The worst netbook is better than the best tablet. Yet the tablet market survives. Lame.:(
People get boners over amazingly awful garbage, but make that same machine better by putting a keyboard on it so that a simple task doesn't have to be a tedious time-wasting exercise in touchscreen typing, and then also put a non-toy, more capable OS (GNU/Linux instead of Android, or Mac OS X instead of iOS) on it, and suddenly it's not sexy anymore.
WTF is wrong with you perverts? You see a sheep and a hot babe and all you can say is "baa-aa-aahh! c'm'ere sexy baa-aa-aa-aah!" Gene Wilder's character in that Woody Allen movie was meant to be absurd, not your role model. Fuckwits.
What chance do you really think a consumer-legal weapon will have against the US armed forces?
Very little. That's an argument against the three-shot weapon idea, no?
If simulations (and common sense) show that in Government-vs-People, People will lose, then do something to the power of one or both sides. Repeat until projected outcome is that People will win.
What's funny is that (over-simplifying) Democrats propose making the People side weaker in that contest ("gun control"), and Republicans propose making the Government side stronger (strong "defense"). I think both of these folks totally misinterpreted my "do something to the power of one or both sides" suggestion, above. *facepalm* It's almost as though they're not on our side.
I have friends on FB who appear to think that our current political situation is just as dire as in the Civil War
Those people aren't arguing over anything important right now, but it should be noted that even the conflicts of the 1860s or 1770s totally pale in comparison to what happened in Germany and USSR in the 20th Century. Millions of people truly ended up in their graves at the hands of their own govenments. Seriously amazing shit can happen in real life, and you don't need fictional works to trigger your imagination. (There are so many ways to be a deluded paranoid wackjob, but knowing real history isn't one of them.)
So they're wrong, but maybe they're wrong because they're thinking so small; incited by the media into pretending the minor divisions among Republicrats are a big deal. What you might wanna think about, though, is whether their wrongness is worse or better than the everything-is-fine-let's-not-get-excited outlook. It's hard to imagine serious shit going down, but might your imagination (and mine!) have also failed, in the 1920s, to predict what ended up actually happening?
It couldn't happen here, or it couldn't happen in modern times. It couldn't happen, because.. umm.. because.. uh.. er.. uh.. because human nature has ch--.. no, wait.. because we'd never be fooled.. no, that ain't it.. because...?
I'd go easy on those fellas. Call 'em out on their bullshit, ok, but even if when a nut stockpiles for all the wrong reasons, it isn't any worse than what all of us routinely accept and do. We all send money to Washington, where we know billions of dollars are also spent to increase weapon stockpiles orders of magnitude larger, which are just as devoid of any sensible purpose as a nutjob survivalist's gun collection. If "gun nuts" are nuts, then what are we, the people who are arming our government?
The people who keep giving money to Apple, even after they claim to be angry.
The public is so angry at Apple, that they will severely punish Apple by suffocating them in a torrent of money. Let this vicious brutality be a lesson to others who may be contemplating evil.
When the amendment was written, what percentage of firearms were capable of holding more than three shots?
At that time, citizenry had about the same percentage of more-than-three-shot weapons, as the government did. I think both sides had somewhere around zero.
I believe the situation has changed since then, though. Perhaps I am mistaken. If you can assure me the 2012 government doesn't have any weapons with more than three shots, and doesn't have the capacity to quickly obtain more-than-three-shot weapons, I'll give the citizens-should-only-have-three-shots idea a second look.
How is it in my best interests for someone who's 4'11" to be able to attack me with equal force?
It's not. When some early hominid invented the idea of the club (and as the technological progression continued toward laser blasters) you started to lose your advantage. That's a done deal, and no law can ever change it. Sorry. You may, in fact, be attacked by a 4'11" person armed with a weapon some day, and if you are unarmed, the 4'11" person will have the advantage. Sucks to be you.
Gun laws are about whether or not (should you choose to adopt a strategy of opposing that 4'11" attacker with similar force, making a slightly better contest rather than you automatically losing) you will live in a constant state of fear from your government, considered an outlaw.
