I lived in France for four years, using checks. Now I live in Luxembourg and use bank transfers. I much prefer bank transfers. It's easier, faster, less prone to fraud, etc...

However, a couple things bank transfers don't do that checks do:

1) Security deposits: recently my fiancée and I reserved a monastery in France. We had to make a deposit of, what is for us, a significant amount of cash. With checks this is easy. He has a check, which is only valid if we don't show up, and we have a year to pull together the money. If he has hard cash, first of we lose access to that cash for a year. Second, if he doesn't deliver the goods, he has the cash, and all we could do about it is sue him!

2) Large amounts between individuals: we're selling our car and aren't quite sure what to do. Obviously cash is a little inconvenient, but a wire transfer happens at a bank or online. So neither of these work as nicely as a check either. Of course, I'm certain there's some way around it, but until an online bank transfer happens immediately, it won't be as nice and secure as a check.

You're kidding right? This is the epitome of a free market. Charge the price that the market will bear. The supply-demand curve is the most basic of tools that economists use to express their ideas to laymen. In fact, economists would like to see every person be charged exactly the price they think the item is worth. This reduces prices for some and raises for others.

Secondly, prices ARE widely available, it's just that the prices you see won't be the ones I see. I admit this will cause macro-economisists analyst a certain amount of headache, but you as a consumer will still be able to find 100 sites that sell your item. And you will choose the one that is cheapest. And then you will decide if this price is the right price for you.

I call this "spreadsheet economics". With the advent of very sophisticated control and observation models, businesses can now gage the effect of each individual action against their bottom line. This leads them to do things that would normally seem insane from a customer-service standpoint. Witness RyanAir implementing plans to charge for bathroom usage on aircraft, Apple refusing to repair all smokers computers because of tar build-up, or Best Buy firing customers. They already know how much the bad press will cost them vs. how much they will save/earn based on a new policy.

With spreadsheet economics, one can now see which markets will bear which prices, and don't be surprised if you turn out to be a market unto yourself.

'The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data...

Excuse me, but aren't you the people who charge me for 1MB if I download 1byte?

I'm not sure I care that much about healthcare to drag it into /. What I *do* care about, though, is intentionally misleading advertising that is designed to pollute and discourage any sort of reasonable discourse. I hope you are, too. And that was only obvious on this one story. Not any other. So putting it into a /. journal entry becomes less than apropos.

According to the above /. definition, "troll" is completely wrong. I might give you "Flamebait" (although my intention is not to enrage others, as you say it's a charged issue and we all read these things in different ways), but not trolling. And labeling it as such, when you've got the "Offtopic" button at hand, is, quite honestly, trying to prove an agenda. And that's as lame as making the original graphic in the first place.

Although one wonders is it offtopic if the referenced image can only be seen in this topic? (That's making a big assumption, of course, that you see what I see. Which is not as unlikely as you think, as if this showed up in Europe, it's pretty obvious it's not regional based.)

(By the way, you seem to misunderstand the journal entry. I'd be far more interested if you could have explained, in 2005, what comments had inspired people to list me as their "friend".)

Sadly, not the case. I regularly run across pdfs that I cannot access because they're behind a paywall. Even if I tell google "filetype:pdf", it still finds them for me. Which, quite frankly, pollutes the results to an extent that I sometimes cannot find the signal (actual readable scientific articles) amidst all the noise (IEEE, JSTOR, etc...).

Right, Mr. Get-your-government-hands-off-my-medicare moderator, pointing out that there is an amazingly biased and misleading political attack ad on /. is somehow trolling? I'll need that one explained to me. Offtopic, why not, but "troll" makes it look as if you want to disagree, but aren't brave enough to do it with words.

Did anyone notice that the ad on /. is an anti-Obama ad, that then links to a newsmax "poll"?

photo

Well, of COURSE if you have that pic, with that message, the only people who will participate will be rabidly anti-Obama. Kind of makes for a nice poll, Newsmax, right? Of course, that *couldn't* be the purpose, now could it?

LAME.

Having read the article, this seems like a reasonable plan. Not only does it push those who read lots to pay, it also leaves some pretty good options for those who want to read lots, but don't want to/can't pay. That's all you can really ask for. These people need to earn a living somehow, and I'd rather they did it writing news articles than working on a factory line.

Alright, so some American newspapers put up walled gardens. No problem, I'll just read the foreign press. BBC does a good job, and so do many others.

Yeah, and if you look at the demographics who like newspapers they are almost overwhelmingly older. Talk to a 20 something and ask them if they read the newspaper, most will just laugh at you.

