At least, this is what I saw first hand. The teacher ran a lab full of TEN-YEAR-OLD iMacs that were STILL in regular use, and what she really wanted was for the admins to simply fund REPLACING THE ONES THAT BROKE, with SLIGHTLY BETTER USED iMacs.

Her request was denied and her objections shot down, because some salesman from Google had convinced the department head that what students really needed were bottom-of-the-barrel cheap disposable crippleware netbooks that they could take home, because The Internet or whatever.

The teacher had a standing system with a school IT guy, where all the iMacs were rolled back to a known state every night, and the internet connectivity was heavily regulated. It worked fine - all she wanted was more powerful systems so they could use iMovie without things slowing down.

The Chromebooks will all be destroyed or wear out in a couple of years. Then the school will have to fork over another round of cash to Google due to vendor lock-in. There is no advantage here. You buy cheap hardware, you get cheap hardware. Same story as ever. Chromebooks are a "solution" in search of a problem.

Unregulated app installation is a matter of FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS! A consistent UI experience is ESSENTIAL FOR DEMOCRACY! Samsung is evil! Apple is evil! Google is evil! Google is the hero! Apple is the hero! Google is the underdog! Apple is a monopoly! Google is a monopoly! Samsung is a monopoly! (In apps / search / South Korea) ONE OF THEM IS EVIL AND SHOULD BE DESTROYED! The other(s) should be GLORIFIED!

P.s. has anyone seen my schizophrenia meds?

An apple phone is quite flexible and allows quite a bit of freedom to the user. An Android phone may look cool, but as soon as you think of stuff that you like (automatic sync of your chat history, including inline video and photos, across your tablet, laptop, and phone.) you are toast.

But us geeks LIKE jihad! It makes us feel important! Like our opinion of which F&%# PHONE a person buys is somehow the morally superior one!

Don't take that from us!!!!
What would we do with all this technical knowledge!

I didn't know jQuery provided those. Thank you!

Whatevs, yo. Google Earth is pretty damned mainsteam. I run it in my browser FFS. If it's not by your metric, then it's your metric that's wrong, not the OP.

I was particularly surprised to see closures appear. So far I've only been using them in Javascript and Perl, but my experience has been that they are about 15% added flexibility for about -40% readability. That is, they make it harder to tell what's going on, more than they reduce development time.

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.