@Stedmister Ok, if it's truly worth it to you I'm cool with your choice. Trouble is most consumers don't even know what these inefficient features are costing them. This article at least makes gamers aware of that. Oh, and 15w is not typical. Standby is more commonly closer to 1w.
The wastefulness of a 15 watt standby mode is that it's being consumed 24 hours a day, not just while you play. So in a year that's 15watts x 24 hours per day x 365 days x $0.20 per kw-hr /1000watts per kw = $26.28 per year. If Microsoft sent you a bill every year for $26.28 for voice activated power up would you pay it or tell them "no thanks".
I live in the South (Austin) and gets hot as hell here in the summer. Days when the mercury climbs over 103F and everybody and their dog is running their ac the power plants are running full tilt with danger of a brown-out. A new power plant is going to raise the cost of electricity per kw-hr and dump more co2 into the atmosphere. That's why this is a seemingly innocent design feature that contributes to a BIG problem.
@noah364 @gildor2603@bdous North Korea has the LARGEST army in the world. At over 10 million conscripts they have more soldiers than the U.S. and China combined! Look it up.
We have all our eggs in one basket and we need to diversify our address. It's hard to tell at this point how common an earth-like planet is but I bet it's fairly rare (1 in a 1000?) . The nearest system to our own is Alpha Centauri. the light cast from it's largest star is 4.367 years old by the time it contacts earth.
To give you an idea of how far that is imagine our sun is an orange basketball. Now place a small marble 15 feet away to represent earth. The Alpha Centauri system is 200 miles away using this scale reference. That's a long trip.
So terraforming close to home makes much more sense to start. We could do it remotely from earth over hundreds of years. One choice is Mars but in my opinion the better one would be Venus. Venus is the same size as Earth so gravity would be the same. Sunlight and atmosphere are more intense than Earth and I see the problem of reducing something as easier than making something from nothing. How would you "pump up" an atmosphere that doesn't exist?
Venus otoh is mostly carbon dioxide. If we could bombard Venus with hydrogen (big if) the atmosphere would convert to nitrogen, oxygen and water much like earth. Because of the lack of continents 80% of the surface would be submerged with only 1/10th the water. Atmospheric temperature and pressure would subside to earth levels also.
The other big problem with Venus is there is no magnetic field and the Venusian day is 116 earth days. It's thought these two are related. If we could "spin up" Venus the molten core would once again induce a magnetic field to protect the new atmosphere from solar winds blowing away the hydrogen again. Also, those first colonists wouldn't have to sleep during the day.
@Granatar @cratecruncher How did you manage to misconstrue my dislike for corporate greed with not caring about people or employees being consigned to poverty? This tired retort is particularly flimsy in light of the robust job market for tech workers in general and programmers in particular. If anyone is "forced out of a job" in this field they'll quickly find a better one with a rise to boot.
My rant was against the pin-heads at the top who contort their products to maximize monetization at the expense of their long-term reputation. I no longer respect Bethesda the way I once did.
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