2. You're less likely to mistake the brake for the accelerator.

No, it really is the other way around. In an emergency situation, the action that requires the least thought is always least likely to fail. Consider the difference:

• With right-foot braking, you have to consider the horizontal position of your foot and adjust it prior to stomping.
• With left-foot braking, you just have to remember the difference between left and right and stomp the correct foot, which if you've been doing it for years, becomes a purely instinctive reaction..

You're less likely to press the brake as you're accelerating. In the olden days, this only meant that the brake lights would come on as you rode the pedal. In modern cars this cuts the accelerator and increasing the risk of a collision with the person behind you.

I've never encountered this in any car, thankfully. I would argue that this is an inherent design defect that makes it harder to safely get started while your car is on an uphill slope....

Further more, in an emergency situation it doesn't help you stop faster as your reaction speed is still the same....

Yes and no. The amount of time it takes you to start reacting is the same. The amount of time it takes you to stomp one foot is considerably less than the amount of time it takes you to lift one foot, move it sideways, and then stomp, because three motions always takes less time than one. No matter how you look at it, unless you're driving with cruise control turned on and your right foot hovering over the brake pedal, you'll stop significantly faster when driving with two feet than with one.

Adding a "few more pennies" to the cost of a gallon of water means increasing the wholesale cost of water five to ten-fold.

That wasn't intended to be a real number, but rather a way of saying "by a small percentage". I probably should have just said that. My bad. :-)

Meaningless feel-good policies. 4% of California's developed water goes to municipal use, while 80% goes to agriculture. It's most likely agri-business funded propaganda that has you thinking desalinization is an answer to our water problems.

Not at all. I recognize that most of our water is going to agriculture, and I recognize that the technology has not evolved fast enough to reduce the water consumption of agriculture to a level that is sustainable over the long term. And we're seeing a rapid shift in our climate that is causing record droughts. We either have to find more water somewhere or reduce food production, which probably isn't a good idea.

What the Ag industry would like is for cities to switch to super expensive desalinated water, so they can have the existing cheap water sources all to themselves.

Unfortunately, agribusiness can't readily use desalinated water (or at least not the consumer-grade stuff) without killing the plants and leaving the ground unusable. Brawndo most certainly does not have what plants crave. :-)

IMO, agribusiness should have to pay for some of the cost of the desalination plants that their water use causes consumers to have to use. That's only fair. But we still need more water than is coming down on our side of the mountains, which means we still need the desalination plants. You can't keep taking more water out than the clouds put back in over the long term without causing serious problems.

Logic fails abound. If you recycle water, you're ALSO not taking as much water OUT of the river or stream and you gain stability when the river or stream is unreliable.

To a very limited degree. For the short distance between an intake pipe and an outlet pipe, there must be a certain amount of water flowing, and that's the extra water that the reservoirs must emit beyond the amount needed for human use. However, even if we cut our water extraction to a tenth the current amount up near the top of the river, the savings would be completely lost in the noise. Now to be fair, down at the bottom of the river, where so much of the water has already been taken out, it might make a difference in the amount of extra water required (but still probably not a high percentage of the total). Of course, the communities down at the far end of those rivers are, IIRC, already building desalination plants, making that argument mostly moot.

Do you REALLY believe that switching to CFL is the equivalent of living in a shack with a dirt floor flinging your poop into the back yard in a bag?

No, of course not. But storing buckets of water around your house to water plants with is a great way to invite mosquitos and all the diseases that come with them. And then you have the extreme conservationists who insist on only flushing the toilets once per day to save water. (No, I'm not kidding.) That approaches third-world conditions rather quickly.

There are a number of ways that the U.S. seems hellbound to make itself a 3rd world country but none of them involve turning off a lamp in an un-occupied room or using less than 10 gallons of water to flush after you pee.

Clearly. However, none of those things actually matter in the grand scheme of things. That was my point. Even in aggregate, the average person flushes the toilets three or four times per day. That's 40 gallons per person per day. If you could to that in half by forcing everyone to replace their toilets, you'd save 20 gallons per person per day, which sounds like a lot until you realize that leaking water mains alone cost us about that much water, and unlike the major headache of replacing a toilet, can be fixed with little to no impact on individual homes. And when you realize that you'd only be saving about one or two percent of California's water usage by doing so, with a shortfall of twenty or thirty percent, you quickly conclude that we're way past the point where conservation can solve the problem. At best, it is a stop-gap until a real solution can be put into place.

