The link I posted does mention some idiot woman who decided to chuck a bucket of water over herself while sitting on a horse. The expected thing happened - the horse bolted and the woman was killed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Although I was under the impression that the Leidenfrost effect only worked well on bare skin, so I'm surprised he didn't get frost burns to his scalp and clothed parts.

It's one of the (great many) reasons why using web apps for business frequently sounds nuts to me.

How often over the years have we heard stuff like "we can't switch from Office to OpenOffice because of the costs involved in retraining everyone to use a different UI"? Well with a "cloud app" you have *exactly* this problem, coupled with the fact that you usually get no notice that it's going to happen - you just log in one day and everything's moved around.

Flashblock will block HTML5 videos too.

Oh yeah, I'll also point out that the original poster's numbers stuck out like a sore thumb before I even looked up the figures: Petrol is lighter than water, so its immediately obvious that 4.75 tons is going to be over 4750 litres (at current forecourt prices, about £6000) and I know I don't buy anywhere close to that amount of petrol each year. Doncha just love the metric system for making such things so obvious. :)

4.75 tons of petrol is 6445 litres. Since petrol is 85% carbon, we can divide the 6445 litres by 0.85 and we get 7582 litres of petrol containing 4.75 tons of carbon.

Your answer is wrong: 4750 Kg of carbon / 0.85 = 5588 Kg of petrol. It looks like you divided by 0.80 instead of 0.85?

5588 Kg of petrol / 0.737 = 7582 litres of petrol.

Ok, I have a home connection that does 40Mbps down and 20Mbps up. It is capped to 100GB/month during the day (no cap at night, and this is when I run off-site backups and such). I never come close to exceeding that cap - the speed is useful for downloading the odd film, watching streaming HDTV, uploading photos, etc. for short periods. If I need to download a new Linux distro or something, I can do it in 10 minutes - doing this stuff over ISDN would be either very painful (requiring planning a download a long time in advance of actually needing it) or just plain impossible impossible. ADSL, again, would be rather a pain for the occasional large download.

On the other hand, if I were running bittorrent 24/7 I would be able to blow through 15TB of bandwidth in a month, were it not for the cap. But I'm not interested in doing this, so I don't understand why those people who are interested in shifting 2-3 orders of magnitude more data than me should expect me to pay more in order to subsidise the build-out cost of the ISP upgrading their network to support them.

The bittorrent crowd would characterise my 100GB monthly cap as terrible because, at full speed, I could blow through it in 5 hours. The thing that they completely fail to understand is that I never have any interest in blowing through it - I like a fast connection because it lets me do things quickly, not because I can download lots.

That sounds an unreasonably high figure.

Petrol weighs about 737g / l, so 4750Kg of petrol is 6445 litres.
Wikipedia says the carbon content of petrol is up to about 85%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
So 6445/0.85 = 7582 litres of petrol contain 4.75t of carbon.
Wikipedia suggests average fuel economy is somewhere around 5l / 100Km: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
7582*100/5 = 151640Km - I'm pretty sure that the average car doesn't travel 152Mm/year!

Lets assume you're talking about tons of CO2 rather than tons of carbon.
Apparently we multiply litres of petrol by 2.331 to get Kg of CO2 emitted: http://www.carbontrust.com/res...
So 4750/2.331 = 2038 litres. At 5l / 100Km, this gives us 2038*100/5 = 40760Km - ok, a vaguely more reasonable figure.

Apparently the average company car does around 30,000Km/year and the average private car does about 12,000Km: http://www.racfoundation.org/m...

So the average is going to be well under 41Mm and around an order of magnitude less than the 152Mm you claimed!

I'm certainly not saying that climate change is nothing to worry about - I think it's a big problem and whether or not you think it's man made, dumping vast amounts of crap into the atmosphere can't possibly be a bright idea. But I really wish people wouldn't just invent bogus "facts" to back up their arguments - the arguments should stand up for themselves, if you need bogus data to prop them up then you've got something really badly wrong somewhere.

