I think I have one of the last (affordable) 4:3 aspect screens available at home here, an HP CompqLE1911. It is not god's gift to screens, but I really hate a "wide" screen, like I have at work.

My experience is contrary to your ideas. Back in the 1970s I had a small insulation company installing urea-formaldehyde foam as insulation in existing homes. The process was created and tested by the company I franchised from Isochaum Chemie from Germany. They had worked in Alaska with the US government to test the product in extreme environments and had gotten the all-clear to begin installation in residences. I was given one of their franchises to break into a market that was pretty tightly held by the Owens Corning--Johns Manville fiberglass contractors who had been in business for 20+ years in the area. They hated me. They tried all kinds of nasty practices, but the product was solid, so the head offices stepped in.

Owens Corning owned Bordens, the glue company which produced a cheap version of the urea-formaldehyde resin. They put together a really cheap installation system and started to sell them to any yahoo who could pay for it-- no franchise. It wasn't two months before they had complaints and I was being asked to appear in court to discuss the problems that they had created and how to solve them. The only solution was to strip the house from the inside and replace the insulation and then replace the sheetrock or whatever the interior wall was made of. The retired post office worker who started that company went bankrupt before his business was a year old.

Johns Manville had a similar plan where they just sold the materials and suggested that you mix them (this is where it gets totally unreal) with an electric trolling motor in a 55 gallon drum. (Isochaum Chemie had their production plant in South Carolina, and it was a real plant with QA and consistent product.) OK, has anyone guessed what the real goal of these companies that OC and JM helped to spawn really was?

Spin the dial back to 1979and the consumer's product safety commission hearings on the safety and dangers of urea-formaldehyde foam to consumers. Yes, you guessed it. Even though Isochaum Chemie franchisees had no complaints or problems in 5 years of installations, the volume of problems and complaints created by the OC and JM spawn from hell nailed the coffin on the industry for 20 years-- urea-formaldehyde insulation was banned in the US and became synonymous with toxic house syndrome. It is back, but pretty much a niche market, when I, in less than a year, had become one of the most successful companies in the area. And went bankrupt the year after the CPSC decision.

So, I look at companies trying to get into solar or wind and say: "Watch your back"

well actually I am kinda thinking this is,well not entirely true at least partly true. I worked out in the sun (farmer and construction) for 25 years and never used any skin protection. I also refuse to use it at the beach or outside playing soccer with my son, for example. I spend a lot of time outside still. Now I do wear clothes outside in the sun. No, seriously. I don't wear shorts, and I often wear long-sleeved shirts outside in the sun. Why???? Am I crazy???

Year ago, I asked an old farmer (a real lifer) why he always wore long sleeved shirts and long pants. What he said changed my habits: he said it was cooler when you kept the sun off your skin. Think about it, as he said, the sun goes in deep and then you have to work to get rid of that heat, and that work makes more heat. Keep the sun off and you don't heat up as much or as fast. Also the yellow jackets can't get you as easy.

Still today I wear long sleeves and pants, here in Florida people think I'm crazy, but I am cooler than they are . How much cooler? mostly I don't use AC in my house and easily move from inside to out because I'm not over-cooled and then over-heated. Yeah, I'm crazy.

When my wife and I lived in Amsterdam we had a 75 sq m apartment (75x9=675sqft) for the two of us and our two daughters. Part of the problem is that Americans think bigger is better and the corollary: as big as I had is too small now. Time to consider how to make do with less and discover that having a 600-700sqft apartment means you save a bunch of time and money in cleaning, shopping, fixing. You have more time to live and get out on your bike shopping. Kind of missing Amsterdam these days.

I work in a win7 only environment. Only except for me, running Fedora 21 (last week, 22 this week). The number of people that are openly envious is astounding. Just yesterday I was doing screenshots with the keyboard printscreen button: theirs is disabled, or never worked or whatever and they would like to have it. IT doesn't know how to do it. I can do a screen cast with options from an icon on my header, I can paste from a pastebox on the same header, I have the weather on the same header, and the time and date is easily readable on that same header,I have a disappearing dock, multiple desktops, etc, etc ,etc and they all work 24/7.Did I mention that this is Fedora, a Bleeding Edge distribution that runs testing for Red Hat?

So very very tired of people who really don't know shit.

BTW, I was talking to our "IT" tech just yesterday (sorry, Friday actually). He mentioned why they do everything at the university (where I work) in MS. MS gives them everything for free. The training, the OSs the support, the seats, everything is free. I bought a new copy of Win7 for a KVM instance at home for $15 at the computer store, which is a private company on campus, but with a faculty ID I get it cheap. Every morning when I use OWA to check my mail through the MS mail server I get an offer to get Office 365 for free.

This is the embrace. The tech I was talking too knew he was working with an SQL db, but he didn't even know that MYSQL and Maria were the same, even though the real hard core techs at the school run red hat for the HPC mainframes, he admits they are "way above me, I don't even talk to them." When I asked why he chose SQL rather than a noSQL or Postgres, he didn't even know what they were. That is the sad reality of MS today. They are extinguishing knowledge to protect themselves from superior competition.

