"as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce." And if a frog had wings his ass wouldn't bump the ground when he hops.

I appreciate Slashdot acting like an old Popular Mechanics here, but I wouldn't get too excited just yet. As somebody pointed out in another forum, when you compare ethanol with gasoline in terms of efficiency, if all we had was ethanol primarily from "corn" (U.S. term, UK term is "maize") and then someone invented gasoline, we would be raving about the improvement in efficiency and economy. IOW, I will believe cheap, efficient solar power when I see it on the neighbor's roof. Until then, this is one more expensive quest for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. In the meantime, we could be practicing more energy efficiency.

FWIW, I knew W was full of crap with that whole "hydrogen economy" nonsense back around 2005. That was an absurd sop to deflect a little criticism that he was as much a tool of Big Oil as his Old Man. Make note that I served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and when it was over, George H.W. Bush was sitting on a 91 percent approval rating based on a war we had to fight to maintain a steady supply of petroleum for the Western Powers and Japan. From the desert, I wrote my Senators and lobbied them to get a bill going to get us to start weaning off Mideast Oil. That S.O.B. Bush didn't raise a finger, nor did our Congress and eventually Western wealth transfer begat Osama Bin Laden, 9/11, Iraq War II, and Afghanistan. Wouldn't you think a 91 percent approval rating might have been enough political capital to change things a little? It may even have made Bush the Elder seem like the President of the U.S.A. instead of President of the New World Order since he rightfully earned a reputation for being allergic to domestic policy. His detachment had a lot to do with getting booted in '92. A review of the stock market back in '90 - '91 reveals that Big Oil shot up and helped a lot of folks in that business recover from the very hard times they went through in the late '80's. Though I was a conservative and a combat veteran, I campaigned for Bill Clinton in '92 as I was so disgusted with Bush the Elder. Still am. God save us from another Bush.

Most of us know in our heart of hearts that our troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan because of the continued grip the Mideast has on Western economies. In World War II, the U.S. national speed limit was 35 mph and gasoline was rationed with coupons. This was done to make sure the military had plenty of fuel. If some shared sacrifice was called for now, I think most Americans would grumble, but go along with it for the sake of untangling from the Iraq and Afghan Wars. How about bringing back the 55 mph speed limit of the '70's and '80's? What about a tax based on the weight of a vehicle? If we cut back on petroleum use, we help our independence and the environment at the same time. Now that's what I call "conserve-atism".

If you want to see what needs to be done about our dependence on petroleum, just look for the occasional Charles Krauthammer piece on it. He makes the same recommendations about every 5 years, the centerpiece of which is a flexible tax on gasoline that seeks to wean us off cheap oil while keeping the price of gasoline fairly steady.

First off, kudos to ComputerWorld for this shocking newsflash "New Windows Operating System is Bloated and Disappoints Users". Is it 1995 again when I foolishly believed Microsoft and loaded Windows95 on my happy Windows 3.1 computer only to discover the 4MB minimum RAM requirement left my computer a useless lump of plastic with an endlessly spinning hard drive? Four more MB of memory for $130 from a shady computer dealer finally slowed the paging down. I have seen this cycle repeated 6 more times since then. Go ahead and set up the fill-in-the-blank story for Windows 7.1, 8, and so on.

Here is how to get a valid test together:

1. Figure out the testing objective. Sounds like this guy should build a Windows 7 and a Windows XP box with identical hardware side-by-side.

2. Install the same applications on both machines and run the same workloads on them.

3. Measure the performance using the only benchmark users care about, waiting times for things to happen. One thing that was unclear from this article (which I actually read, must be new here) was the level of memory paging that was going on and especially the feedback from the users. The numbers he talked about are pretty much of no interest to end users, just guys in the I.T. shop.

4. Call ComputerWorld with the results, but only if they make Windows 7 look terrible...

BasKet - OSS. I am a PhD student and asked about this very thing of some fellow Slashdotters and they recommended BasKet, a product similar to Microsoft's OneNote. I dearly love Foxit as my PDF reader/annotator, though Okular is quite good as well when I am fiddling with my Ubuntu box. Both are free products (as in beer). As I am stuck on a Vista computer for work/research, I use OneNote, but not as fanatically as some of my associates. Incredibly, the installation of EndNote on my PC trashed my MS Word 2007, so I have had to switch over to OpenOffice's word processor with excellent results so far. Sooner or later I will get around to setting up Windows 7 which hopefully can survive EndNote. I'm really liking the MediaWiki idea and some sort of OSS solution for doing bibliographies. I haven't really had to "share" much of my work yet, but I suppose that is coming later. On a related note, I'm a big fan of lifehacker.com and autohotkey.com using the AutoCorrect file for Autohotkey to substitute a lot of tedious typing for me. I type a few letters of a word IN ANY APPLICATION and autohotkey then replaces those few letters with yet another five dollar word: quantitative, qualitative, research, management, university, student, difference, relationship, and so on are on my self-generated list. Loads of other cool stuff can be done with autohotkey as well.

