Your R is not C. Carmack put the iPad 2 at roughly half the performance of the 360, which puts the "Retina iPad" right in the ballpark of the 360, although with twice the working RAM.

"This? It's a pool."

This is a valid concern-- but until we run out of houses, wal-marts, and parking lots to put them on, it shouldn't be an issue. We have plenty of already-spoiled scenery that can do double duty. ASU is all over this-- their campus parking garages and parking lots are all growing solar covers. Intel's fab on the south side of town has solar panels on top of all their shaded parking.

The problem is that photovoltaics have a limited lifespan.

Well, yes-- everything does. Off-the-shelf consumer photovoltaics typically come with 25-year warranties guaranteeing 80% of original capacity at year 25. They'll gradually degrade at about 0.5%-1% of original capacity per year-- they'll last more than four decades.

What's the energy input to replace a panel?

Depends on the type of panel and how much sun it gets when you hang it up, but construction energy payback is generally 1-2 years. Given the above lifetimes, you'll typically produce somewhere between 10x and 50x the input energy needed to make the panel.

20-year life.

Standard warranty is 25 years at 80% of original capacity. More likely, they'll last for 40+.

The life span of a solar panel is 15-20 years with a denigration of efficiency of about 25% over that period.

This isn't accurate. The standard warranty for consumer panels is for 25 years, guaranteeing 80% of nameplate capacity at the end of that.

That's under warranty, so it's guaranteed. The panels themselves will likely last more along the lines of four or five decades, with a yearly degradation in performance between 0.5 and 1%.

4x it's weight in toxic waste and greenhouse gasses

That's not very much. Each kWh the panels generate saves roughly half a kilogram of greenhouse gasses based on the average generation mix in the US, for example. On average, a single one of the 15kg, 215-watt panels on our roof makes enough power to offset four times its weight in greenhouse gas every 23 days. Given their 25-year warranty, that's means that the panels will save roughly four hundred times the greenhouse gas that was produced in their construction, if your "four times the weight of the panel" number is correct.

> The only reason you find them superior is because you've been using WADS since 1992, you're used to it.

The mouse is a vastly more precise pointing/aiming device. The analog stick, on the other hand, is a better control for movement. For the most part, though, the games that require the most aiming precision are games in which it doesn't make sense to do anything but run at maximum speed, so the advantage of an analog stick becomes moot.

Ideally, there would be some sort of hybrid approach-- a left-hand controller with a movement stick and enough buttons coupled with a mouse or similarly precise pointing device.

But at least be fair to the original poster here-- anybody who has been playing games since 1992 is comfortable with both gamepads and kb/m arrangements, and we're all well aware of their relative strengths and weaknesses.

> compact enough to comforably fit in most people's pockets?

I think this is what slashdot forgets on account of our demographics... roughly half the potential customer base for a phone manufacturer will be carrying it in their purse. Anecdotally, at our office, women seem to be overwhelmingly moving to "mini tablet" phones. And why not? If it doesn't have to go in your pocket, I'd take the larger screen and battery, too.

I dimly remember an article on /. a while (year?) ago where an athlete complained that he may not compete in the Olympics because he is "handicapped". The reason? He was too "advanced", his artificial limbs were actually BETTER suited to the sport he wanted to compete in than the real limbs.

The decision was reversed. Oscar Pistorius is running in the Olympics this year on a pair of Cheetah Flex-Foot prosthetic legs.

It's a strange call by the committee, though-- I think they let him in because this is not an enhancement he sought out. He was essentially born without shins. It won't be long before they will have to draw the line, though, because if this is more than a one-time exception, you'll see people intentionally hacking their legs off to compete as soon as they're sure the artificial legs are better.

The point of sport is exercising your body for the fun and health benefits.

For you and I, perhaps. But the point of sport at the Olympic or Professional levels is very definitely *not* for fun and health benefits. The point is to win, and training (even without drugs) at those levels is already often disabling to the participants during their lifetimes. American pro football is the obvious example, but even in places where you wouldn't expect it-- running, tennis, etc-- athletes intentionally wreck themselves for a short period of maximal performance followed by a lifetime of lingering persistent injury.

Woah... why are the prices so much higher at your Costco? Those Feit 40W-equivalent bulbs are less than $1 each at ours.

Right. Turn on your electric stove. It makes light, right? When was the last time THAT element burned out?

On the other hand, it pulls a kilowatt and makes like half a lumen of really orange light.

He's correct in the way that matters for his usage, actually. I wasn't aware that there was no "EP" speed for UK VHS. If we compare LP to LP or SP to SP, a UK VHS tape is about 43% different than an NTSC VHS tape. He, however, is comparing UK "LP" to US "EP", and is correct.

That's the difference in a nutshell...

"The tape speed is 3.335 cm/s for NTSC, 2.339 cm/s for PAL."

A difference of ~1.43x. A VHS tape labelled "12 hours" in england would be labelled "8.4 hours" in the US, even though the two objects were exactly the same.