Given a choice, I would prefer to read the best stuff. This encourages writers to provide the most entertainment for their readers, rather than just encouraging their readers to buy popular stuff because they recommend it.

I thought Google was supposed to be the monopolist? With talk like that, I guess not.

A similar thing happens in the USA. It's not especially difficult to ID someone based on their Social Security Number and home address. The problem occurs when a lender foolishly extends credit to anyone based on that criteria alone. Rarely do they recover the money (although it does create quite a headache for the actual person). Most USA lending institutions do a much more thorough ID check nowadays. I would imagine that a bank or other business in South Korea would be smart not to exclusively use a Korean ID Number as establishment of identity.

It's good to see a big company actually fight for better prices for customers. I wish my cable company was like that. And before anyone gets me started, remember that monopolies are only abusive if they use their power to screw over the consumers; there is no antitrust protection for businesses to profit.

Your RFID comment got me thinking, since there are people who suggest using a RFID-blocking wallet. Why not cover your plate when you leave your car as a counter against the plate scanners? Is it legal to cover your license plate with a towel or something after you park it?

That $10M sounds pretty damn cost efficient compared to the costs of the obamacare website.

From the article:

So the EPA just came up with a guess, and now that they're wrong they blame it on leaky pipes? Methane is produced by many other sources besides drilling, including natural plant growth. Considering how poorly the CO2 alarmist models have matched actual global temperatures, the EPA definitely needs to study and understand the cause prior to enacting more regulations that will jack up my heating bill even further.

Many inner city schools in the United States receive extra funding from the state and federal levels. They spend huge amounts of money per student compared to the national average and private schools. If your theory is correct, then Washington DC, New York City, and Los Angeles should have the best educated kids in the world. In actuality, the United States gets mediocre results despite spending the most of almost any nation on education, with low income areas receiving even more per student on average. Neither more money nor income equality are the solutions.

It would be bad, but not for the reason you mention. It would be bad because then the alarmists don't get to tax and control the economy. Lefty socialists the world over are severely panicking that this prime opportunity is evaporating before their eyes.

The report recommends cutting emissions to control the weather. As if their lower carbon air will somehow hover only over Australia to keep temperatures down, while China and the other high polluters in Southeast Asia will hold in the heat. If only Australia can experience man-made global warming despite no global temperature increase in the past 10 years, surely they can cool off via the same mechanism as well!

As a side note, the United States is already one of the biggest spenders on education, and yet gets very mediocre results.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/25/where-u-s-stands-in-education-internationally-new-report/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/

So even if they decide to throw a lot more funding for this STEM education it is unlikely to have any real impact.

I suppose I'm considering a longer term buying and usage scale. The article mentions the high prices were December 11th, and the low prices were December 24th. It is concerning to me that my appliances might not operate for 13 days at a time until the price drops again. Certainly price aware appliances are a good idea, and could be combined with a battery or storage mechanism. But ideally I want to buy electricity at 0.50 euros/MWh, store it and ignore high prices while I continue to use my appliances at arbitrary times, buy additional electricity when the price falls again, and then laugh at anyone who paid 35 euros/MWh because they got their electricity from conventional generation while mine was generated and stored from renewable.

That is one of the problems with wind and solar: they are unpredictable. Free markets cannot "smooth it out" for consumers, because if there is large-scale reliance on renewable and the wind/solar generation fails, then there will be a shortage of conventional fossil-fuel/hydro/nuclear generated power. A better solution may be the development of longer term energy storage and batteries, such that consumers can buy at low prices and avoid buying at higher prices.

How many brand PC units were replaced by custom built PCs?

I think that's the point of the experiment, to create more life-like situations to attempt to find out how people would actually react in real life. A test that actualls kills people would be obviously immoral. But would people react differently from a text description of events? What happens if we someday create a simulation so life-like that human participants believe the virtual victims are real? We can't answer that yet, but we're inching closer and closer. And it appears that we are trending towards "save more people" rather than "protect those in the right-of-way" or "don't change events if it leads to someone else's death".