When the village idiot says "get rid of all the guns," we can all laugh him off, just as though he had said, "everyone should have a pony."
When a politician says "get rid of all the guns," he's actually seriously talking about attacking you, should you ever be detected having a gun.
I've never encountered a situation, and am at a loss for an actual, private-citizen, real-world situation, where more than 3 rounds would be necessary except in the case of an incompetent shooter (i.e. poor aim).
Of course you've never had to overthrow the government, which may involve you needing to kill twenty federal troops in one bloody day. If there had been a revolution, I would have read about it in the news. That doesn't mean you go around repealing amendments, though. You have the amendment, in order to inform/bluff everyone into knowing that twenty federal troops will die by your hand if they attack the states too directly, which strangely has the effect of the conflict never happening.
Remember boys and girls, in bitcoin rainbow and unicorn land, deflation is good.
People have wanted deflation (or at least lack of inflation) since long before bitcoin even existed.
Take away bitcoin, and everyone who uses money will still want whatever money they use, to stop being continuously taxed. They'll still see fiat currency as a "necessary evil" at best and many people will see it as an unnecessary one. The unicorns live in the land where governments can magically create FREE MONEY with no negative consequences.
I mean sure a recession is just another word for deflation (it really is)
Good grief, at least go look up what big words mean, before you use them. I assume you're trying to regurgitate some dogma someone told you, but it sounds like you mis-memorized the quotation or something. You sound like a creationist who got his Genesis and Acts mixed up.
He probably just assumed the governments were using blacklists, so adding a letter to his name would get him through. If he had thought beyond AV-customer-mentality for a moment, he would have realized that anyone with half a brain uses whitelists instead.
The rest of us demand more control, more chaos, and more competition.
No, the vast majority of Android users are people buying it because the phones are cheap.
You prefixed it with the word no, but then you agreed with what he said. The very people you just described, are showing their demand for control, chaos, and competition. Take away the control, chaos or competition that they demanded, and they wouldn't be able to have the phone that they ended up choosing.
If you don't understand this, then try looking at it from the other side. Imagine you liked iOS, walled-garden and all. You can't have an iOS phone, without settling for a very limited and homogenous set of phones (virtually no diversity at all) from one single manufacturer. You're getting an iPhone, period, whether that's what you want or not. Even worse, if iPhones happen to be expensive, then you can't have a cheap one.
Most people, when faced with that situation, say no to Apple, and their wallets vote for control, chaos and competition instead.
Fortunately for Apple, not everyone says no. There's a lot of money to be made in the "subservience, order and stagnation" market.;-)
As far as I know, the World Bank people have claimed warming will damage some economies. I have no idea what politics they have advocated, if any. I haven't kept up with that.
My point is that AFAIK nobody is calling the World Bank people "global warming deniers." Actually my real point is that the World Bank can advocate ANY political position, and still nobody is going to call them deniers.
The World Bank could say
"All governments should point guns at religious conservatives heads and force them to become same-sex bigamists, in order to prevent global warming. And let's force everyone to have abortions against their will too. This is the only way to save the planet!"
"Let it all burn. We are delighted that the value of farmlands are going to change, some for the better and some for the worse, and our speculative investors have already positioned themselves to make a killing. Governments should be forcefully prohibited from doing anything to change this situation, and we recommend that heads of state be assassinated if the seek to reduce CO2 levels."
Any other extremists idea
and no matter how crazy the idea is, they won't be called deniers for their policies. It's only if they say "the tables of measurements are fake, despite how many differing measurements there are -- it's all a diabolical conspiracy, the greatest in human history!" that they'll get labeled as deniers.
Some people (read the comment I was replying to!) have claimed that they'll be called deniers based on their politics. I don't believe that. If I'm wrong (and yes, I could be) it will be because some moron yells "denier" without knowing what that word means.
It starts with observations of global climate, and ends up with the undeniable and unquestionable conclusion that First-World governments must do whatever it takes to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in their countries. The entire chain of reasoning from observation to required government policy has been so sanctified that any one who questions or doubts even the tiniest aspect of it is labeled a "denier", implying that they are just as bad or worse than those who deny the Holucaust.
