A large fraction of new PCs come with 8. And it's a problem. For example, my wife bought a 8-PC a couple of months ago, and hates it. Now she wants to buy a new computer for her mother, except she can't imagine going with a win8-thingie since she conciders those horrible. Might end up going with Mac, or scrounging for one of the new PCs still being sold with 7.

You know things are bad when nontechnical users are willing to pay a premium to get your 4 year old product, rather than the current one.

Or post things you want googleable under your full name and things that are more controversial under a pseudonym. For typical employers it's not even as it needs to be hugely well-hidden, they seldom do more than look at the top 1 or 2 pages when googling your name.

Is it possible to find out who (say) Indian Homemaker or Conjecture Girl is by researching on the web ? Certainly. Is it likely that the antics of these pseudonyms will be linked to the identities behind them when they apply for a job ? Not really.

No, they'd be _less_ efficient at higher switching-rates. That's because in an ideal world the waveform is square, i.e. goes instantly from on to off and vice-versa, but in the -real- world switching isn't instant, and there's a (short) "half-switched" state where some energy is wasted as heat in the switching-circuit. This wasted energy would go up with higher frequencies, simply because there'd be more switching.

Not that it matters, I suspect we're talking sub-percent of the energy-budget of a screen anyway, atleast as long as you don't want to go up into Mhz.

Yeah. And he forgets about the fact that the photoreceptors in the eye -also- don't react instantly, as demonstrated by the fact that a spinning white/black disc will appear uniformly gray. The highest detectable frequencies for flashing is in the 10s of Hz, certainly not in the Khz.

Yes, when you buy stock, the money goes to the -previous- owner of that part of the company.

But long-term stock-ownership is still influenced mostly by the performance of the actual company, whereas that's entirely irrelevant for HFT. Apple is valuable today, compared to 20 years ago because they as a company grew in every way over those 20 years.

From todays discussion it seems likely that the NSA stores not only all of the above, but the actual call-content too. Just saying.

Not that it detracts from any of what you say.

You need the permission of the author to make copies, but there most certainly are implicit permissions.

Write a blog-post, put it on a website with no mention of any licence, and you have just given me implicit permission to download the post (creating intermediare copies in RAM and possibly in disk-cache).

In this specific case, there's -already- a default licence that says who can do what wit software in the absence of specific permission from you. It's called copyright. It spells out clearly and unambigously what one can do, and what one needs the permission of the author to do.

The only possible source of confusion is if publishing something openly on the web constitutes implicit permission to do something more than what copyright already allows.

Not "probably" -- definitely.

A *one* watt saving is at $0.15 Kwh a saving of $0.00015/hour while surfing. If an average surfing employee costs $30/hour then we're talking a 0.005% reduction in cost for that employee -- if the employee surfs for 1000 hours/year, then that's a win if the employee, over those 1000 hours, waste no more than 3 minutes.

Not really. Sure, if you multiply a tiny number for 10,000 then you get a higher number. But every other number rises for that company too, so the savings stay tiny relative to the rest of the budget.

1 watt saved times 10000 is 10 KW saved for every hour those computers are used for browsing. If an average corporate computer is used for browsing 10 hours a week, then you're talking a saving of $150 - $250/year, depending on how much AC they use and what power-prices they pay.

$250 on the budget of a 10.000 employee firm is no more noticeable than $0.25 in the budget of a 10 employee firm -- it's still a saving of $0.025/year pro employee. In practice, this is down in the noise.

"they", as in Afghanistan or Iraq, didn't send 737s. A extremist organization did. And yes, it's a huge problem that organizations exist which are extremist enough to be in favor of violence for their political goals. (it doesn't help much that those goals are repugnant to most of us)

So the question is, what policies will help most in figthing such organizations ? It's not clear that every drone-strike creates new terrorists, but it does seem clear that continued occupation by foreign forces, spiced up with the occasional abuse from some soldier or other, creates increased resentment and probably is radicalizing. Drone-strikes are just a tiny bit of that puzzle.

I'm not terribly concerned with somehow insulting a person who doesn't exist.

I don't think those are remotely comparable. At those times, the US was in a full out war with the nations they bombed. Japan was not occupied by allied forces, and with some cells of opposition left, Japan, the nation, was at war with USA.

The current "war" is different. It's a war of ideas. Having the military upper hand is a given -- the sum total of military expenditures in all those countries where most drone-strikes are made, don't add up to 5% of USAs spending. The question really is not if USA is military superior to Afghanistan.

Nominally, Afghanistan is at peace. Nominally, criminals of any kind inside it's borders, is a police matter. Yes I know, that doesn't quite match the reality. Nevertheless there's a -huge- gulf between police-methodology and having flying killer-robots run by a occupying nation circling the landscape day and night, raining death on whomever is deemed a threat to USA.

It's debatable if the examples you gave where supportable too, but in any case the situation was -entirely- different.

True. But the kicker is that there's zero evidence that the "why" answers of religion are in any way better than anyone elses random guesses. And in a few ways they're distinctly WORSE.

The purpose of your life is to please a "loving" God who will nevertheless send you straight to HELL if you fail to unquestionably do as he says ?

Why two fibres ? You can do full-duplex on a single fiber. Not that the price-differential would be much anyway.