Excuse me, but an economy where roughly 50% of GDP is based on oil as are 95% of it is not at all diversified and is bound to fluctuate a bit like the oil price. Source: http://www.economicshelp.org/b...

While it is true that Venezuela has also a lot of political and historical problems, a lot of the current crisis seems to come from lack of economic diversity and large dependence on oil price.

There's a nice podcast about the current crisis in Venezuela (about 30 min) which I recommend:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...

While I agree with you on sentiment, it's just too tempting and the competition may do it, too. You could legislate against overbooking and enforce it. But it's just like a bank. Although it's your money in there, they just lend it to everybody and hope that enough people pay back until people want to withdraw their money. It works when a lot of people keep money in the bank and take it out at random times. When there's a bank rush, only the first customers will be served, the rest will be screwed.

Someone else tried it out in Germany. Lived with 480kWh a year from the grid; remainder was from own photo-voltaic generator. He had some appliances custom made to run off 12V, since these batteries are readily available pretty much everywhere around the globe.

The whole process was documented (1200 blog entries), however the homepage is in german. On the left side there's an automatic translator.

http://www.dasgleichstromhaus....

I use leechblock (firefox extension) and block my time-wasters (slashdot included) after 20 minutes every four hours. Has been working wonders for my productivity.

It's 65 years in the metric system; that's 83 years in US.

Because bootable USB doesn't work for me. The motherboard from one PC recognizes USB as a hard drive, so you have to set USB to be first in the boot sequence. But W7 doesn't allow you to install on anything but the first device in boot sequence. And no: installing W7 from SSD didn't work for me either. So DVD is a must on that hardware, it seems.

I know what you mean. These days I'm struggling to reinstall Windows 7 due to all sorts of quirks. What's frustrating is that installing Linux is a breeze on these machines and Windows without a DVD is a royal pain. The W10 installer is probably better, but there's no way I'm going the "computer as a service" route. So once new W7-installations are required, I'm slowly changing them to Linux. Maybe we'll see a bump in W10 market share by 2020 (when W7 support runs out), but most likely not from me.

Also the robot clearly violated the first law of robotics and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

It's called oligarchy.

I believe it's still behind by a wide margin, but Razer OSVR (Open-Source Virtual Reality for Gaming) was left out. Does anyone have hands-on experience with it?

There's already a long suspicion that the correlation between regular consumption of hot yerba mate tea in south america and incidence of esophageal cancer may be causative. It wasn't confirmed back in the days because there were other substances in the tea that might explain the higher incidence of cancer. Now there seems to be confirmation of this suspicion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

More likely a technology akin to DisplayLink, which drives a monitor over USB-Port. A DisplayLink chip is used either in the monitor itself (like on ASUS MB169B+ or Philips P-Line 231P4QUPES) or inside a docking station with some monitor connection. The operating system treats the USB device like a graphics card and you can do the usual multi-monitor setup.

I have a docking station on my desk (which drives 1920x1080 via USB3) and it works fine for productivity. It's not so good for gaming as there seems to be some latency involved.

The article indicates that this monitor would work over thunderbolt. That'd be like connecting a graphics card on PCIe and plugging the monitor there, except that the PCIe connection is done via cable and the graphics card is inside the monitor and not directly on the motherboard. I believe this solution may reduce the latency a lot and have larger bandwidth.

I'd rephrase what you said a bit by stating that a society based on consumerism, bombarded with advertisements of happy families consuming product X, might be hard on e.g. the unemployed or singles. Some people may be just bored because life isn't so hard as it was for previous generations (so many appliances manage the household today) and there is more time to worry about things and be unhappy about.

I thought so, too. This is news, however, because Apple is usually ahead of competition in terms of size/portability. So this is news about a competitor "beating" Apple. Not my kind of laptop, but still nice to see.

I'm with you. I want my mobile phone to last as long as possible, so I changed the 2.200 mAh battery for a 7.200 mAh (Anker battery case on Samsung S2) and I get about 6 days out of it. I see 35% in the morning I know I'm still good for the day. And I buy laptops based on their speed, not appearance. Core i7 with four cores is my standard requirement. I also like 17" screens, so I know I'm looking at at least 2.5kg.