If you asked someone that 10 years ago, it was the same response. And they, for sure, weren't getting their news online.

Not saying you're wrong, just that your example could be better chosen.

I wonder if 4chan will catch wind of this. Kurt just opened a whole can of worms in this case. If he really thinks that one person being inappropriate is bad, imagine every AC from /. trolling his comment section.

You know, if you want 4chan to do this, you could start it yourself, instead of trying to "subtly hint".

4chan is not your bitch, and trying to connive all the various actors into doing something would be like herding pussy.

Cats, I mean. Pussy. Cats.

A lot of /.ers are pointing out that this is the logical tradeoff for the gains that smart-metering promises us. Some are suggesting that we do without. I say it makes far more sense to strengthen our privacy laws, so that this kind of thing is so clearly off limits from data sharing that no non-criminal consider it.

For example, I'm a member of a local (ballroom) dancing club. I'm organizing a Thanksgiving Dinner, but the privacy laws here are so strong that it was made to me very clear that I *must* delete the club's (snail-)mailing list from my computer after I send out the invitations.

There are indeed tradeoffs between any level of internet-connected progress and our privacy, but it's shortsighted to think that the only response can be "get your gov't hands off my...!"

Quite neat. Especially the Vanderbilt photos of the Whole-room Indirect Calorimeter Activity Measurement System. Thanks for elucidating this topic for me.

So maybe my urine and feces are far more energetic than the average person's. (I'm not interested in testing this concept). While that doesn't change the fact that I shed more heat than someone of equivalent skin surface area but lower temperature, it does certainly make the problem more interesting.

That sounds a little hard to shit... err... swallow. Unless you mean caloric intake in the sense of long-chain starches, etc. that are undigestible by the human body. I'm guessing these don't figure in to the daily calorie allotment.

Could you please give a reference or link for your claim?

I know a lot of people are going to talk about CoE. After all, that's the driving equation here. It is absolutely correct, but can we not glean more insight into the problem?

IWAHTE (I Was A Heat Transfer Engineer), so my guess is that what's going on is that people spend the vast majority of their calories maintaining body temperature. If you eat less, your body's first reaction might well be to reduce skin temperature, maintaining core temperature. This theory links the fact that women eat less then men by 20% with the observation that women are complain about being cold earlier than men. Less calories burnt to keep skin temperature high.

In the case of someone who is overweight, they have an additional layer of blubber (yes, basement /. denizens, you are coated in blubber) that insulates them and maintains their core temperature for free. Maybe there's a hysteresis? First the body weight comes down, then the body learns it can waste excess heat maintaining skin temperature, and then, and only then, the body is free to consume additional calories.

Now, I don't do human anatomy, so a doctor would have to chime in and confirm just how much of the body's caloric consumption is lost to heat, vs. other bodily functions.

A personal example: on an average day, I eat some 3500 calories. But I am athletic, and only weigh 70, so this is a "good" 3500 kCal. What I notice is that my skin temperature is always warm, especially compared to women. In fact, I am very comfortable when the temperature is around 15deg inside. I go outside on a 5deg day in nothing more than a sweater and a top hat. I routinely mock my friends who wear a sweater, coat, and scarf when I'm sitting around in short sleeves. Certainly, my body is horribly inefficient, and if society falls in some sort of catastrophe, I will certainly be one of the first to starve (if my 20/800 eyesight doesn't make me walk off a cliff first). However, in a society that has mass amounts of overconsumption, it seems to fit me just fine.

A second personal example: I dated a German doctor who as a 16-year-old doing a year-abroad in Minnesota, had been anorexic. After she came back, she put on a lot of weight: obviously her body reacting to the extreme abuse she had given it. Now as a 25-year-old, she was in the Bundeswehr (German army), and this girl could RUN. She ran marathons. She ran 2 hours with 25kg of weight attached to her. And yet she was always, always overweight by 8kg or so vs. her pre-American anorexia bout. Not a lot, but she was... pudgy. She'd been to doctors, etc, and could do nothing to get her weight down. I lived with her for a while, I can guarantee she ate nothing but healthy food, and only somewhere around 1600-1800kCal/day. However, she liked her rooms warm.

So I am less physically active, yet consume twice as much. The only thing that can explain this is that physical activity just doesn't use that many calories, not compared to maintaing body temperature. Since I go outside without a coat, I burn more calories than she does to maintain the same core temperature.

My two cents, but I certainly welcome other /.er ideas, though.