How about the new documentary, Terms and Conditions May Apply: http://tacma.net/

Simple - UPS and FedEx essentially have the corner on the online shopping market in America. For instance, most places I try to order something from will only ship by the aforementioned shippers (which sucks for me living in Alaska, since it means a huge additional cost).

I've thought they should split routes into two segments for a long time: MWF, and TRS. They could effectively cut their delivery costs by 40+%.

I hope that if they push through a neighborhood - centralized solution they have enough sense to do that as well.

Let's even just estimate:

Facebook says most people really only associate with 30 'friends'.

Hop 1: 9000 x 30 = 270k people.

Assuming that those people have associates that overlap the existing list somehow, we arrive at:

Hop 2: 270k x 15 + 270k= 4.32 million people

With a conservative estimate of the last hop only adding another three to twelve people, you're still talking between:

Hop 3: 4.32m + (4.05m x 3-12) = 16.47 million to 52.92 million people

True .. Sheetrock only maintains an internal temperature of 100 C until the stuff completely dries up. Three things though - I *did* mention this is the po' mans' version of a fire safe, I suggested only keeping things that could withstand temperature (i.e. not actually melt in 500 degree heat, thus the glass comment), and I'd say at that point if you're worried .. go the extra step and bury the po' fire safe in the ground. Dirt is a great insulator. Admittedly you have to deal with flooding issues then, so double up! One in the attic, one in the cellar, and one off-site (sneaker-net, not cloud. If everything goes to pot, do you *really* think you've got internet access?)

Or, for the frugal worry-wort .. consider building your own. Half an inch of sheetrock is designed to be more or less "fire-safe" for an hour (correct me if I'm wrong), so building a small room with say four or six layers of sheetrock (properly applied), ought to be sufficient for a 3-4 hour fire. You may not get idea humidity conditions (is that really an issue for your typical CD/DVD media?), but you'll also pay 10 cents on the dollar compared to the big fire safes.

Tell that to Truman.

Nope. You're somewhat right though. My memory in the past 25 years is apparently slightly fuzzy. I had a 15" monitor in '85, and a 19" monitor in '89. I kept the same monitor for the next decade (upgraded in '96 to a 21" monitor). Still .. for a memory that's roughly 25 years old,. 10% off one way or another doesn't seem that out of line.

In regard to my other poster that criticized me for not knowing 1920 x 1080p was "Full HD" .. my apologies for not paying attention to current marketing. You're right - Full HD is 1920 x 1080 .. and all I read on my (current) monitor is the "1080p - Full HD" label.

My apologies to both people, and anyone who has read my words. I'm a horrible person without any salient points what-so-ever!

In 1985 I liked a 19" monitor because of the amount of information could be relayed. 1280x1024 was huge compared to the 13" monitor I had (800x640 or whatever).

What screen size I liked (in inches) was directly related to the pixels I could use. Two monitors meant that I'd effectively doubled the pixels. The cool feature there was that I could put *two* pages of dead-tree text side-by-side. The drawback was (with windows at least) that the second monitor was always somewhat a gimp. A you-tube video or a dvd meant it was useless. Playing EQ (because back in the day WoW didn't exist - remember those days?) meant it was useless.

When I migrated to my current setup, I got a 30" screen (Full HD! - 1280 x 1080p). Know what that means to me nowadays? My eyes don't strain to see the same content I used to. Does it mean my screen shows more information? Nope. Is it better than my old 19" monitor? Not noticeably. It's just a little easier on the eyes (and uses less energy, and since its' LCD instead of cathode-ray tubing, doesn't throw electrons directly into my eye). Marginal improvement!

What would be better though? More pixels! A wider screen? Not so much - How wide is a movie every going to be? I seriously don't want to watch a movie that has panoramic (21x4) type dimensions. It'd make me *so* disengaged from the movie I may as well listen on audio-tape.

What would be better? More pixels! DPI used to mean something, and used to be a valued number when buying monitors. Give me a quality monitor, and I'll pay for it. Quality? That means going back to basic metrics - speed, accuracy, precision, cost. How big of a picture can fix on the monitor (DPI!). How long does it take to render (Hz!). How much does energy does it use (And don't give me some eco setting, give me the number for regular use!). How good is the color rendering? [is there a serious value for the last one? I honestly can't remember anymore. I remember there used to be a metric I regularly looked for until I bought a monitor with a 50k:1 value that gave me a headache because everything blurred together).

New world problems.

You think I agreed to be in the 'Googleverse', but no. I went to college. They require I use their email account for school-related information, and sometime in the last two years they switched over to the 'Googleverse'.

Originally, there were a number of excellent create-your-own themes, and most everything was pretty bare bones. I like that, considering I grew up in the pre-commerce Internet. There weren't a lot of fancy web 2.0 windows all over the place, it was just simple text. Things loaded quickly, and didn't develop memory leaks all over the place.

Now, all of those (imho) wonderful options? Gone. I'm not asking for the freedom to create the ideal solution for me, but I really get tired of getting sold a product, only to have it disappear in six months or a year.

Does that mean that every user needs to fall into the 'new' design that Google came up with? I'd prefer to believe that choice is a perfectly valid option in our society.

In fact, people still *do* have choice, unfortunately. Lets remember that Google isn't necessarily the only game in town.

(Sure, its generally the best in town, but perhaps is time for someone to set up an email server that filters through Google first, and ignores their 'user-friendly' ruleset?)

Are you kidding? This is how dice is selling marketing on /. nowadays .. put up a phony "ask slashdot" question, and put the shill at the top of the queue.

Common sense doesn't necessarily mean that it is scientifically true. Plenty of these scientific studies simply verify things that we 'know' to be true.

Plenty of these scientific studies reveal things we 'know' to be true are actually false. Stop being an idiot - there's so *many* other things to attack this study about.

Look at their assumptions! How exactly can they make any reliable statement about rural environments when their study was done in an urban environment?
How can they make any reliable statement about the average city when their study was done in one of the worst cities for traffic congestion in the US?

You know, I keep seeing how corporations keep pushing CISPA related bills through the government.

How about the people push a similar bill through the government, only this time, we mandate some sort of corporate responsibility for firewall security, and protection of consumer-related personal information?

I'm downright tired of companies engaging in the act of demographic siphoning behavior under the guise of a "free" service.