because virtually no office, shop, or business depends on natural light anymore. Ever since artificial lighting became the norm, the scheme only "benefits" people of the latter group who support the former group, such as banks.
depends? no, but still there is reason to use it, if you think about it.

I work in smallish light industry plant, and we have approximately 180 fluorescent lights running all the time. at approx 108 watts per fixture it comes to about 19 kilowatts (or some 80A) power draw.

A factory i visited had lots of big skylights (basically 3mx2m polycarbonate sheets) and we worked for whole week without turning electrical lighting on at all, as lighting was adequate for the work.

As a slashdot reader, i can imagine, You can understand the benifits of using solar energy directly, instead of converting it in plants-animals-fossil-generators-lighting fixtures chain.

lego. the hardware version.
don't make your kid sit and stare at one point (screen) sitting in one pose (chair). it's bad for health.

there is nothing really to fall behind. we all learned, how to use keyboard and mouse at much later age. he still wont be able to blind type for a while (hands too small) and mastering mouse for 6 year old takes minutes, while 3y.o. will struggle due to mouse size compared to hand size.

i am also sure, that for understanding algorhytmic thinking, there are ways outside the limiting screen.

depends if you are 20 or 79.
at some point you realise, that you are indeed mortal, and start looking for options to buy some more time.

The question is - what industry exactly we will lose?
I still find this article insightful - http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/01/selling-paper.html

So I misunderstood. I should have realised, that point 2) pretty much has the same meaning as i wrote. Sorry about that.

If you refer to the third option as "solaris" kind of contact, then You might want to reread the book.

There wasn't even clear agreement if ocean realised, what it was, that it was interacting with.

as you have no way to check, if all the facts you believe is true, doesn't it happen, that you believe in them without proof, just because it is explained in book and makes sense in you?

people like shiny shit.
there you have new, shiny hardware with multiple cores, shitload of ram, distro worth multiple gigabytes on hard disk, and all you do is use about 3 minutes cumulative processor time in hour, while reading slashdot. for 57 minutes processor is sleeping, ready to jump on whatever fancy calculation you might throw at it.

makes you wince, doesn't it? :-)

and then you found out that disk #3 wasn't reading.
talk about good times.

you need the bandwith to download the iso anyway, and you can avoid the bloat if you don't check anything in tasksel and apt-get by hand.
you will most probably get up and running faster, as you wont install the bloat you don't need.

ubuntu used to have net-install too (i haven't used ubuntu for a while, so i don't know if it's still true), but it was well hidden.

while, big business can use emacs, for what it's worth, hospitals in denmark, probably need an easy way to produce odf, as it's official standard for denmarks government bodies and lot of documentation flow for hospitals is with government.

libre office does that, so they can cut expenses on software rather than, say patient care or staff salary.

As a coincidence, i played with bios flashing yesterday, and it isn't so hopless, as you might think. There is user friendly tool - uniflash - weights 30k I believe, one could strip it heavily. Exploits can be as small as 100bytes and even less. Your average bios memory chip is 256-500k Yesterday i was able to reflash SST and intel bios chips on same motherboard, i believe i could do atmel's too, but i didn't try it, so i think routines for reflashing them are pretty much same across motherboards/bioses.

none, that i've noticed.

check your law again. here, in latvia it states that you can copy only content which you have acquired legally. i am pretty sure, that you have something similar.

i might offer some insight on this. i am not sure about brainwaves, but after waking up, often there is about 20 minutes period of which i can't remember. after that I "wake up" in a moment, fully awake, alert and rested. usually already in some sort of action be it smoking or reading mail. as far as i know, i can speak intelligible and think logical. i've had some problems about this, because people would talk to me and didn't suspect, that i am asleep or to be precise - without memory. on the other hand it might be some memory problem.