1 Hour? That's actually quite long for a 10 mile bike trip. A person in reasonable shape, on a reasonable bike could probably do that in 30-40 minutes. 1 hour would be really taking it easy, or if there was quite a few hills.

It's funny this came up, because I don't actually own a car. I just can't financially justify it. I get to work by cycling and take the bus in the winter. I could save a bit of time by driving a car, but not a whole lot. The real difference would be in the winter, but there's only 3 months out of the year where I can't ride my bike, and owning a car for the other 9 months where I wouldn't use it is just a huge waste of money. Living in a rural area, I would most likely not be able to live without a car, but living in the city, I really don't see how people justify the high costs. You can rent a car for $30 a weekend in the winter. Insurance is covered by many credit cards. So you can have a car every weekend in the winter for less than it costs to own a car.

I think this is a big problem as well. Cars keep on getting more complicated and adding more and more standard features. As a result, owning a new car is something that many people only dream of. Many people are driving second, third, or fourth hand cars that a decade or more old. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as vehicle production creates quite a lot of pollution, and you don't want everybody trading in automobiles every year like they do with cell phones. And it also means cars are lasting a long time and are quite reliable. The flip side is that you're going to have a lot of old engine technology on the roads that may not be as efficient as the newer stuff.

The problem is that Widescreen monitors aren't quite wide enough. So you can't fit 2 browser windows side by side without having some kind of horizontal scrolling. Sure, ideally sites would adjust, but there's a lot of websites out there that make you scroll horizontally on anything less than 1024 pixels wide.

The other problem is that the window managers don't handle high resolution wide screen monitors well enough. Ideally you could get a large 4k monitor and have the computer pretend it's 4 regular monitors and a windows would maximize to fill the virtual monitor, or have a full screen option for things that you would actually want to fill the whole screen, which would really only be needed when you are watching a movie or playing a game.

That must be wrong, or the lawmakers are incredibly stupid. How are the publishers even supposed to be aware of all the entities that are using their content? Sure they could check the usual suspects like Google News and get money from them, but what about the new and upcoming news aggregators. How is a publisher to know who is republishing their content (in whole or in part)?

If it really is that way, then can't Google News still operate in Spain but just only show content from publishers it knows to be not in Spain. I'm sure the Spanish publishers would love to only have American content featured on Google News Spanish Edition.

Also, how does this make it OK for Google News to reuse the content belonging to Spanish publishers when people go to some other version of Google News. Does the law not require them to collect money for content shared to other countries?

Isn't that what a robots.txt file is for? Does Google somehow now obey robots.txt when spidering sites for news content? If you don't want Google to republish your content without compenstation, you should disallow their bot in your robots.txt file.

Also, I would like to know why this only applies to Google news. I'm pretty sure Google puts excerpts from the article in regular search results as well. Why are those excerpts not counted in this legislation while the ones on Google News are?

The Raspberry Pi is kind of in a weird situation, and I can't understand why it really caught on. On one hand, it's overkill for little electronics projects where something like an Arduino would be much better suited. On the other hand, it's not quite powerful enough to act as a respectable desktop or media center. The disk I/O is very lacking because it doesn't support an interace with DMA. Various disk intensive applications like torrents will bring the thing to its knees. If the video doesn't happen to be in a codec that is supported in hardware, then there's no chance of it having the horsepower to decode it.

As far as media centers go, It makes way more sense to get a low power Intel board that you know will have enough power to do everything, and will be able to run just about any application and run Windows or Linux as you prefer.

Might be cheaper in the short run, but in the long run, you have to keep on replacing them. Get a decent monitor, keyboard and mouse, and they will last for many years. Then you can replace the computer as it stops working, or as newer computers come along at really low prices.

Can this device run Flash in the browser? If it can, I'd be very likely to get one for each of my kids for doing their homework and general computing on. I'm not a big fan of flash, but it's necessary for some of the homework/game sites the school uses. Combine it with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and something like this seems to be good enough to be a fully functional computer.

I think the problem is with how much they charge for the upgrades. I'm not going to pay $100 for an OS upgrade on a computer that's only worth $200. I might as well just wait until I buy a new computer where the license comes with the computer and I only actually end up paying $30 for the license. The reason that you still see people running XP, is because people are still running computers they bought with XP, and people don't want to spend $100 to upgrade the OS. If it was only $30, you'd probably see a lot more people upgrade. I know I updated a couple computers to Windows 8 when they had their introductory offer of $39 for the upgrade.

I can buy a gallon of milk (4L actually, but I'm Americanizing it) for $4.00. There's no reason that a coffee drink with a little bit of extra milk should cost $2.00 extra over the regular coffee. You can actually dump half the coffee out if you want, and fill up half the cup from the self serve cream/milk if you want. The real reason that it's $4.00 for the fancy coffee is that people are willing to pay it. If nobody bought coffee and milk at that price, they wouldn't sell the product, or they would have to sell it at a price people were willing to pay.

Yeah, which is why I don't think the correct solution is to mount a lawsuit against people making a product that blocks ads, nor is it the right solution to mount a lawsuit against your own customers. I think it's kind of a bad situation that sites are in. Even if they only have good ads that don't take up a bunch of resources and screen real estate and aren't really that obtrusive, they still risk getting blocked because there are a lot of other advertisers that do have intrusive ads that most people don't want to see.

The problem is that using ad block can kind of be compared against messing with your electricity or water meter so you aren't billed for as much. I understand that it's inherently different, because there is no agreement/requirement set up to view the ads in exchange for browsing the website they are on, but that's basically how things are set up. There's only a few ways things could work.

First option. Web site is free to use and there are no ads. Person visiting the site is happy, but the person hosting the site has no way to generate money, other than asking for donations, but that could be considered an ad for the site itself.

Second Option. Only people who pay see the site. This works for the website owner, because they are ensured that everyone pays, but breaks the general way in which most of the internet is used, because you can't send a link to a friend and have them view the content if they haven't paid. Works for sites like Netflix but wouldn't work for something like a blog.There would still be problems with not everybody paying because people would share accounts.

Third Option. Website maker puts up ads on their site to make money for operating the site. If the user blocks the ads then the person operating the site cannot generate any money

Fourth option. The website owner sells actual products at their website and makes money that way. This works if the website is an actual store, as that's what the user came there to do, but very few users, if any, are going to buy something from a website that isn't actually a store. Also, the person operating the website also has to operate a store, which they may have no expertise or interest in doing.

Feel free to come up with some other ways of generating income from a website to recoup the costs of running one. There aren't a lot of good options. I realize that some ads can be over the top and extremely annoying. In that case I just usually leave the site and try not to go there in the future. I don't like blocking ads that are not intrusive, as that undermines the website's ability to make money, and if it's a good website, I want it to remain in operation.

more data than will fit in the device's memory

. I record my bike rides with my GPS. Not once in the last 2 years have I had to remove data off the device because it ran out of space. I think in total there might be a few megabytes worth of data, and it's only that big because they use XML to store the data, which is inherently verbose. There is less data than actual XML. I'm sure that a simple fitness bracelet could store a lifetime's worth of data in under 1 GB.

If home owners could take advantage of using batteries to balance out the peaks in electricity usage, the electricity companies would probably be doing it already. Maybe not in the US, but some power company in some country would be doing it if it was economical. The reason it's not being done is because it's not economical yet. Perhaps someday it would be, and I hope it is soon. As soon as we get battery technology that makes it economical to do so to offset the peak usage rates, renewable forms of electricity and other generation methods like nuclear are a lot more convenient because you don't have to worry so much about variability when the power is generated or (in the case of nuclear) how fast you can ramp them up when more power is needed immediately.