The point of the article was that these boxes consume almost as much energy as a washing machine. That is definitely wrong. The article did not measure power consumption of either device. 500 watts is not how much current a DVR of any type consumes. I have a computer here at home that has 14 Xeon cores and a high-end graphics card. It doesn't even consume 500 watts, and yes, I measured it.

The article is a typical alarmist article with a misleading title.

Big energy consumers in homes: Electric dryers (1-2kw), lighting (1kw for a home), electric water heaters (1kw), electric ovens (1-2kw), coffee machines (800W-1kw), toasters/toaster ovens (500w), Vacuum cleaners (500W-1k), Hair dryer (500W), TVs of any type (200W-500W), computers (100W-800W), air conditioning (1-5kw). Each of these devices uses easily 10-50 times as much as a cable box/DVR. Only some of these devices are left on all day or for a significant portion of a day, but they all consume more than a STB/DVR.

I read the article. It does not explain the 500 watt rating. It doesn't even say what was consuming the 500 watts. Nowhere was any device actually tested scientifically. Someone just read the labels and panicked.

There is no mention of the actual device model or any details for the 500 w cable box. I think it's a complete lie. 50 watts is pretty good for a modern digital cable box imo.

I expect that with a two-party system every single official in government has a political party affiliation. This is nothing new.

What I do not expect is for them to intentionally target groups which oppose some party they are adherents to. This is in direct contradiction to their job description, and of course, to the constitution.

What do I expect? I expect them to do better.

There's nothing "stupid" about naming a political party with a political name.

It's a real scandal when the party in power can leverage tax exempt status, or any other "treatment" from the IRS. You can agree or disagree with the political opinions or positions of these parties, but you must never use political power to prevent another party from gaining traction.

That's more than a scandal, it's pure simple corruption.

You'll probably reply with something political now, such as that you don't like the tea party or Romney or something. Totally irrelevant, save it for a real political discussion.

I was just wondering the same thing.

Bet it taste pretty good actually.

(Good luck getting fresh coffee beans)

I don't know about in space, but here on Earth, I work at a NASA center and we have one of the best "underground" espresso clubs I have ever seen. Very sophisticated engineering techniques have been applied -- our machine gets serviced in the NASA machine shop sometimes.

You should see that place near launch deadlines. Poor grinder never gets a break!

Here's the thing though, the president sets the priorities for NASA.

NASA then gets a budget.

Then, NASA has to cut existing programs in order to execute the presidictactor's NASA goals. This kills off projects that have been years in the making. Or kills off projects that are already in space and now don't have the funding to take data.

So there are certainly benchmark levels of funding that would be appropriate to help NASA maintain and not waste it's current projects.

(Also, there is the political challenge of trying to fund missions that aren't in-line with the current administration's policy or desired image...)

Straight from 1984's Ministry of Truth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Excellent writing.

Completely agree with you. I'm not a windows user, but 2k seemed really quite good.

I also liked NT4 and Windows 7 seems to be not too bad. Mind you, I am only comparing windows to windows...

Rhywden,

I have to reply to you because I feel you really don't get it. I understand, you're probably a grade-school teacher. And that's a hard job. And I think if the qualifications are set high, that's fine, they should be. After all, you are entrusted with the official education of, as you say, +20 kids. I don't mean to trivialize this.

You mentioned that I am trying to "retract my statement" by narrowing it down to lower grades. I'm not though, my argument isn't about college or high school. I know there's a time to learn some hard facts, and I wouldn't want someone that didn't have a firm grasp on chemistry teaching chemistry. My argument is that you don't have to be an "intellectual" to educate. There may be situations that call for it, yes, but we're in a thread here about Reading Rainbow. This isn't about taking Chem 101. This is about inspiring children to learn and create. That's what Reading Rainbow did.

It's a story I can relate to too. I found school completely boring. While the teacher was babbling on about grammar or how to look at nutrition labels, I was making notes about circuits I wanted to try out when I got home. In second-grade I designed a motor that used a rather novel placement of permanent magnets as a journal entry. The teacher gave me a zero because it wasn't creative. These motors are now common-place in electric cars.

