Flat rate unlinked with actual usage is bad, does not make economical sense. You should buy an EV and charge it for free, thus saving expenses on gas.

World over people are being encouraged to save electricity and use it judiciously. Flat rate encourages wastage and defeats the whole purpose of the smart grid initiatives on which several carbon reduction targets depend.

The grand parent obviously did not know what he was talking about. But your post regarding smart grid is interesting.

Still GP has a point. There are far too many people who don't care / don't know about their electricity bill. The electricity bill is less than 10% of their monthly income, hence they don't care. With smart grid features like time of day, seasonal or demand response load adjustment even if we can reduce their bill by 20%, It would still be too minuscule reduction for them to notice or care.

Hence, sometime I wonder if all these investments in smart grid would fetch the promised benefit at all or not.

A smart gird researcher here.

I am least bothered about which time zone I live in. My daily dealings is with people in my current time zone. For few times that I have to deal with far away people its no big deal to adjust. It is same thing as the adjustments need to arrive at a meeting at right time.

There are far more important criteria like quality of living, commute time, education opportunity for children to care for. I am reminded of the time zone only when /. mentions it in their stupid polls.

This is Indian season of festivals. We have four months of back to back festivals starting with rath yatra at the beginning of monsoon (Varsha) culminating in biggest festival of Diwali at the end of autumn (Sharad).

This year the rains are good and we are looking forward to a bumper harvest. Even though there is lot of urban population the ultimate mood of people depends on amount of rains.

There was a recent Indian movie which revolved around the name Khan. Its called 'My name is Khan'.

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

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188996/

And all Khans are not terrorists

Gopla

There was a recent Indian movie which revolved around the name Khan. Its called 'My name is Khan'.

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

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188996/

And all Khans are not terrorists

Gopla

The poll result will be skewed by all Europeans voting for 10+ countries, without much experiencing any substantial differences. So much for the university of Life.

You can travel a lot, and experience much more in India, without ever leaving the country. I have been to very common places within India where I cannot communicate effectively in spite of knowing three Indian languages plus English. I could not read any of sign boards because of differences in scripts. While I have been to Europe, where at least, they use common Roman scripts, which you can make out if you use little imagination.

Better I not say regarding strangeness of breakfast, in India. Words are not enough to describe the differences, the complete menu changes almost every 50 km.

You can experience, the most harsh desert, most coldest whether, most rainy place, oldest living city with continuous history all within radius of 1500 KM from capital New Delhi.

It's all conjecture, the entire basis of his attack is that it could be bad because it's heavily influenced by microsoft. I don't trust microsoft as much as the next person, but get them for what they DO do (while safeguarding yourself from harm), as opposed to what they could potentially do, with their own platform.

The people that are making this initiative have every right to do what they want with their own code.

it's amazing the lengths people went to to justify how the UI was improved by not being able to do something as simple as copy/paste, by talking about "new paradigms"

It would be amazing if it was true. But it's not.

What people did say was that all the various suggestions that people here and on blogs were making for how to do the UI were shit. And that Apple would probably do cut'n'paste in a future version when they came up with a good UI for it. Which is exactly what happened.

Do you believe they will succeed this time? I have been aware of such plans for as long as I remember, more than 20 years. They have been trying, but it is quite easy to remain anonymous in India than anywhere else. Government does not matter as far as individual freedom is considered.

I don't know whether you are Indian or not. But India is HUGE, and you might have experienced just a small bit of India.

It has a place for everybody. From poorest of poor to one of the richest man on earth. You can be atheist or you can be most religious person. There are many saints who stay naked for their whole life, without even getting a second look from anybody. You can belong to any race, religion, caste, creed and still feel at home in India. People may gawk at you, but they welcome all with open heart.

These are sign of open society. May not be open in western civilization's sense, but open nevertheless

India has be described a an elephant as experience by 5 blind people. The blind person touching its trunk may think elephant is like a water hose, while person touching its tail may describe the elephant as a rope, and still one touching its legs will experience it as a tower.

Come and experience the Incredible India. You will get in it what you are looking for. This has been true since the age of Alexander and before.

Yes. In theory, we in India too have restricted freedom of speech and government constantly telling citizens how to behave.

But, India is such a huge country with huge population that government is overwhelmed. It cannot monitor everybody. And the society as a whole is lot more tolerant. So in practice every individual experience a true freedom and anonymity. This remains true until you become too popular and catch eye of media. Which I think is very less probability again due to huge population. May be 10000 popular people in set of 1 Billion.

Methane we produce the same old way.

Pass the baked beans, luv!

Perhaps a better question, then: How far away from zero does the sum have to get to make it profitable to move those factories that build the things we and the Chinese buy back to America?

Do we have to flip the earnings and cost of living ratio around to the point where America has 1/10th the cost of living and 1/10th the wage rates of China before we can start looking for improvement in America again?