But, if you know that your ISP is lying about the available bandwidth, which you know for a fact that they are, then you acting on that lie makes you unethical.

You didn't buy _your_ bandwidth, you bought a share in a pool of common bandwidth. You pay 20 bucks for tens of Mb of bandwidth. Lines that are guaranteed to a certain speed can cost up to hundreds of dollars for 10 Mb. You know that you are paying for the cheap, shared connection.
You are now going to an all you can eat buffet, and gobbling up as much food as you can, yet as an adult you pay the children's fee. The buffet planned the prices lower for children, because they know that children do not eat as much, and therefore they can have lower prices. Do you then go and complain, "but I paid for unlimited food, and have only eaten 13 pizzas, you can't throw me out"?

Strawman alert!

Nope, I didn't say that any usage is unethical. Compare this to a party, where the host has provided a piece of cake for everyone. It's not polite to gobble up half the cake when there are lots of people to share. We can of course argue that host (ISP) is not a good host for not providing all the cake (bandwidth) you can eat.

Same with ISPs, they provide enough bandwidth for basic usage, but if you are going to serve out half of Ubuntu's updates, it's polite to pay for a pipe that is designed for actual hosting.

> apt-p2p'ing is ethical whether it's legal or not.

Ooh.. you're making a bold claim there. If you're on a shared connection, which you are if you have residental cable/DSL, your apt-p2p:ing causes harm to your neighbour's bandwidth. Sure, the fault is at the ISP for oversubscribing lines, but when you are aware of that fact, wouldn't your apt-p2p:ing then be unethical?

I know that this is splitting hairs, but you simply can't go claim something is ethical like that without thinking. Now, I haven't really figured out who decides what is ethical or not, but I'm pretty sure it's not you.

I know you're being sarcastic, but the altitude meters in aircrafts works on atmospheric pressure. The exact same pressure that tends to fluctuate in storms.

Opera widgets == Firefox extensions.
Refer to Qt as a toolkit and not as a widget set to lessen the confusion :)

A few years ago I bought a domain for personal use, and accidentally got the wrong one. I was planning on [mynickname].net, but got [mynickname].org.

When the .org was about to expire I was going to nab the .net one, but at that point some chinese webstore was running on the adress. A year later it expired, and some squatter took it, and wanted several thousand dollars for it. Waited a year more, the squatter expired and I got my precious domain for only the registration fee.

Actually software like SAP requre their own administrative/support staff. SAP is so complex (=administrative nightmare) that a company must have specialists available if they are to purchase it.
And purchasing SAP is not because of lack of technical expertise, it's because software in that scale takes years and years to develop and test. Buy it, and it's up and running in a few weeks.

New bill the next day?

Compared to that speed, our governments are stuck in a tar pit, and yet there are more laws than we can possibly comprehend.

And how about when 4chan arranges a vote to put goatse on the flag, and will crapflood people to vote yes?

It's not only about the energy it takes to run a fridge. It's the energy costs to dig up iron ore, melt it and mix it to steel, mold a fridge, and transport it from the other side of the world.

Yes, because we all know that terrorists like to do some sightseeing before crashing their plane.

Moron.

> I'm not sure how a 3 order of magnitude drop could possible happen, as that would imply a 32GB drive at $0.44, which is 1.375 cents/GB.

I'd rather say that would mean a 32TB drive for $449 (or more likely 3TB for $50). Not so unplausible, considering that the 20MB HDD my dad once bought cost five times the 1TB drive I bought last week. That's about 5 orders of magnitude difference for the cost per capacity, and in only 20 years or so.

I do hope you realize that the GeForce and the Quadro series are the EXACT same chips, with different BIOSes only... FX2700 == 8800GT, both uses the G92 core.

Oh, there is a difference indeed. I have a Xeon 3210, stock 2.13GHz, clocked to 3.0 or so. I'm using Lightroom a lot, and difference between normal and overclocked is annoying lag vs. almost instantaneous response. Lightroom uses all 4 cores evenly, all of which gain 0.8GHz of processing power. That's 3.2 GHz free. Then again using Photoshop, which is singlethreaded, I won't notice the difference without a stopwatch.

But, it doesn't matter. Overclocking is free anyways.

2001 called, they want their AMD Thunderbird 1.4GHz back.

Sorry, but Intel has taken the lead in the hottest CPU, 150W for the QX9775, versus 125W for the Phenom II 940.

You didn't google enough.
These guys are really anal when it comes to finding quiet parts. Following their advice, I now actually have an overclocked PC, that I can't hear if it's on or off.