It's a sugar battery because journalists think it'll generate interest in their stories.

You're missing a huge factor of scale here.

We're using corn, soybeans, etc. as fuel. They're the energy source, so a lot of the market goes into fuel instead of food. Run out of fuel, you need more corn.

These guys are using sugar to make a component on the battery. The energy comes from somewhere else. No matter how many times you recharge the battery, you won't use any more sugar.

Even if we went into full scale production of these and replaced Li-Ion batteries altogether, it wouldn't make an appreciable difference on the sugar market.

As an aside, you also have to consider that by removing the requirement of lithium, you're moving from a scarce resource to a common one. We could make those batteries in the U.S. (or whatever country you happen to be in) and not require buying lithium from China. Lithium is used for several drugs, and by removing the demand for lithium, those drugs may drop in price to the point they'll be more accessible to people in poorer countries.

His message will be why people should hate Democrats, and why they should vote Republican. That message works for both the people who hate Democrats already (to keep them excited about voting) and the independants who haven't decided. As far as the content of the message, the independants are key, since he really just needs the political equivalent of pep rallies to keep the Republicans voting for him.

I suppose I could have phrased that differently. Historically, the president tends to be a focal point for policy matters in a party. It's not written in stone, and of course there's plenty of examples of unpopular presidents who lost the confidence of their party, but for the most part the president can steer party policy to a greater degree than any other individual in the party.

I've viewed it as one of Obama's failings that he hasn't taken advantage of this to push his agenda. A progressive party needs leadership, since there's so many different ways to define progress. Then again, just like he never said he wanted to end the PATRIOT ACT, he also said he felt legislation should come from the legislature, not the executive, so it's not really a surprise.

The legislative branch does repeal laws, but Obama is the head of the Democratic party which had control of both houses. They could have repealed the PATRIOT ACT; they chose not to.

And while the president is not the "prosecutor-in-chief", he does appoint and direct the Attorney General, which is basically the same thing. The Justice Department would act as the plaintiff (in the name of the U. S. government) in a war crimes case against Bush and his cronies. No sane president would do so, of course, because it would be political suicide. We can wish, though :)

No, I'm sure there's many like me who don't fly because of the TSA.

Showing up three hours early for my flight? Be treated like some bomb-carrying nutjob because I (gasp!) only bring a carry-on and have my shampoo and conditioner with me? No thanks. I've got a '65 Galaxie that rides like a dream and has a trunk you could fit Rhode Island in, I've got the money to keep the tank full, and I've got the time to take the scenic route. Screw the TSA.

I used some trig yesterday for the first time in years. I had a piece of wood I needed to cut at an angle, and I didn't have a protractor.

It was sad - I had to look up which of the basic trig functions was opposite/adjacent (tangent, of course). And it's been less than a decade since I took college trig.

(It was pointless, though. My dumb ass used 6" as the opposite side rather than 5 1/2" for a 1x6 plank, so the angle came out wrong. It was my derp for the week.)

Considering that (at the time I'm posting this) there's 640 comments, I'd wager to guess that nerds like this kind of question. I find it interesting to see what other Linux users have used in the past, and I would probably qualify as a nerd (although after you hit 20 or 25 the label doesn't fit well).

Your question sounds like an invitation for a massive flame fest. Perhaps that's why it wasn't selected.

There's a lot of reasons to switch distros. Everyone usually finds one that fits their way of thinking after two or three. People also find that the different distros work better at different tasks - you don't (generally) use Ubuntu for servers, for instance.

As far as what I run on "my" computer, it hasn't changed much: Slackware -> Debian unstable. I knew Slackware inside and out (back in the 3.x days) and now I know Debian very well (you have to, if you run unstable). I've hit a comfort zone, and I'm unlikely to change.

I switched from Slackware to Debian because Slackware was very, very far behind on switching from the libc5 C library to glibc (the second major change in Linux, the first being the switch to ELF executable format). A lot of software was being written that didn't work with the old libc5, and Pat (the maintainer of Slackware) was being stubborn on the point. He had his reasons, but I wanted new software, so I switched.

I tried Corel Linux back when it came out. That lasted about two days. It didn't live up to its promises, and when I found myself replacing the Corel repositories with Debian repositories, I knew it was in vain (BTW, doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade from Corel to Debian is... interesting. It worked, after a lot of fixing, but I finally wiped and reinstalled Debian). It's just as well - there was only the one version of Corel Linux.

