The cost differential of the vehicle itself amortized over the number of usable miles should be added to the calculation.

I read Slashdot for several years before creating an account - a fact that I have regretted more than once. I'm glad to see that some of the truly early people on this site are still year.

I'm mostly thankful for the thunderbird mail client than anything else, a good mature useful thing.

I second this sentiment. I hope that Mozilla simply keeps Thunderbird working as is and does not ruin it by trying to use "modern web technologies", etc.

Its a great tool - keep it private, secure and working and I'll be very happy.

Text-mode DOS programs were also referred to as "applications."

They were sometimes called "Desktop Applications" were almost always called programs. It wasn't until Window 98 that I started hearing "Application" used often, and not until much later that I remember ever hearing "App".

Yes, but a lot of universities converted their *entire* set of OpenCourse Ware (OCW) to MOOCs.

For me as a user, OCW had many advantages over MOOCs, and I am quite saddened that over the last 4 years, MOOCs have killed off the tremendous progress that had been made on the OCW front over the prevous decade.

Considering that the binaries provided by the Python project are generally compiled with Visual Studio, and considering that many if not most new comp sci / programmers now learn python, this is especially troubling.

It is my hope that the Python BDFL and Python Software Foundation will move away from Visual Studio for Python binaries before long ...

Worried about these GMO crops cross-pollinating regular crops? The researchers referred to a study indicating 'a very low frequency (0.04-0.80%) of pollen-mediated gene flow between genetically modified (GM) rice and adjacent non-GM plants.'

Hmmm. You may find the following news story and its associated paper interesting:
'Escaped' Genetically Engineered Canola Growing Outside of Established Cultivation Regions Across North Dakota


The Establishment of Genetically Engineered Canola Populations in the U.S.

The main advantages to moving to China were cheap labor, free training, government subsidies (including land and building) and lower taxes.

Two of those are substantially eliminated by moving to robots. The current crises has left a huge amount of vacancies in industrial parks here in the U.S..

Given the current crisis, it is unlikely that we would lower taxes - but this cries out for a tax holiday on repatriated funds.

Once the capital is in place, the competitive advantage just get that much harder to overcome; we should do what we can to have those robots here. Robotic maintenance jobs will be where the robots are - not to mention all the jobs associated with the presence of the factory!

Let there be a student s that does this for each semester over 4 consecutive years. Assume that the website loses $k each year that the student gambles. Further, assume that the site does nothing with the data for the next 10 years. How much will the website make off of student s over the course of the remainder of student s lifetime?

It is given (in the article summary) that the website requires access to official records, so they will have verified data.

They can sell this information for a good bit of money every time student s looks for a job over the rest of his/her lifetime!

Amazing that no one has noted that:

1. Indian education is very rote based - especially when compared to the U.S. It kills the ability to question and think creatively more than it enhances it.

2. The high schoolers picked were those that either (A) couldn't afford to go to college or (B) had grades/marks just below a strict cutoff (again, in a rote based educational environment). There probably wasn't a significant difference in their abilities v. a large percentage of those that actually did go to college.

3. comparisons were only over the earliest parts of graduates v. non-graduates careers.

Also, wouldn't those individuals in that society that were given an opportunity like this work their asses off to make sure they succeed, especially considering the bleak alternatives in the 3rd world? Motivation is a very important factor!

Strongly prefer Ascii / unicode text unless there are figures.

I haven't tried it out, but I've read that the iPod will limit one to reading only the first 4K of long text files. That's too bad - I really enjoyed reading books I downloaded from Project Guttenberg on a Palm TX a few years ago ...

Refuse to pay anything approaching dead-tree version prices for DRM encumbered / proprietary texts.

The whole idea for many years was that electronic versions of books are much cheaper to produce (marginal costs; ie, cost of making one more) and thus would reduce prices, enabling one to buy many more books. If I can't buy significantly more books for the same cost, dead tree versions will - for me at least - always win.

Executive

The Venezuelan president is elected by a vote with direct and universal suffrage, and is both head of state and head of government. The term of office is six years, and (as of 15 February 2009) a president may be re-elected an unlimited number of times. The president appoints the vice-president and decides the size and composition of the Cabinet and makes appointments to it with the involvement of the legislature. The president can ask the legislature to reconsider portions of laws he finds objectionable, but a simple parliamentary majority can override these objections.

Legislative
The unicameral Venezuelan parliament is the Asamblea Nacional ("National Assembly"). Its 167 deputies, of which three are reserved for indigenous people, serve five-year terms and may be re-elected for a maximum of two additional terms. They are elected by popular vote through a combination of party lists and single member constituencies.

Doesn't sounds, but it is. Using a car analogy it's like saying that windscreen wipers could cost hundreds of dollars because they allow you to drive during rain, and it "improves your quality of life so much".

Overpricing products based on their importance (not that it's the case here) is also called profiteering, or more informally, extorsion.

That's stunningly silly.

I should also point out that media containers were not originally designed for random things being distributed over the internet. Rather, they are for developers to author and users to play back.

As a professional, if I put stuff on a DVD or a Web site that the average computer user couldn't see, that disc or site would include whatever drivers or CODECs one needed in order to video my media. That's still pretty much the rule.

This is very useful for professional work. For example, I bought a license for the Cineform CODEC, which is an "intermediate" CODEC, designed for fast editing of computationally expensive formats like MPEG-2 and AVC. Not so expensive on their own, but try doing 10 or 20 layers of video in a single project, and you'll meet "slow" on any PC. The multimedia frameworks allow video and audio editors to use new CODECs without any changes to their own code.

At the fringes, sure, you have pirates and crazy people putting weird stuff inside AVIs, without telling you what it is. But this is not a general problem.

Do I think the US does things wrong? Oh, definitely. But I don't think we can assume terrorists would stop hating the US if the US fixed things they did wrong

I don't think you can assume that all terrorists would stop hating the US if the US were to clean up its act in a few areas. On the other hand, it seems like a fair bet that a lot of them wouldn't hate the US quite so much.

Which could be good. You could probably get quite a lot of them to the point where, while they didn't like you very much, they really weren't upset enough about it to fly a plane into the side of building. Or strap explosives to their chest and look for an inconvenient to place to detonate themselves.

This isn't a case of "either/or". It's not "either they hate us or they don't". It's more "how many" and "how much". The right changes in behaviour could shift a lot of potential terrorists into the disgruntled-but-harmless category. That has to be a good thing, right?