True, but it means higher standard of living. At current efficiency the whole world can not enjoy the same mobility we (West) have enjoyed for so long.
Why would someone in Africa or Asia not be allowed the same privileges as us? Demand will come eventually and if there is not enough to go around someone will get the short end. Ever noticed how commodities are becoming more expensive? It is the Chinese buying up resources (including food).

False. It is not because your house is properly insulated that you will not put it on a comfortable 21ÂC but at a blistering 40ÂC. It is not because your car is 13 times as efficient that you will drive 13 times as much.

We are not there yet. It is better to have 100 devices each consuming 1W than 1 device that consumes 400W. Off course 100 devices consuming 1W is worse than no device at all ... but I don't feel like going back to the stone age.

You assumed wrong. I live in a developed country. ;)

Never said they didn't, but it may very well be true. I am quite sure my Atom laptop or ARM netbook uses less power than anything remotely comparable from that era.

Exactly what I said: "use less power for the same amount of processing capacity"

So what is your point? You now have a higher resolution and bigger screen using less power and probably cheaper than your old 14"? I guess you missed my point. My point was that lower power usage does not mean loss of jobs, nor does it mean we have to compromise on "standards of living" or even on price as the parent suggested. Look at the quote I replied to.

This is bullshit. I could ask for a citation too. What I found on the net is that a Beetle had an average consumption of 13 L/100km. As you took a small car, I will compare it to the BMW 1 series which has an advertised consumption of 5.8 L/100 km. In tests it shows "real" usage is about 6.8 L/100 km and when you "play" with it on the track you get about 11.8 L/100 km. So even on the tracks, in "sports" mode using the airco and soundsystem you still consume less than normal use of a Beetle. Have you ever looked at the numbers for today's cars?

Exactly. Fortunately for you most European and some Asian countries are doing the right things and leading the future. It is quite sad to see the US is even unable to ratify the Kyoto protocol. It shows how the US economy is no longer leading innovation, but is rusted in their old ways.

That is bullshit. Insulating your house increases your living standard and reduces costs (less heating/cooling required). How does that "kill" the economy? It should even allow for cheaper oil (less demand). If you can save money and get better comfort, how is this bad?

Look at BMW and Mercedes. You think they compromised on power or comfort with their new line of fuel efficient cars? When you don't lose as much time at the gas station and reduce toxins how is this bad?

Household appliances use less power. This means I can now use both the washer and dryer simultaneously on the same circuit without losing the circuit breaker. When you can do more with less. How is this bad?

CPUs and other electronics use less power for the same amount of processing capacity in each generation. Higher efficiency means longer battery life, smaller/lighter components as less cooling is required, ...
You think we would have smartphones and iPads if components were as energy efficient as they were in the 60s? 70s? 80s? 90s? 2000s (P4 anyone?)? When you can have things which could not exist before, how is this bad?

I am not saying this is true for all branches of the economy, but get your head out of the sand.
Recycling (= renewable resources) is an increasing branch in our economy and we could no longer live without as we simply do not have access to cheap resources and the same will be true for energy.
A lot of our devices and habits are VERY inefficient. Every house wastes energy for generating heat (heating, cooking) and cooling (airco, fridge) at the same time. Increasing the efficiency means cutting back on costs and emissions while standards of living increases for everyone. Did you hear about passive houses? They use residual heat from appliances to heat the house.
How great would it be if each building was self sufficient and would have "the grid" only as a fall-back option? How cool would it be if you could drive to the store on the cooking grease of the previous meal? How much better would it be if you did not need to drive to work at all (work from home)?

We are now using resources which took millions of years to form. You think we can keep this pace for another 500 years? 300 years? 100 years (this may be in the lifetime of my daughter which is 3 years old now)? 50 years (this may still be in my lifetime)? Who are we to use up all the resources for our enjoyment now and leave nothing for future generations? Our current habits are UNSUSTAINABLE and HAVE to change.
Either we make changes ourselves or something cataclysmic will happen before 2150. We are at a crossroad between the responsible and the irresponsible way. Changing habits (responsible) takes effort but could preserve prosperity. The irresponsible road leads to destruction.
You remember the days when we had acid rain?
You remember the days when the hole in the ozone layer was growing?
You remember the days when nuclear waste was dumped in the oceans?

Economies and standards of living today dependent too much on cheap energy and cheap credit. Both will crumble eventually. Better prepare yourself or get wiped out and as we saw with the credit crunch (credit went away briefly), it can happen VERY fast and incur irreparable damage.
Energy efficiency (aka reduction in emissions) is essential to our way of life (short term < 70 years) and even survival (long term > 300 years).

Yeah, our downfall can only come from WMDs (Whining and Mass Delays)
Fortunately we have our elite army of supranational bureaucrats ... Eurostat will come back in a couple of months when they know with great certainty about our strength ... Unless some of the member states have presented fraudulent numbers.

Europe doesn't need to shoot down any satellite. We have the awesome power of our commission and they will stop any GPS signal dead in its tracks.
See how effective US missiles will be when their coordinates are a week in customs trying to clear all required documents and permissions.

And for a ground war. Thanks to our import taxes, over 30% of all your forces will have to fight for us. Your tanks will not meet our EURO5 norm so they will be prohibited on our soil.

HAH. In your face.

They should do this more often.
It is not that they will get sued for copyright infringement or revealing trade secrets ...

If all malware were put freely on the internet, wouldn't that dry up some of the revenue streams for the authors? Sure, you will briefly see a spike in derivatives, but I believe the way to combat covert actions is not by covert counter-actions, but by bringing it all in the open.

When you consider this to be a battle, there are a number of things which would make sense:

1) Choose your battleground where you have a tactical advantage. Draw them in the open as "we" are more numerous and have more firepower.