[citation needed] I think the viewpoint of "Yes, the numbers show warming, and no, government policy should not address the problem," is somewhat rare in itself. (But maybe I'm wrong about that.) And I have never heard of anyone who says that, being labeled as a denier. Not that it couldn't happen, but..
Wait, you're saying that you have not only witnessed this 1) rare position of acknowledging the measurements 2) seen the acknowledgement mislabeled as denial 3) seen the aforementioned mislabeling done repeatedly and consistently as a pattern? (I'm trying to rule out fringe crackpots.)
You've got three pretty small probabilities being multiplied by one another. I can believe the first: an anarchist could hold that position. Maybe some libertarians, if they get over that whole someone-elses-pollution-is-a-form-of-force-against-me thing. But step 2 is something truly bizarre (i.e. crazy homeless guy territory, or maybe extreme illiteracy where they don't know the meaning of "to deny" and lack capacity to use a dictionary) and step 3 would require an organized religion of some kind. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would sure be interesting and amusing. You really have seen it? Has anyone ever written that somewhere on the Internet?
It's very puzzling that scientist's predictions of how an imperfectly-understood chaotic system will behave in the future, and recommendations for one particular policy approach to dealing with it, have achieved the inerrant status of Holy Writ, so that those who question any aspect of it must be burned at the stake.
Even literally burning ideological opponents at the stake over this, would be a less surprising reaction than the scenario you described in your first paragraph, where such opponents are being labeled as deniers.
Probably the same reason they were a failure in the WordPerfect and 1-2-3 and DR-DOS and Coca Cola and Toyota Camry and Boston Red Sox businesses: because Microsoft never made those products.
So long as there are accompanying moratoria on new copyright bills, perhaps the/. crowd can get behind it.
Not me. We all need at least one new copyright bill: add an exemption to DMCA's anti-circumvention prohibition (and the associated manufacture/sale/etc part), to legalize non-copyright-infringing uses.
Users need it, hardware and software industry needs it, and even the entertainment industry needs it (to increase media sales).
Actually we need the whole anti-circumvention garbage totally repealed, but I'm putting the above narrow exemption forth as a compromise. I'd appreciate it if the Slashdot crowd would refrain from explaining that my "narrow" exemption is essentially the same as repealing the whole useless mess.;-)
Oh, Bezos. Just a few years before you formed your company, did not Intel show that you should make up a new word, rather than use a number, or as anyone would assume was clearly implied, use an existing word?
And it's the name of a place? I can cut you some slack on that; nobody ever knows for sure that they'll ever hit the big time and become a world power. Nevertheless, you made it. Good for you, but there are consequences.
Now you must face a difficult decision: are you going to rename your company to Amazathalon, or are you going to sit on your laurels while I take the name and form a new business to eat your lunch?
It is not the patent holders responsibility to publicize their patents.
It just occurred to me: might this be the very thing which is needed in order to repair the patent system? What if patent enforcement did require that the patent holder could demonstrate that they put great effort/expense into publicity?
Can anyone think of a downside? Sure, it's an expense and no one wants invention to be expensive, but it's got to be far less expense than independent parallel patent searches by the thousands/millions of people who work in an industry. And in addition to the orders of magnitude reduction in the number of people who do the work, there's also the fact that hiring the advertising media is far cheaper than hiring patent lawyers.
So on the whole, this would reduce the expenses that patents incur on an industry.
It wold work, too. Think back to the LZW patent for example (maybe this is a bad example, because it's a software patent, but bear with me). People used it in GIF because they didn't know better. Then Unisys wrote that letter to DDJ, and soon everyone knew and many people really did stop infringing the patent.
After that, someone might have still had excuses to keep using LZW, but ignorance really wasn't a credible excuse anymore. Publicity worked.
I've never seen that, but if it were to ever happen around here, then the car would need a second computer. The nice thing is that whatever games the cops are playing, they'd have really short ping times when they played with each other.
