Each time I watch a two-hour movie on the 6W device, it uses around 43 kJ. On the 120W device a two-hour movie uses 864 kJ - a delta of 821 kJ per movie. Given the 2000MJ number you provide, that's over 2400 2-hour movies until break-even... might be my lifetime total.

You need to take it up with Dr. Seuss! :)

Gnome has become an abysmal piece of drek not worth the effort of spitting on. The only reason I ever use it is because some configuration options for various distros are only released for the Gnome desktops on those distros. I use KDE day to day, with the sole exception of the Rhythmbox music player (which itself is just a "lesser of evils" choice -- every Linux music player I've tried sucks in some way or other.)

Gnome 2 was usable. I liked Gnome 2. I would have happily stuck with Gnome 2 and reasonable enhancements to it.

But nooooooo, the development team for the Gnome project knew "better" than everyone else how a computer should operate. They totally screwed the power user with Gnome 3, creating an unholy abortion that doesn't work well with mouse and keyboard and doesn't work well with a touchscreen. It is the worst of "both worlds", and even implements a number of widget metaphors that testing showed people didn't like as far back as 1990.

The Gnome dev team is full of egotistical idiots, and I, for one, can't wait to see them all hit the curb.

The software is open source. If the project dies, the useful bits will be picked up and forked, and all the drek they've shoved down user's throats can wither away and die a horrible, painful, screaming death as far as I'm concerned.

Now you are talking past me as well.

If a project has no users, what matter is it which license it uses?

I think you are talking past one another. Much of the interest in LLVM has come at the expense of GCC. So while GCC is not "abandoning" the GPL, certainly there seems to be a certain flow in actual users toward less-restrictive licenses. I have personally been affected by this, choosing FreeBSD rather than Linux for my server because of ZFS.

I think the nationalism is a hard-learned lesson from long ago... other than some dry academic reasons, there is little tying the entire US together. While there is plenty of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, I think the strong vein of pro-immigration comes from a blunt reality: the majority of people can directly trace back one or more ancestors who came from another country. Anyone who wants to tie themselves nationalistically to the Statue of Liberty only has to be told that it has a pro-immigration slogan as one of it's most prominent features. It's also self-sustaining... once 10% or so of the population is an immigrant for a long period of time, it becomes normal. More importantly, it becomes impossible to become nostalgic for the "good old days" before immigration. Even the anti-immigrant sentiment that you get today is more anti-Hispanic than anything else.

I have no doubt that other countries have a more progressive attitude towards sex equality, but that wasn't what I was addressing. That's why I added the disclaimer to my comment about not knowing how history will judge us.

People post clips. I start the clips. I shut them off less than half way through.

They're not funny. Letterman especially reminds me of a high school smart-ass more than a comedian. He thinks he's funny, but what everyone is laughing at is the pissed off teacher.

Yeah, that's a good point. You are in the government sphere. I'm kind of surprised it is legal to pay a public school teacher to drive traffic to any website, educational or not.

So no change then. One boring excuse for a comedian that I haven't watched in years being swapped in for another boring comedian that I haven't watched in decades.

This.

The last company I worked for had some very seasoned Linux people, and shipped a half dozen Linux servers (pre-loaded with our software) a week. The developers ran Linux; the office staff ran Windows and OS/X.

We the developers had to tweak and fiddle with our boxes for a couple of days every single time the AD server was patched or updated. We never did find drivers for the colour printer. Only one scanner out of four would work for us.

We had to run Linux in order to do the development for the servers we shipped, because each developer's workstation was an in-development image of the server software.

But from an administration and overhead position, it was a freaking nightmare.

I run Debian at home on one box, and Windows 7 on a laptop. I don't have problems with it because all the hardware I own was specifically chosen for Linux compatability. I don't have AD problems because I just let the Windows box access read-only Samba mounts from the Linux box, and don't map my drives in reverse.

But there is no way in hell I would ever recommend a shift to Linux unless it was for the entire company and they were willing to bankroll the time and effort it would take to properly set up Linux-centric file and print services.

It's just not worth the pain.

Whatever you save in licensing and hardware upgrade costs will be eaten by tech support costs in six months when you're only doing a partial/small-scale migration such as is being described.

There is the concept that the fact that she knows what the NSA did and how they operate would be a valuable thing for a company like Dropbox to know.

Its like how a coach for one team leaves to go to another team, they bring with them the knowledge of the plays and schemes that their previous team employed.

I think that reinforces my point?

Are we talking about pay in this story? No. Employment and pay is somewhere that discrimination is (mostly) considered unacceptable. This does not apply to performers.

That's exactly my point - that certain forms of sexual discrimination are perfectly acceptable in the US.