2) Disrupt their supply lines by removing incentives to start writing malware. When they are selling their malware, buy one copy and provide it for free. This will remove a lot of their demand as they will have to start charging more and increase their exposure (larger money transactions will stand out more) or drive them deeper underground which makes them harder to find and buy from.

3) Increase your defences by making genuine software more secure and harder to exploit. "We" are making progress in this area.

4) Decrease their firepower by implementing more control on the ISP level. This may be dangerous as there might be "civilian casualties" but spam zombies are easily identified. Remove zombie hosts from the network. Remove ISPs who do not take action on the zombies from the network. Reduce bandwidth from countries who do not take action on the ISPs. This will have an added bonus that it will also disrupt some of their revenue streams. What is the point of raising a botnet army when you cannot do anything with it?

5) Demoralise their troops by taking legal action. Seize their spoils of war (assets) and their freedom (PoW).

6) Moralise your own troops by increasing incentives to write good code and identify problems. Have them rated like their financial health and increase/decrease tax rates accordingly as would interest rates. This will give incentives to write secure code rather than rush something out the door. When problems arise, security holes are patched as quickly as they are discovered and it allows companies to pay security researchers for their effort. It may even convince some of the black hatters (mercenaries) to switch sides as it becomes more profitable.

The whole island was shifted 7 meters to the west. How will that impact the GPS time keeping? Will everything keep on working as advertised or will software (coordinates) need to be updated?
As for the speed of light: 300.000 km/s = 300 m/s or 23.3 ns difference

Speaking as a sysadmin: STOP SENDING EMAILS WITH SO FSCKING BIG ATTACHMENTS. Setup an FTP/HTTP server and send the link in the email. (Preferably public FTP and put me in CC)

C'mon. You can do better than that:
Yo mama is so fat she needs a laser cutter to clip her nails.
Yo mama is so ugly the laser light tries to bend around her.
Yo mama is so poor she needs a laser to cut the last slice of bread.
Yo mama is so stupid she uses a laser to light the house.

Always remember the warning that is on the first page of the manual.
"DO NOT LOOK INTO LASER WITH REMAINING EYE"

That would not be bad engineering, but bad management. I agree that you are not doing a good job, but it is up to his manager to identify and correct it before it becomes an issue.

Managers have responsibilities too and need to foresee these types of problems and make sure the work is being carried out with sufficient human and material redundancy. Also, HR should hire only qualified people who are actually capable of working in a team. Good people cost money, bad people cost even more in the long run. However most managers only care about numbers now and lower the expenses as far as possible to get the maximum amount of bonuses or make them look good for their managers.

IT guys are often seen as disposable lower than blue collar hired help. However when something goes wrong, it is always the lower IT guy that gets the blame as they were supposed to be all knowledgeable and should have foreseen and prevented the issue.

Back on topic. This person went out of line by changing the passwords and then later not disclosing them to others. There are ways to securely disclose them if that was an issue, or as soon as he left/was fired, the keys did not belong to him anymore. That being said he should not be facing up to 4 years of jail time if he did not do this with malicious intent or to enrich himself. Mostly one can quickly distinguish a good sysadmin from a bad one. Look at his/her documentation, see how much information and knowledge (s)he shares with colleagues. If they score bad on both even after you (as manager) asked them to improve, you know you have a time bomb on your hands.

So unless he deceived his direct and hiring managers, they should be facing the music together with him. Leading positions should be again about responsibilities and not just perks.

Where do you get your numbers from?

Let us assume we are only talking about useful code. So not including learning/pet projects or other non- Most people and organizations use a multitude of general purpose software and only a fraction of custom code. The amount of code used to write the OS and tools with which the "custom code" is usually a multitude of code which is actually produced. Then also take into account the code to run said custom code (frameworks, libraries, ...) and I would say the balance is not so clear cut. Now also take into account all the code that goes into appliances from digital thermometer to MRI machine.

The bulk of the industry is using general purpose software with only a fraction of custom code. You would be amazed at how little actual code goes into factory automation and even those programs are usually written by the manufacturers which then would not qualify as code for "in-house" use. Custom code is mainly used by IT shops, financial institutions and governments and a lot of these tasks are outsourced and performed by consultants or software houses rather than actual "in-house" developers.

Is your conclusion based on actual information or more personal experience?

I disagree. If you look fuel consumption in cars, you will notice that in the last 20 years, they consume LESS fuel, have MORE power, safety and luxury. Are they so much more expensive than they were 20 years ago? I don't think so.
LCD screens consume less power, are more space efficient and have less negative health effects than their CRT equivalents. (though some purist may say there is loss of quality as well). CRT TVs the size of the average TV sold nowadays would be vastly more expensive not to say the electricity bill which would make you think twice
When people start to better insulate their houses, they will consume less power for heating/cooling while getting more comfort. This investment is payed back within 1-2 years.

With regards to faster PCs, I beg to differ. If you didn't notice already, current generation CPUs are consuming LESS energy than their predecessors while still getting more work done and this is where we need to evolve to.
People need to start understanding that power efficiency is SAVING money without a need to compromise on features or comfort.

Getting back on topic. Even though power consumption for each device needs to go down, we will need more power as there will be more devices and more people using them. The biggest challenge in this century will be to get India and China up to Western standards. Both countries combined have about 3 billion people. Just providing them with the same amount of meat would require massive amounts of power, and then I'm not even talking about gadgets. So whatever we do, there will be a massive need for power no matter how much more power efficient we will become. Efficiency is key to preserve our way of life but clean and cheap new energy sources will be our only salvation.

Does this mean we'll start to see bootleg hard drives with pre-ripped movies soon?

How cool would it be to just plug in the new movies into the NAS?