This kind of study really annoys me. From the article:

>The researchers think the learning problems result from the drop in after-school actives with educational value.

In other words, it isn't actually video games that are the problem, but the kids doing less "after-school actives with educational value" - i.e. this is an issue for the parents.

I let my six year old son play his Playstation for some hours at the weekend, on the condition that every night he reads to me. Learning to read is hard work, using the Playstation to motivate him actually works really well. My son is learning to read much quicker than many of his classmates, thanks to the Playstation...

I run firefox on an ubuntu 9.04 computer. I monitor power consumption with powertop. Firefox is the worst culprit when it comes to battery waste. Sometimes, out of the blue, it keeps running at >90% CPU utilization. At least that is easy to detect because the computer gets hot.

But more often than not, Firefox keeps the CPU busy in state C0, and even if its CPU usage is small, the CPU just can't go into power savings mode. Firefox can account for 3-10 watts of usage on a regular session.

The problem is, even if I close all the windows/tabs and leave only a static document in the only window left, firefox keeps using the CPU. The only solution is to kill it and restart it. It is frustrating.

Whenever I want maximum battery life, Firefox is killed first, followed by the wireless card (using the physical switch). By doing these two things I can expand battery life by 50% (assuming Firefox is not misbehaving my laptop uses ~ 15 watts, 10 without firefox and wireless, and screen at 30% brightness).

-dmg

"I am going to give a bar of chocolate to your brother if you don't come out, and to you if you do"...

It was a joke.

What the researchers didn't know was that this was an experiment in itself. The question the experiment aimed to answer was "Do researchers have too much free time, and do they waste time which is paid for using taxpayers money?"

The full paper will be published in Scientific America once it has completed peer review.

It probably is some windows worm or something written by a script-kiddie. But to admit that would be to embarrassing, so they make it out to be a big deal.

Like that poor Brit who was looking for info. about UFOs.

Actually it was britneynude.exe

Thanks for that. Good ideas. I think I might get some of that for myself...

Is it just me or are office apps becoming increasingly unimportant.

Ten years ago I spent most of my computing time in some kind of office app. Now I rarely use them. And I receive fewer office documents via email.

Perhaps the office app is just dying? Are they just transition applications between a paper based office and a paperless one anyway?

* gnus. The _best_ email reader.
* remember, along with org make your life simpler
* flyspell, for those times my fingers misbehave
* auc-tex mode for writing latex
* w3 for those times you have to cut and past nicely formatted web pages into a buffer
* org-mode again, for table editing
* calc, for a very powerful calculator
* tetris to kill time
* dired mode for browsing directories and acting upon files
* edit-env for modifying environment variables in the running process (and future children)
* mpg123 to play your mp3 collection
* igrep: very nice grep, better than default one.
* yasb: switch buffers via regular expression.

Some nice tricks:

* make-frame-on-display. Start a window of a running process in another Xserver (including a remote one)
* emacs-client -n. Load file in running emacs (in server mode) without waiting

* Being able to run emacs in a Nokia N810! With remember and org this is a killer application.

--dmg

But do you really think that the leaders of the other first world and developing countries are not the same kind of power-hungry, lying, cheating politicians, and that they will not work with others of the same ilk to get more power at your expense?

Actually, no I don't. And it is depressing that this kind of attitude is so prevalent in the USA today.

Mr Anonymous,

ok, are you are seriously sourcing your below-the-belt comments from Slashdot? Have you checked 4chan? You might find some there too.

With regards to your second comment, that is a different kind of respect, and you know it. I am specifically referring to respect as a figure of authority.

at least by my count, below-the-belt attacks were at an all time high.

Can you elaborate? What do you consider to be "below-the-belt"? People mocking her when she said stupid things? People pointing out her lack of experience and knowledge? People laughing at her un-presidential mannerisms and speech?

Some people command respect. Palin isn't one of them.

Hmm, just finished Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson that deals with many of these questions. His novel describes a colonization program that is dominated by multinational corporations hungry for the raw minerals of Mars and national governments eager to offload the overpopulating hordes onto a land area that is equal to that of Earth (his statement not mine, but the book is a 'hard' SF book).

These two groups are resisted by original colonists and "Reds" who want an Independent Mars. Struggle to be continued in Green Mars, sorry haven't read that one.

neil