I've had to use Red Hat (not Enterprise, but old school Red Hat Linux) on a few occasions for work-related reasons. This was back in the RPM dependency hell days, and it turned me off of any distro that doesn't maintain a decently large package repository. I used Fedora Core 4 and found it to be just as bad. Same goes for Mandrake (before they became Mandriva - I had friends who ran that because it was "user friendly" - I did not find it so. It might be better now, of course.

I've used Gentoo for shits and giggles on a server I run. I was just curious about it. I've since replaced it with OpenBSD because a) I didn't have the time to learn to admin it properly and b) compiling every package in the system on an Intel Atom chip is painful. (I already knew how to admin OpenBSD.) I liked Gentoo and if I ever replaced Debian as my main distro, it would be to go to Gentoo. I just don't have the time to learn a new system anymore.

I've done LFS. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of Linux. It reminded me a lot of my Slackware days, back when you had to compile everything.

Ubuntu works, and I've run it on a few machines, but doesn't fit into my way of doing things. I like to customize my system a lot, and I like to log in as root when I'm doing admin stuff. You can do that with Ubuntu, but it's just easier with Debian.

Of course, there's the BSDs and Solaris as well, and these days I mostly do server stuff on OpenBSD (or FreeBSD if it's a fileserver). The BSDs make excellent servers and don't feel as "hacked together" as Linux does. I wouldn't use one as my main system, but if I had a technical job again I wouldn't mind a FreeBSD desktop.

So the rite of passage isn't to find the most obscure distro, but to find the distro that suits both you and your use case best. Experimentation never hurts, and you can learn a lot from running different distros.

He's not really talking to people who hate Democrats anymore. He did that during the primary.

Now he's talking to independent voters who don't vote straight party ticket. People who hate Democrats are going to vote for him no matter what he says.

Every* religion has its fanatics, but they don't all blow people up. They might kill you (Christian fanatics vs. abortion doctors), wage a war on you (catholic vs. protestant in Northern Ireland, Shia-Sunni conflicts), take away your rights (Christian fanatics with blue laws, countries with Islamic law), or force their ideas onto you and your children (Intelligent Design, Hamas' anti-Jewish children's shows). Mormon fanatics are the ones that still practice polygamy and force young girls into marriage.

Normal Mormons of course are just regular people with some strange beliefs, but really, most of the strangeness was already in Christianity anyway (God created a huge, vast universe with uncountable stars and planets, with relativistic and quantum effects, and he really gives a shit who you like to poke your dick into?). I find it easier to believe that some guy found some gold plates and transcribed them than to believe that the word of God has passed down thousands of years without anyone tampering with it for their own benefit.

*OK, I've never met a pastafarian fanatic, but it's possible. I am curious what a Buddhist fanatic would be like.

You're thinking amish. Mormons can use technology just fine, they just can't wear miniskirts.

I agree that it's a terrible example, but for different reasons.

The post office loses money, true. But it's more like roads that people realize. The post is the one way that is (supposed to be) sure to communicate with someone.

You are notified of jury duty by mail. You're notified of property taxes via mail (at least in Oklahoma, I never owned property anywhere else). Pretty much any time the government needs to tell you something, it's via the mail. Mail has special legal status (certified and registered mail) that other forms of communication do not.

The byproduct is that it's useful for people to mail each other or businesses to mail customers or potential customers, which is good for the economy as a whole.

It's pretty much the same argument as the roads - they're good for the economy and the government needs them anyway.

ISPs, on the other hand, are probably not best deal with by the government. They'd pull another pre-split AT&T and we'd be stuck with crap service. I wouldn't mind seeing them operate the cables, though - government owned last mile and backbone, private reselling and packaging.

According to TFA they can't use the speed camera for anything except photographing speeders (Maryland law), so A wouldn't catch you vandalizing B.

Of course, they could always set up C to watch B, I suppose.

Depends if you're wanting to make a statement or stop the program.

If you just want to make a statement, then a paintball to the lens is good enough (bear in mind though that paintballs aren't exactly sniper ammo - they're pretty inaccurate). If you want to make the program too costly to operate, you destroy the camera.

I'm not advocating that, btw.