I had Sprint Wireless for a few years in the late 1990's, then moved from an area with good coverage to San Diego, California. The coverage there was terrible and I called them a few times to complain. At last I got an honest rep on the phone and asked if they had any plans to put up or lease more towers there and he said "no". In fact, he pretty much admitted Sprint wasn't really trying hard in that market. Fortunately, my contract expired within a couple months and I changed over to PacBell Wireless, which became Cingular, which became AT&T Wireless (but it was really Cingular unlike the earlier AT&T Wireless - got all that?). PacBell had pretty good coverage except for one dead spot along Rosecrans near the airport. Every time I drove past the Rubio's near the Main Post Office, if I was in the middle of a call, it would drop; every single time. I got in the habit of wrapping up the call before I hit that spot. Coverage stunk at the house too, so I spent a lot of time wandering the neighborhood while talking on the cellphone. Maybe it kept me thinner? Seriously, cellphone pricing doesn't make sense to me. A data plan must consume a ridiculous amount of bandwidth, as in this NYC problem, but the carrier doesn't really charge that much for it. On the other hand, unlimited SMS/texting plans consume far less bandwidth or strain the network nearly as much as cell phone calls, yet they are expensive. Whatever the market will bear, I suppose. I should just reduce the number of talking minutes on my plan as we text each other so much now. Hmm, this may explain more of this pricing model...

We will not suffer through this oppression by King Roger! To the barricades, mes amis! Le fleur de lis is the symbol of Le Ancien Regime, so on to New Orleans where we will show them who is boss with our red cockades. We shall erect le guillotine and make clear who will control the symbols of Le France!

Dude, I swear, it was an accident! With all the dynamic ads out there, I have had to get very, very careful about clicking my mouse on webpages, and I still got burned. Looks like it's time for me to install an ad-blocker.

Someone in my office recently clicked on some ad that contained malware, clicked a pop-up's "close" button and ended up with a machine that still has not been purged completely. I accidentally pushed the mouse button on a similar ad a few days ago and barely avoided an infection myself. Strange this doesn't seem to bother my Linux systems... ;)

"Every five years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducts a national survey to measure the number of hunters, fisherman and other outdoor enthusiasts in the country. The latest survey in 2006 found 12.5 million of the country's 298.4 million residents hunted. That was a 4 percent decline since 2001-2006 and an 11 percent decline since 1991."

This story is from http://www.thestate.com/154/story/1007205.html

I have seen a few media reports that indicate The Great Recession has caused some rebound in hunting's popularity, but I haven't seen any statistics on it. This article states that "white-tailed deer is the most popular game animal in Ohio", and shows an estimated 400,000 hunters were to see if they could get a deer that Fall. http://www.dnr.state.oh.us/home_page/NewsReleases/tabid/18276/EntryID/240/Default.aspx

"Linux is only free if your time has no value." -Jamie Zawinski, 1998. In 1997 I first began dabbling with Redhat Linux. I was getting deep into Microsoft OS's at the time, and after much aggravation with Linux and running into that quote, I pretty much set Linux aside. In terms of pure economics, I don't hunt to save money. My time is too valuable to view a full day obtaining 75 pounds of meat as a great investment. (Kill deer in morning, rest of day to butcher it and then get a nap hopefully to catch up from that 4am wakeup.) Just as solving a Linux riddle brings its own intangible rewards, so it is with hunting. If you are really interested in this WHOLE train of thought, check out the book "Crunchy Cons" by Rod Dreher, a blogger and newspaper editor.

Yeah, being an IT guy indoors so much I hugely appreciate going out in the woods at 5am, pitch dark, listening to the train go by, seeing the sun come up, noticing the birds starting to wake with the sun, hearing things moving around in the woods nearby, and so on. Honestly, the best part is the hunter/hunted dynamic. The deer lives in those woods 365 days a year and knows every inch. I'm out there a few days each year (sadly), and I need the edge of the high-powered rifle. Even with that gun, the binoculars, and a lot of familiarity with the patch of woods, I'm doing well to get one every other year. A friend of mine is a biologist and he takes deer at will. I would love to learn with him sometime. When you have been out there freezing for a couple hours and then you hear a deer moving nearby, the cold evaporates, the adrenaline cranks up, and you can hear everything. Fortunately, a lifetime of marksmanship has meant always getting them with one shot (so far, touch wood), but it is exciting stuff when you finally see a deer that doesn't see you. I bet the ones that see me first won't hang around long enough for me to see them. Hunting is cheap thrills, especially when you can haul a deer (or turkey, elk, moose, and so on) back to camp.

First, each season you need to go somewhere and fire off enough rounds at targets to make sure that the scope or iron sights are correctly zeroed in. If you don't, you could end up missing your target when it counts. Second, you will probably be shooting multiple deer each season. If your freezer is full, there may be in-laws/cousins that can use the meat, and you may want to donate to "Hunters for the Hungry" so the meat goes to a local food bank. Third, hunting leases can be expensive, but I am fortunate enough to have a relative with a farm and I get to hunt there "for free" meaning just gas, hunting gear, and time. If I was a bowhunter, "ammunition" would be somewhat different, but arrows break and get lost, I'm sure. Fourth, after you get the deer, it has to be butchered. I do it myself, but deer processors normally charge $50 - $100 depending on what all you want them to do. They can just wrap up the cuts or they can grind it, or they can blend it with other meat and so on.