Actually, if you read more than the last chart of TFA, you see that Opera uses the most power when rendering about:blank. The last chart is pretty misleading if you're making an across-the-board comparison on anything other than the total runtime.

IE wins 3/4 of the tests, with Firefox typically running a close second. It does not win on about:blank, but is about a tenth of a percent off from Chrome there.

SSDs affect other things besides just speed. I put one in my netbook and battery life went from six hours to eight - and it boots in fifteen seconds and starts programs almost instantly. The difference in power consumption matters less in a bigger laptop, but it would still help. I also don't see why you're talking about an SSD and a 2TB drive as a binary choice. The "average user" doesn't need 2TB; they already have enough space with the ~500GB that came with their Dell. They could get an SSD, keep the hard drive they already have, get someone to move the Windows install, and have the best of both worlds.

The mistake would lie with the bank, but if they were to give a loan in your name to anyone with that information, you would indeed have a problem.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/OMB_Wiki_memo.pdf

I know I don't register at any websites.

I have found a solution.

1. Quit your job.
2. Become a private eye who tracks down workers playing hooky.
3. Get paid to go to the same bowling alley you were going to before.
4. Profit!

Didn't even need the ???

Not quite. A great idea that is hacked together will almost certainly be "borrowed" and better implemented by someone else, making them a fortune. The world still gets changed, I suppose.

According to a few different places, Sony started making a profit on PS3s in April this year. Only took them about four years to get there...

Can we stop pushing the idea that consoles are sold at a loss? The Wii has been sold for a profit since launch (source). The Xbox 360 has been sold for a profit for four years (source). The PS3 has taken the longest to get there, but it is now sold for a profit as well (source). New consoles are often initially sold at a loss, but they do not stay at that price.

The problem with the five-year lag is that the consoles are decreasing the lag the consumer sees. Crytek's CEO claims that the current generation of consoles was holding back developers. There are some games that are PC-only, but those only appeal to a fraction of the potential market, so most developers have to go for multiple platforms and accept the limitations that the old hardware has. The consumer mostly sees cross-platform games, so it doesn't look like a five-year lag at all. If there were a hardcore PC developer pushing the envelope, it might be different, but now that Crytek has developed CryEngine 3 for all platforms, I don't think anyone could do it.

I wonder how much of this is Nintendo's fault - MS and Sony look over and see their competitor beating them with half the graphics and a bit of a lower price, and they realize that graphics have hit a point that most games won't benefit that much from nicer hardware. Of course, then they think that the magic is all in the motion controls and that they need to have something that imitates that...it's like watching iphone imitators.

By 'lent once', does Amazon mean that you can lend a book to one other person at a time, or that you can lend it to one other person, once, for each purchase? If the latter, it's not exactly that useful; if the former, I look forward to the websites letting people legally trade ebooks with one another.

You make RSS sound like it's some incredibly complicated enterprise. I use a decent web browser; in the address bar, it displays a little RSS icon if the site I'm visiting has an RSS feed. I click the icon and it subscribes to the feed and tells me, unobtrusively, when new stuff is posted to it. I don't know how I'm supposed to "maintain" it, but I'm pretty sure I've never done it.

If I wanted to use RSS as a way to get general news, it would probably be inadequate. I use RSS to keep track of cool projects or blogs. If they are updated infrequently and if their posts are not immediately spread through the whole of Web 2.0, RSS is a great way of keeping track.