I like the comparison to literature and how it illustrates personal preferences, but respectfully disagree with the idea that literature will all eventually converge into very short, efficient, single purpose works. The entire point of literature is to convey some theme(s) through the medium of a story. Stories are not meant to be efficient or singular in purpose or meaning, necessarily. When you read a book, you are along for whatever ride the author wishes to take you on. And it is exactly that ride, not some re-factored or boiled down version, that he/she wants to experience. If you've ever read Cliffnotes instead of an original text, you'll understand. I don't think all literature needs to be more "readable", sometimes it's ok for something to be a little beyond your comfort threshold, it makes your brain work just a little harder, and I think that's a good thing. Unless of course you want all books to read like Green Eggs and Ham :-)

This is a double edged sword - on one hand, I want to agree with you about C# / VB .Net, the large and broad depth of the built in libraries are certainly a win if you don't want to get bogged down in details, like rolling your own RSA encryption/decryption mechanism for example. On the other hand, struggling through those kind of things are part of what makes a programmer "hardened", in my opinion. Additionally, while these managed languages are nice and all, it would also be good to infuse some memory management knowledge into the youngster. If we were talking about math, it would be like learning about geometry proofs. It might be a struggle, and might not be terribly useful, since you really just need the final theorem to do your work, but still a good exercise to go through that thought process, makes some rusty synapses in your brain fire, and what not...

One of my coworkers has tried T-Mobile enough for the both of us. He can't get a signal in the building where we work, or in the apartment he lives in - he has to drive down the street to make a phone call. We live/work within 20 miles of NYC, not in some random bumblefuck, btw. T-mobile probably does have decent coverage in some places, but if it kinda sucks near one of the largest cities in the US, I'm skeptical about overall performance. I am a long time customer of Verizon, and I do know about all the features they lock me out of. They are far from perfect - but the alternatives are either a carrier with much shoddier 3G service or another carrier with the worst nation-wide coverage of the 3, but great customer service. I'm actually complaining about the lack of real options in terms of service providers. I want to be able to make phone calls all the time, and I don't want my calls to get dropped. Unfortunately the only provider that satisfies those requirements where I live is Verizon.

Well yes you are correct in making the European/US GSM band distinction. Not all the phones will work on the US GSM band, but the Tour in particular does...guess it's cheaper to put quad band GSM in those things now.

My question is - what new carrier are you going to look for? AT&T (bad) or TMobile (worse)?

Actually, all of Verizon's "world" phones have SIM card slots so that your phone will function overseas, where GSM is the standard. My friend's Verizon BB Tour has a SIM card slot and actually lets you choose what network you want to use, he has a prepaid AT&T SIM card in there right now that he can fail over to if there's no Verizon coverage.

In the spirit of discussing FOSS, Linux (I believe, but could be wrong), is still missing support for a bunch of consumer devices, like iPods/iPhones, and digital cameras, etc. And there are a lot of niche apps that just don't work. Let's say I use Solidworks for CAD/CAM drawings, I don't think that will run natively on Linux. That is why a lot of people are not so keen to jump on that bandwagon. Mind you, I happen to run various Windows/Linux distros at home (and every box has Firefox as the default browser)...each has their role/strengths/weaknesses. If the problem is stupid users, then fix stupid users, don't just switch software and expect the problem to go away completely, chances are it will come back to bite you, eventually. I understand that requires more effort, but it's probably more effective in the long run. Or would you rather put a piece of tape over the blinking clock on your VCR?

There are at least 2 pizza places where people are willing to stand in line, this is another one: http://www.pizzeriaregina.com/ Waited on line for an hour, it was worth it.

"Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame."

Not really. I'm sure your energy usage at 1am differs from that at 8am and 2pm. The only way you can arrive at a reasonable per hour estimate of your energy usage is by at least averaging out a day's usage. If you want to get an even better estimate, you would average out usage over the course of a week, because your usage on a Thursday when you are at work all day is probably a lot different than Saturday when you're home. Your "energy over a fixed time frame" is in fact an hourly AVERAGE consumption rate. An estimate (average) which takes into account a larger data sample (takes more days into account) is going to result in a number that is closer to the actual usage were it to be measured daily and added up. So, using monthly estimates actually yields a result that is more accurate than comparing raw hourly usage, it is not as you state, extra work with nothing to show for it. I would think that, in a discussion of efficiency, you would want to talk about results that are as accurate as possible.

Oh yeah, regular usage month == month when the LHC is on and in use. I am not factually wrong, unless you want to consider months when it is running not regular. Weren't the usage numbers from when it is running the whole point of this discussion?

You guys aren't comparing apples to apples - the website [http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/faq/lhc-energy-consumption.htm] indicates that in terms of energy, the LHC consumes about 130 Giga-watt hours (GWh) per month when it is fully online. Your residential electric bill is on the order of kilo-watt hours. On average, the typical US household used 920 KWh per month in 2006 [http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html], that is equivalent to 0.00092 GWh. 130 GWh / 0.00092 GWh = 141304 average US residences able to be powered off the energy consumed by the LHC during a regular usage month. Hardly millions, but definitely a few decent size towns worth of residences. I'm not making an argument for or against the energy use of LHC, just want to clarify the facts...

Let's face it, even if you were making double or triple that for the duration of your internship (which is what, 3, 6 months, at most?), it's probably not going to make a really big financial impact on your life either way in the long run. However, make sure that the experience you're getting there is making up for the shitty pay, otherwise you're really getting the short end of the stick. Getting some good experience at a high profile company will be good for you and your resume, even if the pay is not so great. When I was in college, I started doing IT work for a small machine shop in Rockland County, NY - those guys started paying me $14/hr, that was 8 years ago. The "professional" that I replaced was an imbecile and had the company accountant physically unplugging the hub and plugging her machine directly to broadband router in order to get Quickbooks updates. He also didn't have any of the machines patched or up to date with virus definitions, and all the machines there were on the verge of hardware failure they were so old. Those guys relied on me a lot, because they were too small to hire anyone else to rely on, so my experience there was great and I learned a bunch of things while bringing their shop up to modern standards. All industries are different, but IT interns have in my experience, at least in the NJ/NY area, made decent money. A friend of mine made $8/hr working for Six Flags when we were in high school (12 years ago). If you have the opportunity to, shop around and see what other offers are out there. You're goal as an intern should be to absorb knowledge/expertise like a sponge, don't worry too much about how much you're making per hour. Still, $8/hr seems really really strange.

Yeah, that also raised a flag for me - 0.5% per year for about 30 years is a 15% increase in number of incidences. The only reason I can see for dismissing this increase is that the population grew by a similar or greater percentage, in which case the overall percentage of incidences probably remained flat or decreased if the population grew at a greater rate than the number of incidences.

I live about a 1/4 mile (1/2 km) from a commercial rail line in the US - I can tell you that at least 10 trains per night of appreciable length pass over that rail and that the rail system is still in heavy use here. Another person already pointed out that rail is much more efficient than trucking for long hauls. The Google Wi-Fi system may be free for us (end users) but not for Google. They don't own any telecom backbone infrastructure, and that traffic has to go through someone's network eventually.