I thought carefully about your statement and did a few calculations.

I'm currently using a 17" CRT, with a consumption of 90W. I've found a 19" LCD with a consumption of 18W. That's five times less (better than you said, in fact), but costs 150€.

Given that electricity costs a mean of 0.15€/kWh and that I use my home computer around 5 hours per day, I would save 5*(90-18)/1000 kWh per day, that is, 0.054€ per day.

To get to the 150€ the LCD display would cost me, I'll need 2777.8 days, that is, more than seven years and half.

That said, I'm gonna stick with my CRT until it dies, since I'd rather have the 150€ spent on something else than wait 7 years to get them back.

Why don't you try something about cars? Maybe it could do better!

Yes, but it already exists: it's called a keyboard.

How come this comment's got modded Informative? Can I metamoderate that as funny?

So you mean I have to spend more money on something I wouldn't need if I could get a modern resistive touch screen phone.

That could be a solution, but I'd face one of the problems pointed before: can I use my BIC pen to use the touch screen, or do I have to keep changing pens and stylus?

That's the very thing I really HATE about capacitive touch-screens. All this blah blah blah about how much precision it has. What the heck do I mind its precision when I don't know where I've put my finger, since I cannot see what's behind it? Not to speak of the problems using a screen of these when you're wearing gloves and such.

This things are really stupid. I can get far more accuracy in my old Palm TX since I can use a stylus as thin as I want, my fingernail or just the reverse side of the BIC pen I'm using to write down on paper.

What the fuck! Llamazares shouldn't go ever to the US, the best thing that can happen to him is a shot in the forehead, if airport police has watched for a while this photos, he will really seem to them like a terrorist...

To say the truth, I think anglo-speakers are the only ones with this kind of trouble.
I mean, "Dos mil diez" is much easier to say than "veinte diez", not to speak of how bad this sounds and the grammatically incorrect sentence it is...

I think it's not exactly as you say. Yo say the philosophy is this law or whatever it is is "If you pay this contractor, we guarantee this contractor will provide this minimal service.", but it's not exactly that.

The real philosophy behind it is: "If you want to pay someone to get some minimal service, we guarantee you there will be someone to be paid to and to provide that service to you"

It's a subtle, but very a very important difference

So what? Nobody said housing or broad band were inalienable, instinctive nor natural rights. If you can put, and you do, so many adjectives to one word, it seems to me that the word itself isn't carrying the meaning of all those three words, so "rights" by itself doesn't mean "something which is inalienable, instinctive and natural" to guarantee people to, just something to guarantee people to.

I forgot to say it's not only the random elected people that would have to be under government control, it's also the local representatives of the other parties who are supervising each box, and maybe a few of them are corrupt even against their own party, but you would need to buy at least two or three people more per box, and those would be the same who would be willing to buy you to vote or tamper in favour of their own parties, so I doubt very much anything like this could happen.

From the article: En el 2004 había 56.585 mesas electorales, so about 56585 boxes to count.

And yes, I also think it's pretty expensive. At 50€ per person, it's in fact more than ten million euros per national election. However, we also try to make all the elections happen in the same day, to save money and time. But it's true it's expensive, though we all think it's worth it.

I don't think we're enthusiastically prone to law, but the advantadge of our system is that it really doesn't matter if you tamper 1, 100 or 1000 boxes, cause there are fifty thousand of them, and getting 50.000 people, as you say, "loyal" is really difficult, given that anyone can go and help -meaning supervising- with the recount and they could easily get caught tricking the count.

Yeah, we do count every box, and there are always at least four people counting each box. One of them is designed by the local administration, and the other three are chosen randomly from the electorate itself.

If you're chosen, you are obliged to stay there during the day, and payed 50€ for the inconvenience. Of course, you aren't punished if you present some medical condition, are travelling or that kind of things.

Also, each party can send as many representatives as they want to each box or school, to verify nothing strange happens.

If you're interested and can read spanish, you should go read this link. It's from 2005 and discusses the electronic vote and compares it with our actual system.. I'm sorry is too long for me to translate it accurately

I still don't get it.

We don't go all the 40 million people the same place to vote, nor do we count the ballots one by one.

We open up nearly all schools, so every one of us is assigned the nearest from his home, just a few minutes walking. Inside each school, there are several ballot boxes, so in the end, there's no more than a few hundred ballots in each box, maybe a thousand at the most.

Counting that, is just a matter of minutes, and reporting the total count to a central administration is againt a matter of seconds by phone. Of course you then have to take all the ballots and you can recount them all many times you want, and a physical hand signed report from all the members at the school, but anyhow, it's just a matter of parallelizing properly.

Sure it's more difficult in a place like Brazil, but having a 90% count by the end of the day, seems really feasible to me. Maybe you can enlighten me if I made wrong suppositions, but I suspect there was something really bad done there in those days.

I just don't get it. In Spain we know the results of the election with more than the 90% of votes counted at 21:00, while the election itself ends at 20:00. In an hour more or two, we got the 100% minus the postal votes. And of course our system is just the goold old ballot.