My recollection is that it Gopher in 1985 doesn't count. Gopher (and FTP and anything else with a schema) became part of the web (but not retroactively), after there was a web for it to be part of, and that started with HTTP, and more importantly: web browsers. If you were using a dedicated gopher client rather than a web browser (and you were) then you weren't using the web. You were just on the Internet, doing things that slightly resemble looking at web pages.
You assume one watt of electric being converted to heat is the same as one watt converted by a heater.
I think he's assuming that one dollar of electric is converted to as much heat as one dollar of something else.
When that's true, then CPUs are good heaters.
When that's false, then CPUs are second-rate heaters but OTOH you get some other kind of work out of them at that same time they heat, so maybe they're still ok. Or maybe they're not, depending on the cost difference and the value of the work.
And when it's irrelevant because it's warm enough that you don't want a heater of any kind, then we prefer to not mention the subject to our wives.
Interesting. Yet Another parallel with healthcare (where people don't shop around for best-bang-for-buck services; they just file a claim and are utterly divorced from the cost of things).
Money is not the only criteria, but it is nevertheless a very significant one and happens to be very topic at hand. If auditors could find the theft/waste/whateverishappening and get the cost down by a factor of ten, then you could quintuple the expendatures (oh no, now the cost has been merely halved) and keep the 20 students per class instead of going to 100. Or find some sweet-spot compromise like 40.
We need someone going over it with a fine-tuned comb, over-focusing on "just money" and maybe sometimes suggesting asinine things like switching to huge classes. Asinine suggestions are ok because you don't have to take all their advice. But somewhere in their advice, right next to "switch to 100 students per class" you're going to find something like "stop using gold plates (which keep disappearing) for the complimentary caviar which is charter-flown in from the Black Sea each day and served in the instructors' lounge."
I think looking at that sort of thing purely in terms of money, may be very enlightening. Sure, someone is going to say it's not just about the money, and that through the caviar they are getting insight into the causes of the French Revolution which is discussed in their history class. They're right. But I bet we can do just as good a job enlightning that instructor buy buying them a $20 book. Or if I'm wrong that the book is just as good, at least we'd have more information with which to get the strategy debate going. Maybe gold-plated plates with a steel core, which the users need to sign out? Maybe domestic caviar, or a 2 oz per day limit to each instructor? Who knows, you might publish the report and then a bunch of instructors will step forth and say "WTF? I never saw any caviar in the lounge, and the plates are plastic," and then you look at whose signature is on the PO for the gold plates and caviar.
To get there and explain how thousands of people can spend thousands of dollars per person to get so few man-hours of return labor (teaching), we need the auditors. You talk about 20 students like that's a small class, but the instructor could be hired at LAWYER RATES and even then, once you divide it by twenty, you get something quite affordable. And yet the education costs far far more than that. And I haven't heard of any instructors who say they're making lawyer money. Something is broken.
Slashdot Mirror
The worst netbook is better than the best tablet. Yet the tablet market survives. Lame. :(
People get boners over amazingly awful garbage, but make that same machine better by putting a keyboard on it so that a simple task doesn't have to be a tedious time-wasting exercise in touchscreen typing, and then also put a non-toy, more capable OS (GNU/Linux instead of Android, or Mac OS X instead of iOS) on it, and suddenly it's not sexy anymore.
WTF is wrong with you perverts? You see a sheep and a hot babe and all you can say is "baa-aa-aahh! c'm'ere sexy baa-aa-aa-aah!" Gene Wilder's character in that Woody Allen movie was meant to be absurd, not your role model. Fuckwits.
Very little. That's an argument against the three-shot weapon idea, no?
If simulations (and common sense) show that in Government-vs-People, People will lose, then do something to the power of one or both sides. Repeat until projected outcome is that People will win.
What's funny is that (over-simplifying) Democrats propose making the People side weaker in that contest ("gun control"), and Republicans propose making the Government side stronger (strong "defense"). I think both of these folks totally misinterpreted my "do something to the power of one or both sides" suggestion, above. *facepalm* It's almost as though they're not on our side.