On the other hand, when I was 5, I had seen how tubas are made on Mr. Rogers. And I saw how a composer uses a digital sampler on Reading Rainbow. I watched "Square One" on PBS and learned about fractions and division. I saw a "computer" on The Bloodhound Gang that could hold several books on a microchip. I watched Nova and learned about blackholes. One of my few memories from fourth grade was a behind the scenes tour of a check processing facility, where I saw enormous IBM mainframes with open-reel tape feeding them instructions. I knew it was outdated at the time, but it made an impression on me. I remember getting to sit in the cockpit of a 747 on a flight from NY to LA. I was only a child, but looking at the radar screens, comm systems, etc, it was awesome. I remember changing spark plugs with my dad, and learning about how combustion engines work. I remember looking at how the guy at the grocery store ground up the beef (specifically, how the motor was connected up to the grinder). I remember watching the recording engineer at a live show checking each microphone. I remember looking at a watermill grind wheat at the Eno in North Carolina. I remember my uncle's distortion and flanger effects on his guitar.

Looking back, of course there were "intellectuals" involved. I'm not writing them off all together. But you can't just write off the cast of Reading Rainbow because your favorite PhD isn't on the board. Look beyond the diplomas. If a TV show can get kids inspired, how about we support it.

Another point, a science teacher in junior high explained to me and a buddy of mine that if we kept goofing off in the back of the class and not doing his homework, we would never become anything. Well guess what... My friend dropped out of high school and started his own engineering company. I took a different path, but I ended up as an engineer at a top national lab. Saw that teacher recently (an intellectual), and you better believe he took back his statement.

Inspire people and they will learn to learn on their own. They will enquire about what they do not understand. This alone is more important than learning about derivatives or electrons. When I was in school they said electrons had "orbits", something we now know is completely wrong. But that never really held me back. When I took "real" chemistry in college, I got the full story. No harm done.

Please do your students a favor. Stop with the powerpoints, the graphs, and the dimensional analysis. Turn off the calculators, shut down the computers. Get the students into a school bus ("field trip") and slam on the breaks in the parking lot at 10 MPH. That's acceleration. Want to teach about Faraday? Maxwell? Stop with the integrals. Build some circuits. Get some walkie-talkies. If you create an interesting situation, the students will naturally want to learn more.

That's all crap any decent sysadmin can accomplish with simple shell scripts and a database.

This kind of thing has been going on since the 70s or possibly even earlier, and it was called "system administrating". When demands became too high for an admin to manually do this sort of work, he or she wrote scripts (or as you would say, "autonomous agnostic software") to balance loads and free up resources automatically. Some of this work was the basis for memory-protected SMP OS designs. On a larger scale, this is how most enterprise systems operate.

So what you call "cloud computing" most people used to just call "getting work done efficiently"

And, velocity is change in location. Each level of "change" is really just a derivative, and going from position to speed to acceleration is a lot easier than doing dy/dt...

But totally irrelevant to the topic. What kids need is inspiration to learn and create rather than being sat in front of the Cartoon Channel or learning how to kill in a video game.

If that means watching shows about science, or making a volcano, or rolling down a hill in a box, I'm all for it! With or without the "intellectuals."

This is where the "anti-intellectualism" comes from. A person on slashdot thinks I am unqualified to teach children if I don't understand that oxidation is loosing electrons. WTF. Can you see just how "out of it" you are?

What on earth does fundamentals of chemistry have to do with my qualifications as part of an educational system for a child? If I were home schooling my kids, and I didn't know what a term meant, I would ask someone that does. Or get a textbook. Or look online. I've never heard such ignorance. I need to be an "intellectual" to educate?

Get your head out of your ass. You have no idea what it means to really raise children. Much less what qualifications a show like Reading Rainbow needs to inspire the Pre-K-3rd grade crowd to read.

Gosh, sure hope Levar Burton remembers his basic chemistry before he reads any more books to my kids! (sarcasm)

How different is that from automated nightly builds with a fricking multi-arch makefile?

You keep defending "the cloud" like it's something new. It's not! People got faster Internet connections so services like google docs, Netflix, AWS, etc got a lot faster and more sophisticated. There is nothing intrinsically new here. The buzz word sounds good to the public and to knowledge-less managers, so it stuck.

It's no different than you calling the cloud "autonomous" or "agnostic". People have considered computers to be "autonomous" to one degree or another for a long time.

How about this definition: The cloud is a marketing buzzword used to describe modern-day implementations of non-local time-sharing services. It is frequently paired with cloud-like icons. Any website that hosts data in any way can claim to be offering a service "in the cloud"