Same thing going on here. My desktop and media centre used to be always on. Now I've sorted out standby mode properly (3W in standby, wakes in about 4 seconds), and just the server stays on permanently.

My server was at its peak using 11 drives: 5 x 400GB, 6 x 500GB, which made quite a bit of noise, and used quite a bit of power. When I worked it out, I reckoned there was about 50W power to be saved. I decided to get rid of the RAID configuration, and replaced them with a pair of 1.5TB greenpower discs. A small cut in capacity (3.6TB down to 3TB), but it cut the machine power usage by nearly 60W - over £60/year.

I've got a box of 14 discs that are now just offline backups, although the server now also has a pair of 2TB greenpowers also.

Given that it's £20, it's the UK and the GP is correct. Retailers try to get out of it / say that it is a manufacturer issue, but of course they would. It is still down to the retailer to sort out the problem with the manufacturer on your behalf.

Agreed. Last night I tried to watch a Blu-Ray I had ripped to a plain image (I do usually use MakeMKV, but this was the 'Life' documentary series with various features that don't quite get captured right in MKV). First, PowerDVD insisted I needed to update it, which took a while. Then it told me a variety of error messages before crashing. In the end Blu-Ray is just such a pain to use on a PC that I can imagine why no one wants a disc loader type system.

Rip everything to MKV - it is way easier.

Remember though, the team who have discovered this effect have pointed out as much, and are also still skeptics of their own results. I don't mean to sound unskeptical of the result, but I think it is possible that neutrinos can under differing circumstances travel at different speeds.

You're assuming that in all cases there are no alternatives to using lots of energy, and that is completely invalid.

Tying in the London congestion charge just gives a great example for a rebuttal. London does have a decent public transport system - the tube is the quickest way of getting around. Commuting journeys across London do not need to be made in a car. The congestion charge has been effective: people go to work on the tube, or a bike.

A generic carbon tax will promote efficiency and lower consumption of carbon, but just increase costs.

> Kids these days don't know the meaning of a kilobyte.

Shouldn't that be a kibibyte?

I just don't believe that jobs are 'opened up' by older workers retiring. When people have more money, and can buy more stuff, jobs are created. If old people stop retiring, they have more money, and therefore create extra demand.

In the short term, what you say is true, and it may take a couple of years before companies see the demand trending higher, and choose to employ more people, but longer term, there isn't an economic problem in people living longer.

I can't completely agree with this. I'm pretty sure Intel would love to get rid of a lot of the cruft in the X86 ISA, and release a properly new product. Partly because they've tried it once already. The reason they can't is that so much software is compiled to work well on X86.

And in the end, when people are buying a PC, they expect to get a PC that does everything they want of it. ARM are doing very well, as smartphones become better and so bought by more people, and tablets take off. But in the end, there aren't full fledged ARM based PCs. That line is going to be incredibly difficult to cross. Maybe tablets will blur the lines - a tablet with a docking station providing keyboard, mouse and full-res monitor, might for instance create demand for desktop-style software recompiled for ARM ISA, but it is very far from a sure thing.

The real farce has been that they were allowed to tell people everyone was naming him on Twitter, and the woman's name is Imogen Thomas. If the injunction had blocked her name, it would have got rid of the obvious search on Twitter. If the injunction also prevented referring people to somewhere that the information was available, it would have left people googling searches for injunctions.

If you're going to bother with an injunction, don't let people with internet access have the search term and website surely!

Really?? Last night I just copied the last batch of photos off my camera, and it's upto 2,800 photos. I'm sure it's within a couple of years old, since my old one broke. That one had been on 4,500 photos. Admittedly, about 1000 of those photos were taken while snorkelling in the Maldives, and since I couldn't see the screen underwater, I just kept hitting the shutter and hoping!

The judge who granted the injunction did appear to suggest Imogen Thomas had attempted blackmail with the details of the story - which is part of the reason an injunction was granted.

> If by the time you get to university you don't have more than a basic (no pun intended) proficiency in programming then you're likely headed for a non-techie role.

I don't agree with this. Not everyone is from an environment where they will have been exposed to much of this stuff - certainly, before I went to university, I couldn't do any programming. I didn't know many people from any professional background really, just knew I quite enjoyed messing about with computers and figured I'd do computer science. My parents both work in the public sector, the school careers service was very heavy on public sector jobs (IIRC airline pilot was the only non public sector job which appeared on my list, and I'm colourblind which rules that one out...) In the end I've been a techie for 10 years now and am still mostly avoiding moving into management.

University is the first time people are really making their own choices on a large scale. Any assumptions made on a person before that are unlikely to be valid.

Tesco sell CFLs for 10p a piece (16 cents). That's the UK, but it's rare things are cheaper over here ...

My previous house (built 1885) had a couple of light fittings that got through a ridiculous amount of bulbs. Based on the wiring colours, it must have been about 50 years since the wiring was put in. CFLs lasted about 2 months, but incandescents only lasted 1-2 weeks. My current house had most of the rewiring done in the 90s, and I've only had to replace 1 CFL in over 3 years.

I'm guessing you're also American. Because I think in the UK and the rest of Europe (and seemingly the world) people do still like Nokia.

Naming a current product might be an issue, because they do have lots but without big launches. But if I needed a phone I'd find plenty of current models in the shop. What are they particularly good at? They're very compact (iPhone is just too big for my liking, and most smartphones are equal size to bigger), excellent battery life (mine lasts about a week between charges), work beautifully as a phone, I've never had a dropped call (for that matter I'm not sure I even heard about dropped calls until smartphones came around...), very good value for money, well built, designed with thought about how it will be used as a phone ...

The best smartphone I've seen yet is the HTC Desire, but second is an N900 which I like enormously. The iPhone 4 gets third place for me. The Nokia OS isn't the prettiest, but it is definitely one of the most usable.

It isn't black and white - but the shade of grey has been getting darker since the Oracle takeover. I'd say they've taken a pragmatic view that Java had a lot going for it, despite not being 100% open. It seemed to me the shine had been coming off Java for a while before the Oracle takeover anyway - there are plenty of gems in there, but getting useful stuff done still seems a bit cumbersome.