I think the formula is more like Satisfaction = 2 * Reality / ( Expectations + Hopes). Even if a product performs exactly as you expected, you won't be 100% satisfied if you hoped for better, thus Satisfaction is Reality divided by the average of your expectations and hopes.

Of course since some people like geometry more than arithmetic, maybe for them it's really Satisfaction = Reality / sqrt(Expectations*Hopes).

Ironically, I knew that and meant to put that in my asterisk as well, but submitted too quickly.

Nope, not quite right (except the part about higher voltages needing less thick wires.). How thick a wire must be to handle a given load depends mainly on amperage. Since this is a heat dissipation issue, where you put the wire also matters: in a wall means less heat dissipation than outdoor use which means a thicker gauge. Voltage means nothing. The only thing that voltage matters for is insulation. The higher the voltage, the better able electricity is at jumping gaps in the circuit, and so you need thicker insulation to prevent this. To give you an example, in my brother's car, one of his amplifiers uses 6AWG wiring, and runs at 60A at 12V. An overhead transmission line that uses 6AWG aluminum wire will typically carry 69kV with a maximum capacity of something like 300A. The reason it can use higher amps is because of the cooling effect of having the wire exposed to air and not near anything, and that we have increased safety tolerances for wires in areas where humans are likely to be present (buildings, cars, etc.). The insulation difference is massive. The car wiring's insulation is like 1mm plastic, whereas the transmission line uses literally meters of air between the wires and ceramic insulating suspenders that are several feet tall.

To give another example, let's take house wiring. If I have a 20A 120V circuit, I'll need to use 12AWG wire. If I have a 20A 208V circuit, I'll need to use 12AWG wire. If I have a 20A 240V circuit, again, I'll need to use 12AWG. Now you might be tempted to say, "But, there are three wire in the 208V and 240V circuits." But then I'll remind you that all the electricity, no matter the configuration*, flows back through the neutral.

* Yes, I know that's simplistic and 3-phase is even weirder and 208V is the potential between the hots and we don't touch the neutral with 208V, but it doesn't really affect my point, so fuck it.

If you were truly cheap you would have already replaced your incandescent bulbs with CFLs. The payback for the switch is amazingly fast. At five hours of use per day, $1 per bulb and $.09/kWh, it takes one month for the savings in electricity to pay for the new CFL, five weeks if add in the cost of the old incandescent.

This argument is bullshit. Pure bullshit. If any "Big Pharma" company invented a cure for cancer tomorrow, you can bet your ass that they'd be all over it in a heartbeat. Why? Because, then that company would forever be known as the company that cured cancer. Every new product they make would be a pot of gold. Every ad they put out would be "Muhdikard, a new treatment for erectile dysfunction, from Drugco. We cured cancer.". Every drug company on the face of the planet would kill for that kind of marketing, not to mention the money from selling the cancer cure.

Now, of course, "cure for cancer" is a worthless phrase as well, since cancer is a type of disease, and not a single disease, and therefore, it's extremely unlikely that one cure will work for more than one cancer let alone all of them.

No, standard is not Imperial. In the US, standard is the common name for the US Customary System, which is different from the Imperial system of measures. While I believe the units for distance are the same between the two systems, the units for volume and large masses are quite different. Particularly, fluid ounces and gallons.

Holy fucking shit! That's ridiculous. Of course, it makes my buddy's turning down a promotion make much more sense. He gets $50k here in Grand Rapids, MI, and was offered a promotion in San Francisco for $70k and had to turn in down because it resulted in a net loss of income when you take cost of living into account. Of course, in addition to cheap electricity, we have cheap water (like $3/100cf), cheap natural gas, and cheap housing ($700/mo will get you a 2br/1200sqft apartment in a reasonable neighborhood, $40k will get that as a house; my 700 sqft/ 1.5br house cost me $7500 cash plus $1k/yr in property taxes, utilities average $100/mo over the year and insurance is only $400/yr). I knew this area was cheap but I guess I didn't realize just how nice we have it.

