There is plenty of useful work to be done: children would benefit from smaller classes, the elderly would like more attention, cities could be made prettier, there are lots of things that can be researched. The problem is that no-one is willing to pay for those things: we're always looking for lower costs, lower taxes, not higher quality of life.

Wouldn't they have to check the systems anyway after discovering they were vulnerable? A break-in points out vulnerabilities in a system, but it is not the cause of those vulnerabilities and if one person can break in, others can as well.

If someone else had found the same vulnerabilities earlier and alerted them without breaking in, would that person be charged for the costs of reviewing the systems?

That depends on how much sun hours you get, whether you can install the panels at a good angle, how much you pay for electricity and whether there are subsidies (either for installation or a feed-in tariff). I've heard from several people who did the math for their own home that their payback was less than 10 years.

Panels typically come with a 25 year warranty and while their efficiency declines over the years, they'll still be producing a significant amount of power after those 25 years. If you can provide numbers showing how much the solar panels save a month in electricity for this particular house, I doubt all potential buyers would ignore that advantage.

If her fridge uses over 300 W average (not peak), I suggest she invests in buying a new fridge.

For a home, I think lead-acid batteries would suffice: you wouldn't need particularly light or space efficient batteries.

If you look only at providing emergency power, a conventional generator is probably cheaper. But solar panels would produce power all year long, reducing your regular electricity bill. And it doesn't have to be all or nothing: you could install some solar panels and during outages you could then cope with a lower capacity conventional generator.

Unless you have outages very often, I doubt the amount of carbon output by the generator would be significant.

During a power outage, would there still be a signal for your cable box or modem to receive? I don't know where the last distribution step gets its power from, but if it's from the same grid as your house, it will be down too during an outage.

If you look at efficiency graphs, you'll see that power supplies are typically the most efficient under moderate load: at low and high load the efficiency drops. A typical desktop or home server is idle most of the time, so idle efficiency will have a big impact on the total efficiency. If you over-dimension your power supply, your idle load might be 10% or less of the max rating, which is far from the optimum of the efficiency curve.

I'd recommend getting a power supply that can deliver a bit more than what you need, for example 450 W if you think you need 350 W max. A bit of margin is useful since you might not have found the actual worst case or you might want to add components later. Also it avoids poor efficiency at the high side of the curve when the system is under load.

No, this is an actual low-power CPU, not a desktop part. Wikipedia does mention rebadged Athlon XPs being sold as "Geode NX 2001", but there were real Geode NXs as well.

I'm running a Debian 686-pae kernel on a Geode NX without problems. It seems the Geode LX doesn't support pae though.

The other apps stores saw Apple taking 30% and still getting plenty of developers, so why would they pick a lower percentage?

In my opinion, the problem is not that Apple takes 30%, but that Apple's store is the only one you can use for iOS devices unless you decide to exploit your own device (aka jailbreaking). If third-party app stores were supported, there could be competition between them and there would be an incentive for them to operate on thinner margins. However, with Android this is possible and I haven't heard yet of flourishing 3rd party app stores there.

Fusion is easy at the stellar scale, since gravity takes care of both ignition and containment. On a smaller scale, we'll have to build and maintain machines for that which costs money. How much is hard to predict when we're still in the prototype stage, but there is no guarantee that fusion power will be cheaper than existing forms of power generation.

From the article it seems that is already happening: those low-cost carriers that do not drop the call often forward it to another carrier, who makes the same tradeoff and forwards it again and in the end no-one connects to the recipient.

The only real solutions I can see is to either have uniform termination costs or have different quoted prices for routing a call depending on where that specific call is going. It seems the FCC is choosing the former, but that's a long-term solution. I'm guessing the latter would require significant changes to the systems directing and billing calls so that wouldn't be a short-term solution either.

Are huge TVs a US thing? I never saw a DLP TV in anyone's home, only at trade shows.

The long distance carriers should take "you must complete this call" into account when setting their price.

Currently high fixed costs of maintaining the infrastructure are covered by higher per-call costs instead of higher monthly fees. Of course higher monthly fees won't be popular with people living in rural areas, but it would more accurately reflect the actual costs.

According to the article, there is regulation on paper but it is not enforced.

The domain was registered less than a week ago and some of the registration data doesn't look valid. Also nasa.gov says "The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 3, [...] Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect." So it's probably a fake.