They do seem to be rather twisting words to appear not to be imposing limits.

However, my question is: why are data caps such a bad thing? Most slashdotters seem to think that ISPs can provide truly unlimited bandwidth for zero cost, and given that most slashdotters are pretty technical I don't see how they can consider this to be a rational view. If large numbers of customers try to use large amounts of bandwidth at the same time, the only way an ISP can maintain a reasonable service is by upgrading their infrastructure. Sure, there's a lot of dark fibre already laid, but the hardware to put it into use is not free, nor is the engineer time required to install and maintain that hardware, nor is the power that the hardware draws.

So, whilst I acknowledge that a lot of slashdotters seem to think it is their god given right to max out their internet connection torrenting "moviez" 24/7, I have to question why the majority of internet users (who don't do this) should be expected to subsidise the minority who do? Why is it not better, for everyone except that minority, to cap connections somewhere above what the majority of people use, and then charge people extra if they want to download a disproportionately larger amount?

FWIW, here in the UK most of the ISPs provide a wide selection of packages with different (well publicised) caps and associated prices - those people who don't use their internet connection much get a cheap package, those who have a mid-range requirement get a mid-range package, and those who want to max out their connection the whole time either pay for an expensive package or go to one of the ISPs that offer "unlimited" connections (with the expected dire performance you'd expect from an ISP who is exclusively attracting the high bandwidth users). I really don't understand the American attitude, which on one hand is "I don't want to subsidise anyone else" (for healthcare, etc.) but at the same time "I expect to be subsidised by everyone else" (for high bandwidth internet use).

What I do object to, is ISPs using the term "unlimited" to describe packages which are clearly limited. And the terrible thing is that the regulator here has said that this practice is ok. Luckily only the crap, large ISPs seem to participate in that kind of misleading marketing, with the smaller, better performing ISPs preferring to clearly label what you're getting for your money.

I was under the impression that most commercial websites were intentionally designed so no one could actually find anything... At least, that's the only explanation I can find...

Don't hold your breath - my experience of Acer is that they don't give a damn about their customers once they've got their money

Oddly, the first generation magsafe plug on my wife's old Macbook (which I've now inherited) is fine after around 4-5 years of use. Conversely the new style one (~2 years old) has already broken due to insufficient strain relief on the computer-end (I chopped open the cable, resoldered it and wrapped the whole thing in amaglam tape... no telling how long it'll last though).

Yep, so do I. I've been in my current home for 6 years. I was in my previous home for 7 years (then I relocated by a few hundred miles). A quick Google shows solar power companies around here quoting break even points of 8-12 years (and its only that low because of the artificially high feed in tariff, which has a very questionable future). So whilst I don't "flip in 3 years for a profit", I have never actually reached the break-even point in either my current home or my previous one. I don't know what I'll be doing in 6 years - I may still be here, or I may have decided that my family needs a bigger house and moved, and 6 years ago I certainly couldn't have predicted how my life currently is.

Ok, I've not done any research into this, but IMHO around here house prices are so high that people are already really stretching their budget to buy a house. If they see two identical houses, one with freshly installed PV cells and the other without, I really can't see them laying down anywhere close to the installation cost of those panels extra to get that house. Yes it might save on the energy bills, but most of those savings are going to be used up paying off the extra large mortgage. Remember, that "8-12 year" ROI doesn't take into account the interest you're going to be charged on any loan you got to cover the cost.

The problem with solar is that it requires an upfront investment that pays back over a long term but does not significantly increase the value of your home. This means its only worth installing the panels if you can guarantee staying in your current property for a considerable length of time. Sure, some people can make that commitment (notably the older generation) but a lot of people can't.

i.e. if I spend £20K on PV panels and then sell the house, no one is going to pay £20K more for it just because it has PV panels on the roof.