That is the issue though. The summary mentions how Portugal is poor in oil but has a great deal of potential for solar and wind. This implies that by using sun and wind to create electricity somehow oil usage will drop. While I heavily support the switch to alternative fuels, this is just not true. Most oil is used for transportation rather than electricity. So the only way to save oil by switching to solar or wind is to use electric cars, which in general are not popular enough to be a heavy drain on the power grid. People really do need to learn the difference between electricity generation and oil usage, if nothing else just to make an informed decision when creating policy.

While I agree with you that cars are not nearly as green as buses, trains, bikes, etc, they are still sometimes a necessity. Some of us don't have a choice on the matter since there is no public transport for our commute. Ya, I would love it if there was, and we should invest in adding some, but until then, we need all the green solutions we can get. These companies found something that was cheap, easy to implement, and could make a real difference. I for one am quite happy about it.

Here traffic lights are made to be a source of income. They are designed to stop you and increase your chances of running a yellow light so that the cops can pull you over and give you a ticket. Plus, it has the guise of making the roads safer (since people don't have as many green lights, they cannot speed as much), so much of the public is mostly ok with it. Unfortunately, in reality, we're just wasting fuel and making the roads more dangerous (more rear end crashes and angrier drivers).

'Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,' wrote one of the students, who blogged about their reactions. 'When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.' I just thought it was a bit ironic to blog about one's Internet addiction

Well, this poll is probably a trick question, as it doesn't specify against what group you are measured. Anyone who uses a computer is above average among all the people on this planet. Also IQ is useful for measuring child's intellectual development, not really applicable to adults.

The only reason I have purchased any of the CDs I own is because of downloading them before buying to hear the entire album, to find out if it is worth buying. I have hundreds of CDs because the artists made good albums, albums worth paying for because every track was good. I would not have bought a single album if it wasn't for being able to download the tracks in FLAC before buying.

All your freedom are belong to us. . . In reality, it is already too late to "fix" this by changing the slope of the curve with governmental restrictions on amount/types of energy use. The only viable solution, and the most likely to happen, is some form of Geoengineering. At some point, some large country, acting in its own self interest (or in the interest of a well-monied lobbyist) will unilaterally enact a Geoengineering "solution". This will mostly likely outrage and inconvenience some other country (or lobbyist or large company with internal resources capable of Geoengineering), setting off a chain reaction of competing attempts at geoengineering. The only viable solution to the coming geoengineering crisis is to put democracy on hold. . .

Will PeerBlock/PeerGuardian still work? If not, what counter measures does one take? Also, does this apply to the USA only?

If one has gotten it for free, then it cannot fairly be called 'paid content'. Maybe better to say, 'content for whose use the copyright holder hoped to receive payment'.

There was a recent slashdot story on this. The common person in China probably will not see too much of a difference with Google gone, since they do have Baidu, but scientists and researchers will since they rely heavily on Google Scholar, which China has yet to reproduce their own version of.

FTFA: "They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians," she said. "They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world." "Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past." ---- 1984 by George Orwell

2 birds, 1 very expensive stone. It would probably cost a great deal of money to build tunnels, evacuate out almost all the air, and maintain that low atmosphere. Sure, it might save some energy of running the train, but the money and resources needed to do this would greatly outweigh any benefit. We are almost certainly much better off investing in other ways of producing or saving energy.

Randall C. Kennedy was an InfoWorld blogger known for his outrageous, inflammatory posts. Often these posts appeared to disregard the facts, overinflate the issues, or otherwise ignore the tenets of basic journalism in favor of sensationalism and manufactured furor.

Combine this with the fact that the guy is already very comfortable using a pseudonym then I heartily recommend him for the post of Slashdot editor!

There are no things that user is supposed to "decide" if they should or should not be allowed to run as root/admin -- there are things that should always run as admin, and things that shouldn't.

Well, that's not really true. If you're looking at it at an executable level, then there are at least a few executables that are quite reasonably run at both privilege levels. Even at a command level, if you do "./configure --prefix=$HOME/my/install/location" then "make", then "make install" is something you'll probably be running as yourself. If you omit the --prefix part, then "make install" will need to be run as root.

Make laws that prefer the rights of corporations over the rights of actual human beings. I don't see how this could possibly go wrong.