It prevents errors from being propagated?

I tend to agree, but there's some devil's advocate arguments that need to be made here

Firstly and most importantly, percentages of population, even overwhelming majority, do not make an action moral. The legislated murder of an innocent person would only affect ~0.00000032% of the population, but it would not be a correct thing to do. Increased tax rates on incomes above $1,000,000 may be [I believe they are] justifiable, but the small number of people affected is not the justification

You start with a number of filing households with various incomes, but then switch to count of persons. Stick to one or the other, otherwise it looks like a textbook statistics lie. I realize that the easily available data from the different sources doesn't match up in units of measure, but that's still an important thing to address.

I was under the impression that the term 'slashvertisement' referred to:

1. a slashdot story
2. linking to a singular post from a company or interest group
3. which is written primarily to be persuasive on a certain matter
4. especially for the sale of product or services from that company/interest group

Alternatively, it could refer to a vague, sensational story, meant to drive traffic to a blog.

In either case, the story was submitted by the owner of the landing page, with intent of some sort of personal gain

the link points to a free, open-source project(*), which has a parody of advertisement encouraging its use. The only product one would need to purchase, if convinced either by said 'advertisement' or the slashdot posting, is a certain toy rocket-launcher, unassociated with the company behind the FOSS project.

how is this a slashvertisement?

(*) All the source code is freely available online, there is no indication of desire to charge for or limit use of the code, and it's built as an extension to the FOSS project 'Jenkins'. That said, no license is explicitly given. I could be incorrect about the project being FOSS

actually . . .

As an experiment - have you tried adding a small sign reminding people of what should be obvious - "please don't take the flowers"?

Some people don't naturally think outside themselves, or into the future. This isn't *necessarily* bad, but those people do have a responsibility to compensate. Of course, many don't.

A reminder forces them to at least consider the possibility that it's not a good idea to take the flowers

Ok, one thing I have to respond to - WiFi, cordless phones, and all that jazz would have pretty much the same problems even if microwaves didn't exist.

The point of WiFi is that it was sold as a low-power, consumer-grade device in unregulated space (because of the microwave ovens, of course). So, home users didn't have to get any sort of licensing to operate the radios.

Say, hypothetically, there was some other, consumer-open, unregulated spectrum space, not clobbered by microwave ovens. In addition to WiFi, EVERY OTHER consumer wireless device would flock to that space, and you'd have the same trampling problems.

Grandparent's post is about solar->electric cells. At some point, you have to start at the sun. What's the point of discussing targeted wavelength systems here? "Only in sunlight driven systems" . . . isn't every solar panel "only sunlight driven" ?

Parent wasn't claiming it was meaningless because of units. It's a Very Large Number (VLN). At some point, numbers of such scale are pretty much meaningless, without comparison. It's very large in either measurement system.

The only thing they're doing is scanning twitter for foursquare addresses, and prepending an "I'm out of the house".

They aren't publishing information that wasn't already public, or even aggregating it in new and creative ways. They're just recontextualizing posts people are already putting online!

What benefits of educational shows? I made the mistake of watching an "educational" show on the Discovery Channel, on the Nazca lines.

About 15 minutes in, the host claimed he had shown dousing to be viable. About 45 minutes in, he was taking low-grade hallucinogenics. Not to worry, though, he's being "Supervised by an experienced shaman"

(The hallucinogenics, by the way, didn't end up telling him anything about the Nazca lines. In his own words)

Well, it depends, though. Some people attribute the success of Linux to GPL. (see here, 3rd or 4th question) Obviously, the success of F/OSS isn't entirely due to Linux, but I'd wager it's helped more than not.

Linux might have thrived just as much under a different license, but that's not what happened. But beyond speculation, can you really argue that one anti-copyright-lawyer-shark rock would have worked better than another?

also:

(http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F20.html)
:D

The thing to remember, though, is that it was a survey of households, not users. You could easily have a scenario where one person owns a PC, the other a Mac, and neither use each other's computers.

Even by your definition of increased computer literacy, having multiple machines in the same household proves nothing.