to these posts of mine. I'm working on a PhD related to climate change and climate modeling. I've got a pretty good inside look at the process. It's a couple orders of magnitude more complicated than I had assumed going into it. Doom and Gloom? Only if you don't have insurance. If you have that, no worries. If you don't, you're in a fair bit of trouble in the next 50-100 years. Feel free to peruse, and ask me questions - I'll do what I can to answer.
On Climate Models
Who's screwed
Why Data is hard to work with
BATS oceanographic data
NCAR Reanalysis data
The LEDO data
There you have it - a brief explanation of climate science as I understand it, and links to some data.
It all depends on your phone, and what you use it for. My phone is a cheap, throw-away device. It cost $15. I have a list of family and friends on it, it makes calls, and it receives them. I average about 2 texts a month, so it has a normal keypad.
In short, it's the mobile version of my land-line with the important numbers scrawled on a sheet of paper and tacked to the wall above it.
Cost? About the same as my old land-line.
Not everyone wants a camera-tablet-netbook-gps-phone. I have good versions of all of those already. When one goes bad, or I want to upgrade one of them, I do.
I feel as you do that the crap hardware that's being put out is a travesty. But the god-damn rip-offs that are cell phone plans are far more onerous. I went pre-paid 8 months ago, and I'm in no way sorry I did. Every 6 months or so I drop $100 on my account. Yes, that's about $200 a year for cell service, for how much I use it. Pick a phone with a data plan, and you're looking at triple that, minimum.
I have good quality, well researched hardware for everything but one piece of equipment: My phone. It 's the most likely to get crushed, lost, dropped in water, etc. Since I'm working with an account with a balance, it doesn't matter what phone I have - when this one dies, I'll hit the mall and have a new one with the same number in a half hour, for all of $15-$20.
It's even BETTER than a land line!
I can't. I'm either playing a game, or I'm not. I don't go for games where I die/lose when I'm not playing. That's the realm of crazy folk.