Average electricity consumption per capita in the USA is 1683W. For the EU, it's 688W, which makes 2kW ample for a small household. If my electricity consumption went to 1.5MWh/month, I'd start to seriously worry - my electricity bill would be about three or four times what it currently is. According to Wikipedia, electricity in the USA costs 8-17 cents per kWh. That works out at $120 to $255 for 1.5MWh. Do people seriously spend that much money on power each month?

Does it carry voice? Does it do so over IP packets? Sounds like VoIP to me. It's not SIP or an open protocol, and it can carry video as well as voice, but it definitely meets the definition of voice over IP.

The problem with all of these services is fragmentation. If I have a telephone, I can call anyone else who has a telephone, irrespective of what operators we both use. If I have a SIP account somewhere, I can generally do the same thing. If I have a Facetime account, then I can't call someone with Google Hangouts. Without federation, these services are far less useful than they could be (to users - the lack of federation is useful for encouraging lock-in, so good for the providers if they're big enough).

Eh? I was in Amsterdam a few months ago and took the train (and a tram) between my hotel and the airport. There were kiosks at both ends that would sell the tickets, taking cash or credit cards, and they were quite cheap - far less than a taxi. Buying tickets for the tram worked the same way. They contained a chip that you tapped on the readers, but aside from implementation details they were single-use tickets.

1.5MWh over 32 days, not 1.5 MW. It works out to around 2kW over the entire time. Which is still large enough that you'd probably notice a microwave beam delivering that much energy to the device, and probably enough to power a house quite comfortably...

Well, they're only paid £50K/year. That's not a lot for having to press a button not once, but twice every few minutes...

I never understood why the US manages to use quarter for the coin, but fourth in other contexts. Outside the US, fourth is used exclusively to mean the ordinal.

Mid '80s, when all of the scientists left?

And a well-functioning militia is one with a clear chain of command, regular training, and so on. So, presumably, all of the NRA members are enrolled in such an organisation...

For speakers of Commonwealth English, 'a fourth' is American for 'a quarter'.

Because he's a scientist and if Hollywood has taught me anything it's that, once you get to a certain level of proficiency as a scientist, you can instantly turn your mind to anything and understand it.

Actually, most physicists I've met seem to believe this too...

'Based on' should be on Wikipedia's list of weasel words. True story:

A guy was bitten by a spider.

Based on this true story:

A guy was bitten by a spider and turned into spiderman!

You can recognise the true story from the film, but that's not why you watch the film...

Really? I remember mocking the one person I knew who got a Pentium 4 instead of an Athlon or a (by then, much cheaper, Pentium 3). We all knew that it could have 140 instructions in flight at a time, so needed heroic work from the branch predictor to have more than a vanishingly small chance of keeping it full and coming close to the theoretical throughput.

The thing that emerged later was the reason for the problem. It takes around 5 years to get a CPU to production, so you need to make a guess at what the available process technology in five years will be. For once, Intel got it wrong. They expected to be able to launch the P4 at 4GHz and scale it up to 10GHz within roughly the same thermal envelope. At that speed, even if you can only keep the pipeline half full on average, then it's still a very fast chip, and getting to 10GHz with a shorter pipeline is probably not feasible. At 2GHz, it's an embarrassment.

That isn't a Nobel Prize, it's the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (which is, like the Nobels, selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and announced at the same time as the Nobels, but it is not a Nobel prize).

Which would have meant that porting code from UNIX to Linux/*NIX would have required shim layers. Worse, it would mean that every program that uses these APIs would be a derived work of UNIX and the UNIX license could prohibit the use of such shim layers.

It's not about my 'pet project', it's about the entire computing landscape. I'd actually be quite happy with a ruling in favour of Oracle: it would completely destroy a large segment of the US software industry and promote investment nearer me...

It wouldn't be the first time that lawyers from one company have been arguing opposite things at the same time in different cases. If the other side is alert, then they'll enter court transcripts from the other case into their testimony.