Those people aren't arguing over anything important right now, but it should be noted that even the conflicts of the 1860s or 1770s totally pale in comparison to what happened in Germany and USSR in the 20th Century. Millions of people truly ended up in their graves at the hands of their own govenments. Seriously amazing shit can happen in real life, and you don't need fictional works to trigger your imagination. (There are so many ways to be a deluded paranoid wackjob, but knowing real history isn't one of them.)
So they're wrong, but maybe they're wrong because they're thinking so small; incited by the media into pretending the minor divisions among Republicrats are a big deal. What you might wanna think about, though, is whether their wrongness is worse or better than the everything-is-fine-let's-not-get-excited outlook. It's hard to imagine serious shit going down, but might your imagination (and mine!) have also failed, in the 1920s, to predict what ended up actually happening?
It couldn't happen here, or it couldn't happen in modern times. It couldn't happen, because .. umm .. because .. uh .. er .. uh .. because human nature has ch-- .. no, wait .. because we'd never be fooled .. no, that ain't it .. because ...?
I'd go easy on those fellas. Call 'em out on their bullshit, ok, but even if when a nut stockpiles for all the wrong reasons, it isn't any worse than what all of us routinely accept and do. We all send money to Washington, where we know billions of dollars are also spent to increase weapon stockpiles orders of magnitude larger, which are just as devoid of any sensible purpose as a nutjob survivalist's gun collection. If "gun nuts" are nuts, then what are we, the people who are arming our government?
Dear Apple,
Fuck You!
Yours Sincerely,
The people who keep giving money to Apple, even after they claim to be angry.
The public is so angry at Apple, that they will severely punish Apple by suffocating them in a torrent of money. Let this vicious brutality be a lesson to others who may be contemplating evil.
At that time, citizenry had about the same percentage of more-than-three-shot weapons, as the government did. I think both sides had somewhere around zero.
I believe the situation has changed since then, though. Perhaps I am mistaken. If you can assure me the 2012 government doesn't have any weapons with more than three shots, and doesn't have the capacity to quickly obtain more-than-three-shot weapons, I'll give the citizens-should-only-have-three-shots idea a second look.
It's not. When some early hominid invented the idea of the club (and as the technological progression continued toward laser blasters) you started to lose your advantage. That's a done deal, and no law can ever change it. Sorry. You may, in fact, be attacked by a 4'11" person armed with a weapon some day, and if you are unarmed, the 4'11" person will have the advantage. Sucks to be you.
Gun laws are about whether or not (should you choose to adopt a strategy of opposing that 4'11" attacker with similar force, making a slightly better contest rather than you automatically losing) you will live in a constant state of fear from your government, considered an outlaw.
When the village idiot says "get rid of all the guns," we can all laugh him off, just as though he had said, "everyone should have a pony."
When a politician says "get rid of all the guns," he's actually seriously talking about attacking you, should you ever be detected having a gun.
Of course you've never had to overthrow the government, which may involve you needing to kill twenty federal troops in one bloody day. If there had been a revolution, I would have read about it in the news. That doesn't mean you go around repealing amendments, though. You have the amendment, in order to inform/bluff everyone into knowing that twenty federal troops will die by your hand if they attack the states too directly, which strangely has the effect of the conflict never happening.
You have to become your enemy to defeat him, huh?
People have wanted deflation (or at least lack of inflation) since long before bitcoin even existed.
Take away bitcoin, and everyone who uses money will still want whatever money they use, to stop being continuously taxed. They'll still see fiat currency as a "necessary evil" at best and many people will see it as an unnecessary one. The unicorns live in the land where governments can magically create FREE MONEY with no negative consequences.
Good grief, at least go look up what big words mean, before you use them. I assume you're trying to regurgitate some dogma someone told you, but it sounds like you mis-memorized the quotation or something. You sound like a creationist who got his Genesis and Acts mixed up.
He probably just assumed the governments were using blacklists, so adding a letter to his name would get him through. If he had thought beyond AV-customer-mentality for a moment, he would have realized that anyone with half a brain uses whitelists instead.
