In suburban Auckland, New Zealand I pay NZD $0.2388/kWh for energy plus NZD $0.3750/day for the connection. That converts to USD $0.1863/kWh and $0.2925/day.

My last bill, after prompt payment discount, cost NZD $110.53 (USD $86.2252) for 456 kWh which works out to a overall cost of $0.1891/kWh including the daily fee and discount.

The Web needs a practical HTML standard that documents how you DO write HTML, not how you theoretically SHOULD write HTML.

That's a nice idea of standardizing based on how people do write HTML. However if we go down that train of thought, whose method of writing HTML should we standardize? Should we have a standard that adpots how Microsoft does HTML, or how Mozilla does HTML, or how Apple does HTML, or, worse, a hybrid/combination of these?

At the end of the day the only practical way to develop a useful standard is to get everyone together to agree on a standard and have commitment from everyone involved to actually implement the standard as specified.

Mod parent up.

Skype installing a toolbar isn't half as annoying as the JRE (Java Runtime) or my Logitech Mouse Software installing the Yahoo! toolbar.

Why bother installing the Logitech mouse software? Surely it works fine with out it?

Something's wrong with your configuration then -- Flash should be able to use the hardware decoder to handle these kind of videos.

Which I have no problem doing on my hardware. Seriously, take a look at the latest (read: 2 years old) stuff coming out of Intel and see how well it performs with common tasks required by 95% of users. Your example, HD YouTube videos, work pretty well on this 2 year old machine using integrated Intel graphics. I had a nVidia PCI-Expres card (with some 1GB of DDR RAM) for a while and I didn't notice much difference when I switched back to Intel graphics -- only notable difference was found in games released in the last few years or so.

I have an Intel GPU on my desktop at home and it works fine with Flash aninmations. It does have difficulities with recent games I concede that, but Flash animations isn't too much of a challenge for Intel's GPUs.

Indeed. Back in the days before zonal pricing for roaming, Vodafone New Zealand used to set their roaming prices for individual foriegn networks. There were a few cases in several countries where it was cheaper to roam on a non-Vodafone network for certain types of traffic (i.e. inbound voice, outbound voice, texts, data, etc) than with a Vodafone network. I found that highly amusing at the time. However I suspect they made a lot of money off people who thought Vodafone was the cheapest roaming parnter -- when it was sometimes not the case.