I apologize for not being clearer in my post. I was not making a comment one way or another on sChatwin's rebuttal, but was instead noting that the term "average" was incorrectly defined. My aim was not to discredit the post, and I hope it did not come across that way, but rather to point out and correct an inaccurate statement, in a similar manner of that which sChatwin's post employed.

(Also, just FYI, your post came across rather self-righteous -- you might want to tone that down. :))

Actually, average can mean many things. What you are describing in called the mean. It could also be referring to the mode, which is the most commonly occurring value in a data set. Or perhaps the median, which is the middle value of a data set: half of the population uses less and half uses more. Or any of the numerous ways you can compute an "average." Wikipedia's article provides a good starting point to familiarizing yourself with this topic.

In summary, never assume that you know which method was used to compute an average unless it is explicitly defined. I didn't take the time to examine the original paper to see how wrong the newspaper restatement was, so it is possible that it was better defined there.

to reduce pollution and other environmental problems . . . for one day a week have cereal for breakfast, A PB & J and Banana sandwich for lunch and a plate of pasta for dinner

Let me get this straight. To be eco-friendly, forego natural sources of energy and use factory-produced ones?

That really doesn't seem that much for a whole year. A person can't live more than 4 or 5 days without water, and health professionals recommend people drink 2-3 liters of water per day.

You might want to rethink that. Let's be generous and assume 4 L a day for a year:

4 L * 365.25 days = 1461 L/yr

At 2,500,000 L in an Olympic-sized pool, that only accounts for about 0.058% of the pool's volume.

And that's just drinking water - people also need to bath and use water for cooking.

Indeed, and I don't have a good method for approximating this, though the quantity used in drinking water is such a small fraction of the pool's volume that I wouldn't anticipate these additional activities using a reasonable percentage of the volume. Use your water bills to determine your annual consumption and see for yourself. (Be sure to divide by the number of people in your household!)

Read up on it for more information. This is my understanding of it:

• The Model A (128 MB RAM, no ethernet port) is $25
• The Model B (256 MB RAM, ethernet port) is $35

The first run is of the Model B, as they anticipate more people are interested in that set of hardware. Their FAQ likely provides more in-depth information that what I have provided here.

Because the stores don't pay very much for used games.

Indeed, but you're forgetting that you can bypass used game stores and sell directly with sites such as Amazon, half.com, ebay, etc.

So, for example, when I buy a used game for $30 -- because I never buy brand new games, and I don't care to play online anyways, I can sell it again in a few weeks for approximately the same price, minus the cost of shipping.

The used games stores are bad for the industry.

I disagree. If buying new were the only option I had, I would simply do without. It's the same argument for pirates -- if they had to pay full price, they'd simply do without. This isn't something that I personally lose any sleep over. It's very easy to stop consuming (overpriced) entertainment, and there are many alternatives in the world to occupy one's time with.

Fair disclosure: I'm a software developer in the video games industry. (And I'm supposed to be writing some code right now. :-X)

I really don't follow ebook formats because pdfs have always been my portable format of choice, and I have no ebook reader. I skimmed the article, but I could not find any points on what makes this superior to a pdf file. What advantages does the Kindle format or epub format offer which a pdf cannot do?

I saw some mention of audio and video and javascript, but pdfs can support that. Why recreate the wheel? From reading the article (where perhaps the author doesn't know what he is talking about?), it sounds like it's trying to do everything HTML can, but not be HTML.

Can anyone please clarify this for me?