In suburban Auckland, New Zealand I pay NZD $0.2388/kWh for energy plus NZD $0.3750/day for the connection. That converts to USD $0.1863/kWh and $0.2925/day.

My last bill, after prompt payment discount, cost NZD $110.53 (USD $86.2252) for 456 kWh which works out to a overall cost of $0.1891/kWh including the daily fee and discount.

The Web needs a practical HTML standard that documents how you DO write HTML, not how you theoretically SHOULD write HTML.

That's a nice idea of standardizing based on how people do write HTML. However if we go down that train of thought, whose method of writing HTML should we standardize? Should we have a standard that adpots how Microsoft does HTML, or how Mozilla does HTML, or how Apple does HTML, or, worse, a hybrid/combination of these?

At the end of the day the only practical way to develop a useful standard is to get everyone together to agree on a standard and have commitment from everyone involved to actually implement the standard as specified.

Mod parent up.

Skype installing a toolbar isn't half as annoying as the JRE (Java Runtime) or my Logitech Mouse Software installing the Yahoo! toolbar.

Why bother installing the Logitech mouse software? Surely it works fine with out it?

Something's wrong with your configuration then -- Flash should be able to use the hardware decoder to handle these kind of videos.

Which I have no problem doing on my hardware. Seriously, take a look at the latest (read: 2 years old) stuff coming out of Intel and see how well it performs with common tasks required by 95% of users. Your example, HD YouTube videos, work pretty well on this 2 year old machine using integrated Intel graphics. I had a nVidia PCI-Expres card (with some 1GB of DDR RAM) for a while and I didn't notice much difference when I switched back to Intel graphics -- only notable difference was found in games released in the last few years or so.

I have an Intel GPU on my desktop at home and it works fine with Flash aninmations. It does have difficulities with recent games I concede that, but Flash animations isn't too much of a challenge for Intel's GPUs.

Indeed. Back in the days before zonal pricing for roaming, Vodafone New Zealand used to set their roaming prices for individual foriegn networks. There were a few cases in several countries where it was cheaper to roam on a non-Vodafone network for certain types of traffic (i.e. inbound voice, outbound voice, texts, data, etc) than with a Vodafone network. I found that highly amusing at the time. However I suspect they made a lot of money off people who thought Vodafone was the cheapest roaming parnter -- when it was sometimes not the case.

Nope, you can buy vouchers with cash in New Zealand (I can't speak for Australia). This has been the case here since day 1 and is currently still the case -- even though credit card top ups have since been introduced as an (not very popualar) alternative option. However they can match up your voucher to where it was issued -- which some might consider a privacy issue.

Mod parent up -- excellent point. The antenna could very well be hidden.

Your connection must suck, it loaded in under 5 seconds for me. Well... I know that most Slashdotter's are under 25 and pretty impatient when it comes to load times.

Worked fine for me too, loaded in seconds.

Browser: Firefox 3.6.13
OS: Windows Vista Home Basic
CPU: Intel T1600 @ 1.66GHz
RAM: 2GB of RAM

Benchmark #1: 328 iterations
Benchmark #2: 10 iterations
Benchmark #3: 3005 iterations

FWIW

Sorry for replying to myself, just noticed 5132/50000 rwb points for the above benchmark. The overall score is shown at the top of the page.

They should show it on the bottom, since that's when most people will look for it.

Browser: Firefox 3.6.13
OS: Windows Vista Home Basic
CPU: Intel T1600 @ 1.66GHz
RAM: 2GB of RAM

Benchmark #1: 328 iterations
Benchmark #2: 10 iterations
Benchmark #3: 3005 iterations

FWIW