You prefixed it with the word no, but then you agreed with what he said. The very people you just described, are showing their demand for control, chaos, and competition. Take away the control, chaos or competition that they demanded, and they wouldn't be able to have the phone that they ended up choosing.
If you don't understand this, then try looking at it from the other side. Imagine you liked iOS, walled-garden and all. You can't have an iOS phone, without settling for a very limited and homogenous set of phones (virtually no diversity at all) from one single manufacturer. You're getting an iPhone, period, whether that's what you want or not. Even worse, if iPhones happen to be expensive, then you can't have a cheap one.
Most people, when faced with that situation, say no to Apple, and their wallets vote for control, chaos and competition instead.
Fortunately for Apple, not everyone says no. There's a lot of money to be made in the "subservience, order and stagnation" market. ;-)
As far as I know, the World Bank people have claimed warming will damage some economies. I have no idea what politics they have advocated, if any. I haven't kept up with that.
My point is that AFAIK nobody is calling the World Bank people "global warming deniers." Actually my real point is that the World Bank can advocate ANY political position, and still nobody is going to call them deniers.
The World Bank could say
and no matter how crazy the idea is, they won't be called deniers for their policies. It's only if they say "the tables of measurements are fake, despite how many differing measurements there are -- it's all a diabolical conspiracy, the greatest in human history!" that they'll get labeled as deniers.
Some people (read the comment I was replying to!) have claimed that they'll be called deniers based on their politics. I don't believe that. If I'm wrong (and yes, I could be) it will be because some moron yells "denier" without knowing what that word means.
[citation needed] I think the viewpoint of "Yes, the numbers show warming, and no, government policy should not address the problem," is somewhat rare in itself. (But maybe I'm wrong about that.) And I have never heard of anyone who says that, being labeled as a denier. Not that it couldn't happen, but..
Wait, you're saying that you have not only witnessed this 1) rare position of acknowledging the measurements 2) seen the acknowledgement mislabeled as denial 3) seen the aforementioned mislabeling done repeatedly and consistently as a pattern? (I'm trying to rule out fringe crackpots.)
You've got three pretty small probabilities being multiplied by one another. I can believe the first: an anarchist could hold that position. Maybe some libertarians, if they get over that whole someone-elses-pollution-is-a-form-of-force-against-me thing. But step 2 is something truly bizarre (i.e. crazy homeless guy territory, or maybe extreme illiteracy where they don't know the meaning of "to deny" and lack capacity to use a dictionary) and step 3 would require an organized religion of some kind. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would sure be interesting and amusing. You really have seen it? Has anyone ever written that somewhere on the Internet?
Even literally burning ideological opponents at the stake over this, would be a less surprising reaction than the scenario you described in your first paragraph, where such opponents are being labeled as deniers.
Probably the same reason they were a failure in the WordPerfect and 1-2-3 and DR-DOS and Coca Cola and Toyota Camry and Boston Red Sox businesses: because Microsoft never made those products.
Hm. That seems reasonable. Let's try that and see how it goes...
"Lay down your gun and surrender quietly, or there's gonna be A CAJUN RIOTLY!"
No. That doesn't work at all.
Not me. We all need at least one new copyright bill: add an exemption to DMCA's anti-circumvention prohibition (and the associated manufacture/sale/etc part), to legalize non-copyright-infringing uses.
Users need it, hardware and software industry needs it, and even the entertainment industry needs it (to increase media sales).
Actually we need the whole anti-circumvention garbage totally repealed, but I'm putting the above narrow exemption forth as a compromise. I'd appreciate it if the Slashdot crowd would refrain from explaining that my "narrow" exemption is essentially the same as repealing the whole useless mess. ;-)
Apple patented this in 2008. C'mon, Samsung, at least change the password to something other than "jobsrules".
Oh, Bezos. Just a few years before you formed your company, did not Intel show that you should make up a new word, rather than use a number, or as anyone would assume was clearly implied, use an existing word?
And it's the name of a place? I can cut you some slack on that; nobody ever knows for sure that they'll ever hit the big time and become a world power. Nevertheless, you made it. Good for you, but there are consequences.
