What a pathetic individual.

Actually, parking does. And maintenance goes way down. And insurance too, if you file your paperwork properly. And registration is what - ten bucks? :P

Now if only mopeds weren't so noisy...

Well, neither are cars. I can't fit one through a door for example. :D

Aside from just being playful (sorry if you don't enjoy that sort of thing) , the point I was making was that there is a hell of a lot of room for improvement even still, and people might benefit from a wider perspective in that the answer _may_ not be to buy a shiny new car, but to buy a shiny new bicycle instead.

I'm sure a cyclist's efficiency drops dramatically with 60mph of wind! You could mitigate that with a fairing and a fancy recumbent bicycle. (Cyclists have actually achieved that speed, with such equipment.) But they kept that up for a matter of minutes, not hours.

That said, you can always put your chosen system on top by messing with the parameters.

For example: BMW's 2014 i3 has a 38 mile range, but I've been known to go over a hundred miles on a bicycle in one day. So, factor in two charge cycles, and not only use less fuel, I might actually outrun the vehicle as well.

Fun aside:

Cheetahs are significantly faster than humans, but over a long range, humans on foot can actually catch up with a cheetah and overtake it. Somali tribesmen recently did this to catch a cheetah who was attacking their livestock. (Reference: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... ) Walking on two legs is a hell of a lot more efficient than walking on four.

That cost chart happens to include capital cost (manufacturing a solar panel) but only barely factors in the environmental degradation cost (crap spewed into the atmosphere by a coal plant). The adjustment chosen - $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions - is very optimistic, and acknowledged to be arbitrary. That's why the only number that comes close in your short list is nuclear, which factors in disposal cost.

Personally, I'd be happy to increase up-front cost to save on the back end. And given the popularity of electric and hybrid cars, I'm not alone in that feeling.

I've been getting five or six times this efficiency for years!

"A person riding a bicycle at 15 miles per hour (24 km per hour) burns 0.049 calories per pound per minute. So a 175-pound (77-kg) person burns 515 calories in an hour, or about 34 calories per mile (about 21 calories per km). A gallon of gasoline (about 4 liters) contains about 31,000 calories. If a person could drink gasoline, then a person could ride about 912 miles on a gallon of gas (about 360 km per liter).
( Source: HowStuffWorks website )

Actually I can tell you from first-hand experience that a WHOLE LOT of tinkering goes on behind those doors.
The real difference is this: When Apple comes up with something half-assed, it goes where it belongs: In the trash can.
When Microsoft comes up with something half-assed, they ship it and try to make a buck before anyone (even their own management/engineers) can catch on.

Here's the point: We've all already begun to acknowledge the death of privacy. Most of us know that yes, we stand a chance of being recorded at any time, at any place. That's oooold news, Admiral Burrito. With this knowledge in hand, the point of contention is now, "How well is access to that information controlled?"

Consider Mr. J. Random Dork, in an Apple store, aggregating thousands of photos of strangers without consent, for his own purposes. He is showing people, by his own conduct, that he is not a very good steward of the information he is collecting. He didn't ask the subjects, he didn't ask the venue, he didn't ask legal counsel, he didn't even ask his peers. In fact he deliberately avoided all those responsible inquiries because he knew his project was objectionable to all of them from the outset. Directing anger at him is not "shooting the messenger". Once you're writing your own code, you've pretty much moved beyond the "messenger" role and into the "perpetrator" role.

The $C000 address space was used for softswitches. The areas you're thinking about are $2000-$3FFF and $4000-$4FFF, Hi-res pages 1 and 2 respectively.

Each page held 192 scanlines of data, with each scanline described from left to right in a continuous line of 40 bytes. The upper left corner of the screen was described in the first byte ($2000 or $4000).

So far, so good - but everything after that is madness.

$2000 is the upper left corner, yes. But the next scanline down is located at $2400. The one after that at $2800. And so on, through eight scanlines, with the eighth at $3C00, until the ninth which begins back at $2080. Then the routine of adding $400 each time goes for another 8 scanlines, until the 17th starts at $2100.

And it gets even worse. And don't even get me started on the whole "8th bit of every byte swaps the palette for the other 7 bits" thing...

Sorry; you must have mistaken me for an iOS developer. I am an end-user.

Nothing on your list gets within shooting distance of "misery" for me, except perhaps tethering, which is now a non-issue since Verizon changed their data plans. Now I tether effortlessly.

The non-Apple apps that I use the most are Fandango, Flickr, Zillow, Facebook, Kayak, and VLC. These were all free. You claim there is a disincentive to releasing free software, and though it's not apparent to me, I'm willing to take your word for it.

On the other hand, I understand developers like to get paid, and given that my nephews have had more than five hours of fun playing "So Long Oregon" on the iPad, I'm don't begrudge the author the two dollars they were asking for. I remember when all they wanted was Nintendo DS games and those cost thirty dollars each. Even now - today.

No competition with Apple apps? Look at it from my point of view: I don't care that there aren't ten different apps for playing music, seven for chatting, five for browsing the web, and three for reading email. To me, it's a challenge and an accomplishment to just get ONE DAMN SONG onto the thing, from my computer to the iPad, and get it to play. And hey! It turns out I don't have to. If I bought it on the computer, now it just shows up on the phone.

Do you understand my point of view? I am far from miserable. Maybe the traditional car metaphor will help. Playing music on this thing is as essential and obvious as a steering wheel is in a car. You're saying I should be miserable, because there isn't a thriving market for installing a second steering wheel in my car. I just do not care. And there are millllllliiions of me.

Please define "misery" in this case?

Sounds like that job I had at Wendy's when I was seventeen. Thank goodness I had the spare time and the local resources to train myself to write code. If I had only my JOB to train me, I would probably be putting in my 20th year as a "grill technician" right now. :D

Oh, if only the forces "keeping" these people deprived were torn away - the power-mad junta or the corrupt government or the insidious state religion - the ordinary masses would rise like corks in the ocean, to bob in the daylight of prosperity and peace! They would draft up a Bill of Rights and immediately self-organize into law-abiding citizens, engaging in fair trade and cultural egalitarianism, thanks to the natural civilizing force just waiting to be unleashed within them!

Curse you, Chinese government, for being a reflection of the collective cultural history of your own nation! Here, let's just invade China and depose all those bastards in the "status quo", who have their boots on the necks of the citizenry. We'll reform their government into a model of our own, where even peasants get a fair shake, and the bullet trains all run on time.

Sure, it was an insane boondoggle when we tried it on Iraq. But this time it'll be different.

So? Foxconn would refuse the contract if it gave more than the standard crap. Foxconn does not. Foxconn gives the standard crap.

Luckily, even today's standard crap is a lot better than the situation 60 years ago, when no crap whatsoever was given, during, for example, the "Great Leap Forward".

You think an 80-hour factory workweek and a bunk in a dormitory is bad? How about having your land taken from you, then having you and your neighbors herded onto it like cattle, to work 80-hour weeks for the government, and sleep right there on the ground between shifts? This was what was going on in China, two generations ago.

Foxconn represents progress and the Chinese know it. What would you have them do differently (and why should they listen to you)?