Worse, by conserving, you're allowing the same politicians who endlessly delayed the capital improvements that could have prevented the shortage in the first place to continue doing so. This may sound cynical, but IMO, if you really want to end the water crisis in a hurry, the best way would be for every Californian to try to double their water usage by flushing the toilet four or five extra times per day, running the sprinklers longer, taking longer showers, etc. That would rapidly bring the water crisis to a point where politicians have to act now or get voted out en masse, ensuring that their only option is to get off their backsides and build the needed infrastructure that they should have built thirty years ago.

First, and here's the rub, most gains in efficiency are small historically. Such progress is incremental. So while you are correct about the bulbs, aggregate effects build. That 60W incandescent will create heat, which then the air conditioner will need to counter, which means it is more inefficient than it first appears.

Except that incandescent lights are mostly used at night, which means that the waste heat is on average reducing power consumption (or, more likely, natural gas consumption) by helping heat the house, albeit less efficiently than a heat pump or gas furnace would. So on the whole it is less inefficient than it first appears.

Further, money not spent on energy will be spent elsewhere, generating economic activity.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, that's true for money not spent on anything, not just energy. And energy production is economic activity. It provides stock value for the retirement savings of millions of Americans. :-)

Mass agriculture as currently practiced needs to also go away. Vertical farming combined with other techniques will greatly reduce water use while restoring natural habitat to native flora and fauna, once the technology matures. This, combined with either efficient solar (which is coming soon) and/or fusion (which may or may not be coming in the next 10 to 50 years) would allow for near-total water reclamation.

This, I tend to agree with. The thing about those sorts of technology changes is that they make conservation mostly irrelevant as a long-term strategy; so long as equipment periodically gets upgraded, everyone will end up saving power or water or whatever automatically, and over the long term, any conservation that individuals might attempt in the short term will be lost in the noise.

As for desalination, it must be done with some care not to damage any more ocean habitat.

Certainly true. The key is to spread the brine across a large enough area so that the amount of extra salinity isn't more than a few times the extra evaporation you'd get on an unusually hot day. There are many approaches that would work, and I'm happy leave the final decision on that to scientists. I desperately want the trolls who, even after all the scientists are in agreement, continue to impede progress through frivolous environmental lawsuits to crawl back under their bridges. Is that too much to ask? :-)

Sadly, I've come to much the same conclusion. The most vocal of the environmentalists are demanding that we all conserve water here in California, claiming that we have a water shortage, when there's approximately a trillion gallons of water within a quarter mile of our coastline, just waiting to be used.

So instead of spending a few more pennies per gallon to set up the mass-desalinization that we simply must have to properly sustain the population over the long term, these folks keep insisting that we should try to conserve our way out by doing stupid things like saving the wasted water while you wait for your shower to get hot and using it to water your plants, and other token gestures that significantly reduce quality of life while not making a significant dent in the state's water consumption (the overwhelming majority of which is used not by showers and toilets, not even by lawns, but by mass agriculture).

The problem is, when these folks say that they want to save 25% of California's water use through cuts to residential and municipal water use, they're really saying that they want every man, woman, and child to magically import about twice as much water as they currently use from some magical river in the sky so that they can be net producers of water instead of consumers, at about their current rate of consumption. Yeah, that's going to work.

And then they propose dubious ideas like reprocessing of waste water as a means of saving water... except that reusing water doesn't save water. Waste water typically gets processed and dumped into rivers and streams. If instead of doing that, you reuse the water, you're taking out less water, but you're also failing to put back exactly the same amount of water as you reuse. Yes, that might mean less processing for the cities downstream, but in the end, you still have the same amount of water in the river that you did before, so there's the same quantity of water for folks downstream as before.

The only way that reusing water could actually save water would be if the total human consumption and release of water exceeded the amount of water needed to keep the rivers and streams at a safe minimum level for wildlife, allowing less water to be released from the reservoirs upstream. Unfortunately, that is not the case, so waste reprocessing cannot (safely) save water.