Now you must face a difficult decision: are you going to rename your company to Amazathalon, or are you going to sit on your laurels while I take the name and form a new business to eat your lunch?
It just occurred to me: might this be the very thing which is needed in order to repair the patent system? What if patent enforcement did require that the patent holder could demonstrate that they put great effort/expense into publicity?
Can anyone think of a downside? Sure, it's an expense and no one wants invention to be expensive, but it's got to be far less expense than independent parallel patent searches by the thousands/millions of people who work in an industry. And in addition to the orders of magnitude reduction in the number of people who do the work, there's also the fact that hiring the advertising media is far cheaper than hiring patent lawyers.
So on the whole, this would reduce the expenses that patents incur on an industry.
It wold work, too. Think back to the LZW patent for example (maybe this is a bad example, because it's a software patent, but bear with me). People used it in GIF because they didn't know better. Then Unisys wrote that letter to DDJ, and soon everyone knew and many people really did stop infringing the patent.
After that, someone might have still had excuses to keep using LZW, but ignorance really wasn't a credible excuse anymore. Publicity worked.
I've never seen that, but if it were to ever happen around here, then the car would need a second computer. The nice thing is that whatever games the cops are playing, they'd have really short ping times when they played with each other.
Every single one of those people is a non-voter.
My recollection is that it Gopher in 1985 doesn't count. Gopher (and FTP and anything else with a schema) became part of the web (but not retroactively), after there was a web for it to be part of, and that started with HTTP, and more importantly: web browsers. If you were using a dedicated gopher client rather than a web browser (and you were) then you weren't using the web. You were just on the Internet, doing things that slightly resemble looking at web pages.
I think he's assuming that one dollar of electric is converted to as much heat as one dollar of something else.
When that's true, then CPUs are good heaters.
When that's false, then CPUs are second-rate heaters but OTOH you get some other kind of work out of them at that same time they heat, so maybe they're still ok. Or maybe they're not, depending on the cost difference and the value of the work.
And when it's irrelevant because it's warm enough that you don't want a heater of any kind, then we prefer to not mention the subject to our wives.
Interesting. Yet Another parallel with healthcare (where people don't shop around for best-bang-for-buck services; they just file a claim and are utterly divorced from the cost of things).
Money is not the only criteria, but it is nevertheless a very significant one and happens to be very topic at hand. If auditors could find the theft/waste/whateverishappening and get the cost down by a factor of ten, then you could quintuple the expendatures (oh no, now the cost has been merely halved) and keep the 20 students per class instead of going to 100. Or find some sweet-spot compromise like 40.
We need someone going over it with a fine-tuned comb, over-focusing on "just money" and maybe sometimes suggesting asinine things like switching to huge classes. Asinine suggestions are ok because you don't have to take all their advice. But somewhere in their advice, right next to "switch to 100 students per class" you're going to find something like "stop using gold plates (which keep disappearing) for the complimentary caviar which is charter-flown in from the Black Sea each day and served in the instructors' lounge."
I think looking at that sort of thing purely in terms of money, may be very enlightening. Sure, someone is going to say it's not just about the money, and that through the caviar they are getting insight into the causes of the French Revolution which is discussed in their history class. They're right. But I bet we can do just as good a job enlightning that instructor buy buying them a $20 book. Or if I'm wrong that the book is just as good, at least we'd have more information with which to get the strategy debate going. Maybe gold-plated plates with a steel core, which the users need to sign out? Maybe domestic caviar, or a 2 oz per day limit to each instructor? Who knows, you might publish the report and then a bunch of instructors will step forth and say "WTF? I never saw any caviar in the lounge, and the plates are plastic," and then you look at whose signature is on the PO for the gold plates and caviar.
To get there and explain how thousands of people can spend thousands of dollars per person to get so few man-hours of return labor (teaching), we need the auditors. You talk about 20 students like that's a small class, but the instructor could be hired at LAWYER RATES and even then, once you divide it by twenty, you get something quite affordable. And yet the education costs far far more than that. And I haven't heard of any instructors who say they're making lawyer money. Something is broken.