Rather ironic given that Sony has been caught engaging in illegal activity of their own, including price fixing and hacking their customer's computers, not to mention just delivering poor quality products and coasting along on the strength of what used to be a good brand name. The fact is when you steal from your customers you should hardly be surprised when they react in kind. I don't condone people taking what they want rather than paying for it, personally, I just stopped buying their products altogether and don't download them either. If Sony wants to deliver their music and video products with a reasonable profit margin rather than price gouging and attempting to get laws passed which give them money from my pocket even if I don't want their products, then I may consider buying again.
Rubbish! The microprocessor was the new and revolutionary tool of the time, today there is the internet, biological sciences and a whole host of other areas. Individuals can (and have) taken a new idea, created something and brought it to market in a few short years, and in a few cases some very young people with particularly good insight or just a love of something that hadn't occurred to everyone else have turned it into 10's or 100's of millions of dollars. If you really love hardware, anyone can use open source tools and have a small prototype board made by a professional production shop overseas (including mounting of components) for the inflation adjusted equivalent of less money than I made in one month delivering newspapers in the 1970's. If you love other areas of science, just take a look at what teenagers have been doing in the major science fairs. It has never been easier or cheaper to gain access to technology.
This may not be exactly wrong, but it is certainly misleading:
"There's absolutely no evidence that a lack of exposure to bacteria reduces the efficacy of the immune system."
the immune system (for lack of a better word) learns from the bacteria, viruses, etc. that it has been exposed to, lack of exposure leaves the system less able to defend then it might be against anything new that it encounters, resulting in much greater risk of damage or death from new diseases.
In other words, the efficacy of an immune system without any previous exposure is at a rather pathetic baseline level, and unless you want to die very young, it needs to be exposed to a variety of invaders in order to learn. There is boat loads of evidence to this effect, and it is in fact the basis of many of our vaccines which in some cases don't use the actual disease, but something that looks similar from the perspective of our immune systems.
You left out one other major factor, people with very high and very low IQ's typically have much poorer social skills, particularly during their teen years, and poor social skills also leads to less sex.
The biggest problem with going green/low power, particularly for servers is the motherboards (there are already good CPU and power supply choices out there). Manufacturers rarely provide power specs specifically for their motherboard's power draw, and so far as I have been able to determine there is no such thing as a server grade seriously low power motherboard (I've been looking for the last two years). Basically, manufacturers do not support either ECC or large amounts of RAM (preferably multi-gigabyte) on any board designed for low power use, and these are far more important than CPU horsepower (as is multiple ethernet connections). As someone who has been running an off grid internet server 24/7 for the last couple years, I have been forced to settle for one gigabyte of RAM in my latest server upgrade (tolerable) and no-ECC (really bad idea), but with a 30 watt total power budget, there is no other real choice in today's market.
I live off grid, so power consumption is the first thing I check before buying any product. LCD power consumption is all over the place, but there are some good reasons for it, things like contrast ratio, viewing angle, response time, brightness and display size vary tremendously and all of these have a significant effect on power consumption (not to mention the efficiency of the power supply). Generally the better the specs for the LCD, the more power it is going to use. To give you an idea of the kind of variation that can occur, the 15" LCD I am using right now is rated at 36 Watts (and out of the box drew around 30 watts), but plugging it into the 12V power supply on my computer (instead of it's wall adapter), and setting it's brightness to the lowest level that showed any effect on power consumption (which I find more than adequate), reduced it's power consumption to 15 Watts. This was a top of the line LCD four years ago when I bought it, newer ones might be able to do better.
I'm getting ready to mount two mini-itx boards in metal cookie tins I bought from the local GoodWill store for 37 cents (for both of them). Is that cheap enough for you:-)
I moved off grid about 8 months ago and have recently been working on cutting the power consumption of my computers (I've been supplementing the solar panels with alot of generator run-time lately). Laptops will give you the low power, but after three laptops, I decided they aren't worth it (not upgradeable, never have the design tradeoff choices I would have made). Prior to the move I was running a dual Duron system 1GHz, 1Gig of RAM and dual head with 21" monitor. With some careful optimization of my system setup, I have switched to a 933 MHz EPIA-M motherboard, 512MB of Ram, 2.5" IBM/Hitachi 40 Gig laptop drive, and most importantly a 12VDC ATX power supply (PW-70A that plugs straight into the motherboard), just the power supply change dropped the power consumption by over 20 watts, which results in an idle power consumption of less than 20 Watts (without running any special power management software), the 15" flat panel draws about 20 watts, but it's still running on 120 VAC (it does have a 12VDC power input, I just haven't switched over yet). Ultimately, I intend to pop the flat panel out of it's case and mount the works in an attache as a home brew laptop to use on the road as well (powered by an external laptop battery unit). The only time I really miss my old system is when I do Linux kernel builds, the rest of the time I hardly notice it (and I run multiple User Mode Linux VM's on this setup). I've been toying with the idea of setting up MOSIX and configuring to automatically boot the old dual Duron system to pickup some of the load whenever the system load stays maxed for to long, then have it automatically shutdown once the load goes away in order to save power.