These are presumably the same people who, when we had a power shortage, didn't demand more generator capacity, didn't demand investigations into the illegal practices that resulted in the shortage, but instead tried to get everybody to save power by banning incandescent light bulbs. This, of course, had no noticeable effect on our state's power consumption because the total consumption from incandescent bulbs averaged a fraction of a percent of the state's power use (because nearly 100% of businesses switched to primarily fluorescent lighting at least twenty years ago). So they took away a form of lighting product that a lot of us preferred under the guise of saving power, but didn't actually save a meaningful amount of power.

You get the idea. Sane environmentalism means pushing for renewable energy sources. Trying to get people to reduce consumption is like screaming at the wind, demanding that it not mess up your hair; anybody going down that path is pretty much guaranteed to look absolutely insane.

On iOS you can't put unsigned code on any device, not even your own, without the signing cert so to do serious development, you need to pay $100 ...

Until today.

That actually doesn't sound too horrible, but then again, I enjoy writing parsers, so take that with a grain of salt... or an entire salt truck.

Same here, though for me, it was ATA and USB HID devices. As a programmer, nothing annoys me more than running into bugs and thinking, "I could fix this in two minutes if I had the source," and not being able to fix it because I don't. I've fixed bugs in many other people's code on many occasions simply because they annoyed me.

With that said, I've never seriously entertained touching a GPU driver; I think that might very well be the special hell that Captain Reynolds was talking about. :-)

Steve's speech may not have gotten us off of Flash, but it did light a fire under Adobe's backside. At the time, Flash was by far the biggest cause of browser crashes. I think it was well into the double-digit percentages, at a frequency that made the next most frequent crasher bugs seem like noise by comparison. Between the public pressure it put on Adobe to clean up their terrible, buggy, hopelessly insecure code and the effort that various browser teams made to sandbox plug-ins in separate processes, browsers are a lot more stable with Flash installed now than they were back then.

In practice, you're much, much more likely to have cells become nearly dead shorted because of dendritic growth caused by cell reversal in a pack. Such dendrites dramatically reduce the pack's overall capacity and increase its self-discharge rate. This is why discharging packs to nothing is a very bad idea unless you either do it one cell at a time or do it extremely slowly.

You cannot damage a single NiMH (or NiCd, for that matter) cell by simply draining it down to 0v. Well, you will have to use a "stupid" charger to wake it up afterwards, but the cell will be otherwise ok.

If the charger is too dumb (lacking thermal sensors), I'd be concerned with overheating the cells and starting a fire (though not nearly as spectacularly as with lithium ion chemistry). You do, of course, have to use a charger that won't cowardly refuse to charge a cell that is fully depleted.

And damage rechargeable batteries by draining them below their safe discharge threshold.

Also why would anyone make a bluetooth keyboard without a proper boost converter that can run down to the alkalines minimum voltage!!!

Because the device can't tell whether you're using an alkaline battery or not, and if you run a rechargeable battery down to an alkaline battery's minimal voltage, you'll permanently damage the battery.

Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1.

The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Executive power, by definition, means overseeing the day-to-day administrative activities of the government. Executive orders whose sole purpose is to manage those day-to-day administrative activities fall very clearly within the President's authority.

About twice as many Democrats voted for it. Only 1 Democrat voted against it compared to 30 republicans. That's a very significant difference.

It was poorly ordered. I think the intended meaning was "slightly more against it than for it", but because of it being right after the post about the Democrats, most folks read it as "slightly more against it than the Democrats".

The biggest problem, IMO, is why the Republicans were against it. Most of them seemed to vote against it not because it gave the government too much power, but because it gave the government too little. For example, they bring us folks like Mitch McConnell claiming that the lack of the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. (sic) Act is going to cause terrorism-related deaths in the U.S., rather than recognizing that the colossal resources and manpower that are going into data collection would be much more effectively spent in a more targeted way that didn't catch so many innocent people in the dragnet, and that the mere existence of the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. (sic) Act that he so staunchly supports makes us more likely to miss a real terrorist threat rather than less.