The amount of power used by the laptop is going to be pretty much a rounding error. You'd be better off making sure the tires are properly inflated.

Except more efficiently powering your laptop will not prevent you from fully inflating your tires, nor will it make doing so any less effective nor more time-consuming.

Similarly, fully inflating your tires will not prevent you from more efficiently powering your laptop, or eliminate the significant gains from doing so.

No matter how relatively significant the gains, there are gains, and they are cost effective and well worth the effort. And if you add up all the various "rounding error" type gains to be had in most vehicles, they cumulatively add up to a significant amount of savings.

I watched the first season of Game of Thrones on netflix, then gave up.

The discs are nearly empty, with two ~55 minute episodes per disc. The subtitles (vobsubs) are ugly as hell, compared to the beautiful subtitles included when broadcast, the copy protection is aggressive, wasting my time, there are no special features to speak of. etc, etc.

Except that's just a striped down front page. Managing the horde of comments is the challenging part, and they made no attempt to do so.

Without a doubt, the biggest tech failure of the year is slashdot's new mobile site, and the horendous beta desktop site. I can't imagine the motivation behind the flashy, slow, non-functional mess. If classic.slashdot.org ever goes away, so too will I.

I was considering a tablet instead of a netbook some time ago, but hit on a major stumbling block right away... Ethernet ports.

RJ45 gives me faster and more reliable network access when I need it. RJ45 allows me to connect to the network (and the internet) in places (or particular subnets) where there is no wifi. RJ45 allows me to configure my WiFi router/AP out of the box, or when the configuration gets erased. RJ45 lets me configure my WiFi PTZ camera to join them to my WiFi network in the first place. RJ45 allows me to use my netbook as a basic server or network analyser temporarily, or as an end-of-life job. RJ45 allows my netbook to act as a wireless bridge for other devices, and provide wifi and network access for your tablet, smartphone, ultrabook, etc.

Even if I could install a real OS like Linux on a piece of tablet hardware, the universal lack of RJ45 ports would be a continual problem. Carrying around a bunch of dongles is a nightmare. And netbooks are cheaper than decent tablets anyhow.

Now, if anyone can find me a nice cheap and small laptop that also has actual RS-232 ports built-in, I'll buy one in a second, since USB only provides 5V, and some serial devices strictly need the old +12V/-12V signaling to work... Not to mention issues with timing and similar...

Case in point: I'm using an inverter that I bought 6 years ago, rather than buying a new laptop with a longer-lasting battery right now (cellular data, too... in the back seat of a car that's travelling 100km/h through the countryside).

An inverter is a terribly wasteful way to power a laptop, and when that waste is powered by gasoline in an ICE, you might be quadrupling the expense.

My old EeePC is powered by 12V, so I can use an old $2 car cig-lighter cord, with no dual-conversion waste. If your laptop is not (most aren't) I strongly suggest a $12 investment, which you will get a return on in a matter of days:

http://dx.com/p/universal-car-cigarette-powered-adapter-charger-for-laptop-cell-phone-pda-gps-81013

By changing the amount of average monthly balance on the checking account I can select what kind of spam I get via USPS. Seriously. The running joke around here is that if you keep the average above $10K, you are bougie since all your firestarter paper comes by mail!

I get no such spam. Of course every time I sign-up for a bank account, I jump through hoops sending in cards or calling-up automated phone numbers to opt-out of ALL information sharing.

I find that impossible to believe when the exact same processing system is used for both credit and debit cards.

That only proves you are a fool. There is no "debit reporting agency".

Debit cards do not affect your public credit history. Credit cards, do.

the old adage about possession being 9/10ths of the law does ring true here: it's much easier to keep what you have than to get back what you don't.

There's no truth in that at all. The fact that you have to write a check doesn't obviate any responsibility you have to pay your bill, nor does the bank's possession of your money obviate them of the responsibility to fully reimburse you for fraud very quickly. Legally, the two are entirely equivalent.

I remind you that this is a debate about the merits of debit cards versus credit cards. References to other payment methods would be more than just stupid.

Information about debit cards are NOT shared with anyone outside of the issuing bank. They are every bit as private as writing a check, doing a wire transfer, or similar. Credit cards are the polar opposite, with all your financial information being reported, and being easy for anyone on the planet to access.

There really is only one reason to ever use a debit card - your credit is so bad that you can't actually get a credit card. In all other ways credit cards are the superior tool.

Superior, how? Superior as in just about anybody is able to easily find out about all your credit cards, and plenty of purchase details? Is that the kinds of "superior" you were talking about?

People who have "important data" and fail to make a backup copy - no matter which type of media they are using - deserve to lose their data.

How often would you say people need to make backups? Servers aren't read-only devices that get updated in batches once a month... Losing a week's worth of work can be a nightmare. Even losing a day of work can hurt. Spending more money on reliable hard drives is well worth it. Even if we're talking about your transactional database, and you've got real-time streaming backups to a peer node, the downtime of one of them is going to be costly, and again worth buying more reliable equipment.

UPS are cheap and reliable, and give you time to shut down.

Cheap UPSes are horribly unreliable. What's more, they can be less reliable than grid power... APC's horrid SmartUPS devices had an awful tendency for a significant percentage to drop the load during a self-test, even when both battery and utility power were in perfect working order...

Even if you have dual power supplies, and connect to different UPSes, you're screwed. The SmartUPS all perform a self-test at exactly the same time, two weeks from the last power outage, we had hundreds, and they all self-tested almost to the second...

Big UPSes don't guarantee reliability, either. I've seen refrigerator-sized units that dropped the load during brownouts so short that servers NOT on the UPS didn't see the interruption.

Of course UPSes CAN be designed in completely fail-safe ways, failing-over to grid power bypass, but since I've seen even very expensive units failing, I expect nobody is willing to pay for that, and most instead architect a power system where individual UPSes failing still doesn't cause interruptions.

What is this vacation of which you speak?

"Vacation" is what most people call it, but the technical name is "Unemployment"...

Datawind is always late to the party. They make big annoucements about incredibly inexpensive items years in the future to generate interest. Then by the time they're actually selling something, everyone else has passed them by. Even now, you can pickup a tablet with similar specs from walmart for $50. By the time we see any DW tablets on the shelves, several companies will be selling $40 tablets, or better.