Where the hell do you live that electricity is so ungodly expensive? I pay $.09/kWh, and that's with a 7% from last year.

To answer your two questions, no, yes.

That's right, if I steal your camera and take pictures with it you don't have any obligation to return the pictures to me upon return of the camera, but I, as the photographer (even though the camera was yours and stolen) own the copyright, and, thus, can stop you from publishing them.

More relevant to the monkeys, in order for the owner of the camera to have a copyright on the monkey's photos, he would have had to make a conscious creative act causing him to reasonably expect the monkeys to take the pictures. I don't think this has happened so there's likely no copyright at all on the photos, placing them by default into the public domain, since monkeys can't own copyrights. Had these monkeys instead been humans, they would unequivocally own the copyrights to the photos and not the camera's owner.

Are you sure you're not confusing kb/s with kB/s? A speed of 3Mb/s will result in downloads of around 250-350 kB/s. That's because your ISP will rate your connection speed in megaBITs per second. Your browser and BT client will tell you speed in kiloBYTES (or megabytes) per second. 8 bits = 1 byte. Furthermore, your connection speed will reflect the total number of bits transferred, including protocol overhead, whereas your browser and BT client will only tell you about throughput (the bytes that were downloaded that actually get written to the downloaded file), which doesn't include overhead, making the ratio between your connection speed and throughput more like 1 Mb/s = 100 kB/s.

The percentage is about 20-30 %. I think the main difference between the US and elsewhere is that ALL of our bachelor's degrees are the equivalent of Honours bachelor's elsewhere. We don't have 3 yr BA/BS programs like in most countries. I have a feeling that that's where the extra gen ed stuff comes in. If you do college right in the US, our gen ed requirements become an advantage. I'll be receiving a math degree from a state university in two years. My first three years of college will be covering the first half of the math and the gen ed at a community college on the cheap (also giving me an associates) followed by two semesters of hard core math at the senior university level. Coupled with 45 credits of CLEP an d AP tests, and my BS in math will be ridiculously cheap, like $10000 total. The other nice thing about doing the associates in this manner is that you can find out that career path X is super sucktastic and change your mind without having to redo a pile of credits because those courses you took at CC don't count, because now you can count them as electives or gen ed instead. In fact, in Michigan, an associates from a Michigan college guarantees you 60 credits (of the required 120-130) at a Michigan University toward almost any bachelors regardless of the associate's focus.

We need to start getting away from XP anyway. It's ancient and insecure compared to other, not-ten-years-old OSs. It annoys me every time I have to work on an XP machine for someone, since I haven't used XP myself in four years, and it's damn near impossible to walk someone through OS related tasks over the phone at this point.

..or five DVD's. Where I'm at least, theft over $100 is larceny, which is a felony. Thank Jesus we don't have a three strikes law.

Speaking of yelling, "Get off my lawn!" I actually had to yell that at kids yesterday. They were smoking pot behind my woodshed (seriously). I thought of Slashdot and instantly felt really, really old, even though I'm only 27.

Concerning 1.B: Merchants are the ones held responsible in cases of fraud. If you steal a credit card and buy $1000 worth of Wal-Mart shit, then Wal-Mart is out $1000 unless they can figure out who you are and either have you arrested so you can pay restitution or sue the crap out of you. Generally, most companies are forced to pick option C which is: bitch about it, fire someone and do nothing to stop it from happening again.

That's where your point 1.C comes in. VISA is going to do exactly 1.C by threatening to issue their contractually allowed $100,000 fine for a data breach if Sony doesn't fix the original problem, which can escalate to $500,000 if VISA wants to be a dick about it. That's probably the main reason why the PSN isn't back up. Well, that and if Sony reactivates the PSN without at least looking like they took care of the problem, VISA could terminate Sony's merchant contract altogether. So I agree with you that Sony fixing this problem for real instead of for fake is caused by VISA acting in their own interests. It just happens to be that it's in Sony's best interest to shut up and take the hit for the team, lest they have real problems like not being able to take VISA. If it wasn't, you bet your ass the Sony wouldn't have shut down the PSN and would already be on our third or forth breach.