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Rather ironic given that Sony has been caught engaging in illegal activity of their own, including price fixing and hacking their customer's computers, not to mention just delivering poor quality products and coasting along on the strength of what used to be a good brand name. The fact is when you steal from your customers you should hardly be surprised when they react in kind. I don't condone people taking what they want rather than paying for it, personally, I just stopped buying their products altogether and don't download them either. If Sony wants to deliver their music and video products with a reasonable profit margin rather than price gouging and attempting to get laws passed which give them money from my pocket even if I don't want their products, then I may consider buying again.
Rubbish! The microprocessor was the new and revolutionary tool of the time, today there is the internet, biological sciences and a whole host of other areas. Individuals can (and have) taken a new idea, created something and brought it to market in a few short years, and in a few cases some very young people with particularly good insight or just a love of something that hadn't occurred to everyone else have turned it into 10's or 100's of millions of dollars. If you really love hardware, anyone can use open source tools and have a small prototype board made by a professional production shop overseas (including mounting of components) for the inflation adjusted equivalent of less money than I made in one month delivering newspapers in the 1970's. If you love other areas of science, just take a look at what teenagers have been doing in the major science fairs. It has never been easier or cheaper to gain access to technology.
This may not be exactly wrong, but it is certainly misleading:
"There's absolutely no evidence that a lack of exposure to bacteria reduces the efficacy of the immune system."
the immune system (for lack of a better word) learns from the bacteria, viruses, etc. that it has been exposed to, lack of exposure leaves the system less able to defend then it might be against anything new that it encounters, resulting in much greater risk of damage or death from new diseases.
In other words, the efficacy of an immune system without any previous exposure is at a rather pathetic baseline level, and unless you want to die very young, it needs to be exposed to a variety of invaders in order to learn. There is boat loads of evidence to this effect, and it is in fact the basis of many of our vaccines which in some cases don't use the actual disease, but something that looks similar from the perspective of our immune systems.
You left out one other major factor, people with very high and very low IQ's typically have much poorer social skills, particularly during their teen years, and poor social skills also leads to less sex.
The biggest problem with going green/low power, particularly for servers is the motherboards (there are already good CPU and power supply choices out there). Manufacturers rarely provide power specs specifically for their motherboard's power draw, and so far as I have been able to determine there is no such thing as a server grade seriously low power motherboard (I've been looking for the last two years). Basically, manufacturers do not support either ECC or large amounts of RAM (preferably multi-gigabyte) on any board designed for low power use, and these are far more important than CPU horsepower (as is multiple ethernet connections). As someone who has been running an off grid internet server 24/7 for the last couple years, I have been forced to settle for one gigabyte of RAM in my latest server upgrade (tolerable) and no-ECC (really bad idea), but with a 30 watt total power budget, there is no other real choice in today's market.
I live off grid, so power consumption is the first thing I check before buying any product. LCD power consumption is all over the place, but there are some good reasons for it, things like contrast ratio, viewing angle, response time, brightness and display size vary tremendously and all of these have a significant effect on power consumption (not to mention the efficiency of the power supply). Generally the better the specs for the LCD, the more power it is going to use. To give you an idea of the kind of variation that can occur, the 15" LCD I am using right now is rated at 36 Watts (and out of the box drew around 30 watts), but plugging it into the 12V power supply on my computer (instead of it's wall adapter), and setting it's brightness to the lowest level that showed any effect on power consumption (which I find more than adequate), reduced it's power consumption to 15 Watts. This was a top of the line LCD four years ago when I bought it, newer ones might be able to do better.
I'm getting ready to mount two mini-itx boards in metal cookie tins I bought from the local GoodWill store for 37 cents (for both of them). Is that cheap enough for you :-)
I moved off grid about 8 months ago and have recently been working on cutting the power consumption of my computers (I've been supplementing the solar panels with alot of generator run-time lately). Laptops will give you the low power, but after three laptops, I decided they aren't worth it (not upgradeable, never have the design tradeoff choices I would have made). Prior to the move I was running a dual Duron system 1GHz, 1Gig of RAM and dual head with 21" monitor. With some careful optimization of my system setup, I have switched to a 933 MHz EPIA-M motherboard, 512MB of Ram, 2.5" IBM/Hitachi 40 Gig laptop drive, and most importantly a 12VDC ATX power supply (PW-70A that plugs straight into the motherboard), just the power supply change dropped the power consumption by over 20 watts, which results in an idle power consumption of less than 20 Watts (without running any special power management software), the 15" flat panel draws about 20 watts, but it's still running on 120 VAC (it does have a 12VDC power input, I just haven't switched over yet). Ultimately, I intend to pop the flat panel out of it's case and mount the works in an attache as a home brew laptop to use on the road as well (powered by an external laptop battery unit). The only time I really miss my old system is when I do Linux kernel builds, the rest of the time I hardly notice it (and I run multiple User Mode Linux VM's on this setup). I've been toying with the idea of setting up MOSIX and configuring to automatically boot the old dual Duron system to pickup some of the load whenever the system load stays maxed for to long, then have it automatically shutdown once the load goes away in order to save power.