Lord British might have something to say about that.

Like Michael Bublé, Bryan Adams & Céline Dion...

Harsh!

I think what the OP was talking about was the more commercial end of the market, rather than an individual growing for their own use.

What tends to happen is people take over (rent) a property and remove the internal walls, black out the windows and set up large growing operations, bypassing the meter. There was a disused shop near me (in the UK) where this happened... twice in six months!

Captain Asperger saves the world once again!

It's stories like this that make it so obvious why the American system was completely broken and wrong.

Here in the UK we pay income tax and national insurance (basically a second income tax). The more we earn, the more we pay.

If someone, anyone, gets sick or injured, they get treated. The state of the NHS is pretty fantastic (despite what gets reported, particularly in America recently - ask anyone who has had to make use of their services and the VAST majority will have nothing but praise).

Granted, there are those in society who are lazy and refuse to work, spending what benefits they get on fags and booze, and we treat them too. That's the point really, healthcare for all, free at the point of use.

I, and I suspect the vast majority of the UK population, wouldn't have it any other way.

It seems to me that the American public has been brainwashed by those who stand to loose out having the money to push their agenda through the news media in America where you can buy news time as easily as advertising time. It also seems that in order to get this through it has been watered down. Hope it works out for you all. Glad we have the NHS and the BBC.

Bonkers.

Pretty much every British person is proud of their National Health Service and their unarmed police.

A significant amount of Americans foam at the mouth at the thought of not being able to take a gun into Starbucks or the thought of providing health care to someone unable to pay.

Bonkers.

Help me out here, is this a joke or a serious post?

Honest question, I'm really not sure, but I have a nasty feeling that it's not a joke...

Your choice.

It happens nowadays without any war too. There's no declared war in Yemen or in the West Bank. Is the USA currently at war in Somalia?

I got all excited when I bought my first place 2 years ago. The place wasn't well taken care of and when I was fixing it up I put in a bunch of CFL's for my place. But it just didn't seem right, seriously. My wife in her work space was getting annoyed with the lighting so finally I had some old bulbs laying around and I popped them in, she noticed a difference before I even told her that I had changed them. I still want to use CFL's so I have them pretty much everywhere, except in places that I will be reading. This seems to be a good combo for the most part.

So reasoning here is this, I might have got a lower end CFL or a shotty product, but then I have to ask you, did you ever get a bad colour or light coming from an incandescent bulb? I've bought cheap ones all over the place and never had the issues people seem to have with buying cheap CFL bulbs. It would be my hope that they would make sure that the cheaper ones(probably older 15 year old technology) would disappear and make people more willing to switch over.

So while there might be little difference between the two if you get a high end CFL you will probably find most people get the cheap ones that give off funny colours(at least they seem to to me, but I think Incandescents give off too much of a yellow glow) and people will be less apt to go out and buy them.

I think CFL's will eventually be replaced by better LED's than we currently have. They don't have the mercury, they don't waste any heat creating light(yes CFL's still do) and they last longer. Currently they kind of suck(only currently get bulbs up to 60watts) and they cost a lot more than CFL's(cost of white LED) and the colours arn't quite right compared to the sun's spectrum. But I think that LED's have more of a future as they are still being developed and hopefully they can fill the void with a better spectrum of light than CFL's.

I ramble on too much, basically I like the idea of CFL's and I think people should use them as much as possible, but I can see the benifit of still having incandecent lighting at least for the time being, and this news is sad.

Are you also not fooled by the checkerboard illusion?

Hint: Your eyes don't have any absolute color reference, not even from one part of the visual field to another. The brain constantly adjusts things.

You might say that in an A/B test you prefer one color but we also find in A/B audio tests that people say that music which is 10% louder is 'better' even when it's played on the exact same hardware (ie. you tell them you're switching to different amp/speakers but all you do is change the volume level).

Psychovisual models ... it's all in the head.

I meant to amend that with...

Other than that, we've been running CFLs exclusively for well over two years now (other than a handful of rarely-used fixtures), and I have had exactly one bulb burn out.

I'm even running a handful of the really old "big plastic enclosure" CFLs with the straight fluorescent bulbs enclosed in the huge plastic-y dome. They take a while to fire up after a couple of decades of use, but they are useful in areas where bulbs are really hard to change because they JUST WON'T DIE.

hitList.add(new Target("Soulskill"));

>>>Maybe you should have tried a different brand then? I have CFLs in almost every fixture in the house.

Which brand?

In my experience ALL the brands (Philips, GE, Lights of America) have a warmup time, unless you buy one that don't have the instant on function. (Instead they sputter and flicker for 2-3 seconds.) I've tried to find the non-instant-on CFLs but they don't seem to be made anymore. Bottom Line: After ~15 years of CFL use I've reached the conclusion they simply are NOT an identical replacement for incandescents. There are too many flaws, like trying to use a netbook when what you really need is a full-sized laptop or desktop.