Comment .23 USD equivalent / kWh here in Sweden for me (Score 1) 216
My latest electricity bill (Jun-Aug) had a cost of
Comment Intriguing (Score 2) 173
And here I thought that from what I've heard so far that Earth had possibly some dust or at most some gravel at its L4 and L5 points. This discovery of a sizable asteroid there makes the Earth's L4/L5 points much more interesting. Hopefully there is even more to be found!
Comment 183 pages over three years, about 0.86 USD/page (Score 1) 310
Bought the printer, an HP DeskJet 6980, about three years ago and its admin pages says it has printed 183 pages which seems fairly reasonable given my usage pattern of it.
It is now on its third black ink cartridge, and second colour ink cartridge. I've had at least one black cartridge dry up before it was used up.
Given the cartridge cost of 299 SEK for black and 399 SEK for colour, and excluding the cartridges that came with the printer, the post-printer-purchase supply cost per page so far ends up being 5.45 SEK / page, which is about 0.86 USD per page. Not exactly dirt cheap.
Comment No TV, zero hours is pretty accurate (Score 1) 385
I haven't owned a television receiving unit for about five years, and before that it was several years when I only turned the TV on about once-twice per month.
I find the concept of a television schedule to be archaic. Why should I adapt my media consumption during my own free time to a fixed schedule when I could just watch things whenever, where ever, I want through the powers of the 'net instead?
Antivirus Firms Short-Changing Customers 205
Barence writes "Two leading security firms have been accused of ripping off customers by cutting short their antivirus subscriptions. AVG and Symantec are offering their own customers discounts on subscriptions via email or pop-ups, but the new subscriptions start immediately, 'short-changing' users who had months left on their existing deal. Both Symantec and AVG owned up to the practice, and said they had no plans to change their ways, instead advising their customers to upgrade as close as possible to the end of the subscription. However, the pair actively send out emails and pop-up messages that encourage customers to upgrade immediately."
Comment Stationary computer with two displays + laptop (Score 1) 628
Both at work and at home I have a stationary computer with two displays, and a laptop along them.
In both cases the center display is a 24" 1920x1200, and to the right is a smaller one (at home a 19" 1280x1024, at work a 19" 1440x900).
To the left is the laptop. At work a 15" 1680x1050. At home a 9" 1024x600 when I don't have the work laptop at home.
Comment The efficiency measurement needs to be rethought (Score 1) 1006
Either give all efficiency measurements in joules/meter (or foot-pound force/mile or megajoules/kilometer or something), or separate the figures for when the vehicle is running on pure electricity (J/m would work for that) and when the vehicle is running exclusively with the fuel-consumpting engine (traditional MPG or liter/100km would work, or maybe J/m for this too).
Jumbling it all into a single quasi-MPG is just smoke and mirrors to make the figures look good.
Earth's Period of Habitability Is Nearly Over 756
xp65 writes "Scientists at this year's XXVIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil agree that we do not yet know how ubiquitous or how fragile life is, but that: 'The Earth's period of habitability is nearly over on a cosmological timescale. In a half to one billion years the Sun will start to be too luminous and warm for water to exist in liquid form on Earth, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect in less than 2 billion years.' Other surprising claims from this conference: that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size."
Submission + - AT&T blocks img.4chan.org from customers (reddit.com) 11
bmecoli writes: "AT&T seems to be blocking img.4chan.net which hosts the infamous /b/ (random) board, as well as /r9k/. Those who have contacted AT&T representatives were told that the site is in fact blocked, so this isn't a technical problem, and all the other 4chan subdomains work fine."
Comment Re:Fine (Score 1) 548
Well, you can write both those symbols here, it just takes some extra, shouldn't-be-needed-in-this-century, effort to make it happen.
£ = £
€ = €
Comment Store everything relevant on the home server (Score 1) 421
I just store anything saveworthy on the server at home. That way the "client" computers (my main "work"station/gamestation and laptops) contain only relatively expendable data. And if I need to access the stuff from some other location I just SSH into the box.
And backups are handled from the server manually occasionally to an external USB drive. I know, I need to improve on that part.
Comment They got one seat (Score 4, Informative) 674
The 7.1% the Pirate Party got gives them one seat. See http://www.val.se/val/ep2009/valnatt/rike/index.html. It is incredibly unlikely that they'd get another one. Nearly all of the advance votes have already been counted.
The advance votes get sent to the polling station where one would have normally voted on and are counted as part of the normal counting process. See http://www.val.se/in_english/2009_ep_election/index.html. Those advance votes that aren't counted yet are those advance votes that were placed on Sunday, which are relatively few given Sunday was the ordinary election day.
Anyhow the final count will be available on Wednesday.
Copyright Protection Business Model Expands, Plagiarizes Others 50
Techdirt has an amusing story about the expanding adoption of the RIAA-style business model of collecting settlement money from threats of litigation based on copyright infringement claims. This story comes with an amusing twist with the two cited companies, Davenport Lyons and ACS, being clearly related and ACS publishing an article with clearly plagiarized selections. Anything to make a buck I guess. "TorrentFreak noticed that an article apparently published by ACS Law was actually plagiarized from a variety of different sources, basically cut and pasted together with no credit or citations given at all. Remarkably, in some cases, articles with the exact opposite view of ACS Law were copied with paragraphs that just had an added sentence to the end which completely contradicted what the original article said."
AT&T Says 7.2Mbps Wireless Coming This Year 141
CWmike writes "AT&T will upgrade to High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) 7.2 wireless networking technology later this year, offering faster (up to 7.2 Mbit/sec.) network speeds to new compatible laptop cards and smartphones due to be released at the same time, the company said today. Current HSPA download speeds can theoretically reach 3.6 MBit/sec, according to AT&T executives who commented on the planned upgrade in April. AT&T did not comment on which laptop cards and smartphones will be compatible with HSPA 7.2 other than to say it will introduce 'multiple' devices later this year. Could this be one of the big iPhone announcements to come from WWDC?"
Submission + - Swedish factory fined $3,000 for robot attack (theregister.co.uk)
rodrigoandrade writes: "Maintenance worker was attacked by a robot. The robo-assault reportedly took place in 2007, when a man attempted to repair a defective machine used to lift rocks without properly checking the power supply beforehand. And unfortunately, the human head isn't all that different than a big juicy rock to such a robot."