Ya know, I am getting tired of people assuming that the government and its relationship to economics is the same as a family and its relationship to economics. No, they are not the same and not comparable. You, in your family, do not have to account for maintaining a standing army. You, in your family are not responsible for the safety, health and well-being of your family members from birth to death. Etc, etc. On the other side, while you have to pay your bills, those bills do not include roads that are used by the people who bring the food that you eat from the other side of the country. If you pay your water bill you expect water, but it is the government that provides the water and the infrastructure that provides that water to you at a cost that can be amortized over decades. Do you amortize your water bill over decades? I thought not. There is really, nothing in common between how uyou or I handle our home finances and how the government handles its finances. And there shouldn't be: repeat: and there shouldn't be. Different roles, different functions, different economics.

Ponzi schemes are a person trying to cheat another person. No relationship to government process.
Busting your budget: what happens when a person overspends their budget: No relationship to government process.
Bankrupting the government: for a person--to owe so much more than income that the possibility of repayment is decades in the future: No relationship to government process (bankrupting the government means that the entire economy of a country will not be producing and selling enough product and taxing that product in a sustainable way for that economy that debts can be repaid in a reasonable time frame as determined by negotiation between the debt holders and the country's government.

See what I mean? There is no point at which you can make a one to one correspondence between government economics and personal economics. Can someone take this message and make it clear to the 2016 candidates as well as the 2016 voters so we don't have to hear homespun BS for the next 18 months?

I don't think there is any question that the floods and subsequent destruction of the factories in Thailand were the real cause of the shittiness of the latest drives. Certainly Seagate has never recovered. Part of the problem was that the workers for some companies were kept on payroll (reduced) and others just let them go and assumed they would come back when the new facilities were completed. Didn't work, as didn't the new facilities at the beginning, naturally. It was as much the way that the company responded to the setbacks that occurred as the actual problems of course. WD was very thoughtful and future-focused while Seagate just want money poouring into the bank ASAP. The results are obvious.

We are almost twins. Fed22, redundant backups, except on the drive side I use a 3TB storage drive and a 64 GB SSD "main" drive: this holds my OS and a (very) reduced home folder: pictures: no videos:no music: no downloads:yes Documents: yes Desktop : nothing anyway except a link to an old copy of autoten. All the "no" data go directly to the storage drive which is always backed up along with the primary SSD. The double redundant is a 2GB portable drive that I bring home to backup and return to work where it sits in a fireproof building all month.

Yeah , that, I first had a netscape.net email address, then, when AOL bought them out they tried to lure me away by giving me an AOL.com email. I didn't bite and continued to use the netscape address. Later they gave me an AIM.com address, I still didn't bite. Then I went to university and got two emails there, which updated to @alumni.virginia.edu when I graduated. Then I got a gmail address, then another one from the website I built for my wife (plus the webmaster, webminion, and random name) then I got one for the australian uni where I got my masters, again with an alumni prefix when I finished there. Then a work email at my current university job. The aol and aim I use for throwaway stuff for sure, the netscape I still use when I want to assert web cred. The gmail is the personal workhorse which I keep completely separated from the work email. It all works out and keeps some order in the world.

Sounds like he might have been at East Wind Community, an old Walden II, offshoot from Twin Oaks in Virginia. I had some friends there, and lived in another of the "acorns" of TO for a few years in the 70s. Many of the residents tended to reject all the modern world, in opposition to the more realistic and pro-tech views of BF Skinner, the author of Walden II. Few of the residents came from a Behaviorism background (I sure didn't) and fewer became conversant in it during their time there (but I did). They have all evolved far away from Skinner's vision, and apparently pretty distant from the modern world as well.

I saw all this in a TED talk about three years ago, and it was probably more than 3 years old then. Now I can't find it, but the story was exactly the same.

Actually, a country like China has a majority of cars under 5 years old. Cars older than, say 10 years old are mostly owned and maintained by the armed forces and other government bodies. So, at least in that case, the beaters here in the US and Canada produce more air pollution than they do in a car by car comparison.

Effin' Amuriccuns. OMG, life without AC, I just couldn't live without it! I mean, how could you drive a car, or think about it, we are going to die if we get caught by a hurricane but we MUST, MUST, MUSt have our AC running as we try to save our sorry butts from death.

Note, I live in Florida, drive a Chevy Volt and use my AC occasionally. But, last night driving home I had the windows open and the AC off which gives me more than 40 miles range (when the expected range is 38 at 55mph) at 65mph --that is just the battery, with gas the range is about 300 miles.

thanks for beating me to this. It is nice to see old tropes reinforced with recent research, but this is not news. Fortunately for Americans you can still watch Fox news and eat yourself stupid in just one language.

Old joke:
What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual
What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks one language? American (or British, or Australian or whatever)

But is this "free" speech or is this licenciousness? Is this not comparable to shouting "FIRE" in a theater since it incites people to act against their own best interests and the best interests of the society that supports them?

There is nothing wrong, per se, with the app. Unfortunately it is being used illegally (and I mean that literally: shouting "FIRE" in a theater is illegal) and should change to help people use the app responsibly. Just saying that we are "free" to use it to perform an illegal action does not mean that the purveyorsof the app are "freedom fighters."