Nice post, actually. I think everyone assumed this was the case, but there is something people enjoy about getting angry on the internet.

What I would like to see is a 'backdoor' for people who do know what they are doing, like fleet sales for cars. If I come in the front door, I get full service. If I come in the back door (let's say a self service web portal in store - I pick up the cable I want, scan it at the terminal) and I get your best price with a reasonable margin and no negotiating. I buy it, and walk out - no up sell. You will still get hosed on the big ticket items you sell below margin, because as you noted the internet already does this to you. If Best Buy's price matches tiger direct or amazon, I'd gladly buy in town. Best Buy should have the purchasing power to make this a profitable endeavor. Amazon has local store inventory too, its just not in warehouses they let you browse in.

"Hey guys! Watch this!" - I think I just envisioned our next Darwin Award winners. Irradiating sperm should count, right?

We use Solar City, and our system works out to 16.7 cents per KWH this year. As with Verango, it does go up about 3% per year. I live in the central valley of California so we use a lot of air conditioning and have a pool, and we are on an electric well, so this was a massive savings for us in the summer and break even in the winter even when we factor in the 'rental' payments. They size the system so you still pay for tier 1 from PG&E (parent is right, no point buying solar energy that is more expensive than grid). If you do cut back and push electricity to the grid, PG&E will actually pay you for it. Two caveats to that - when you go solar, PG&E moves to billing you only once a year, and that can be a significant shock when you get the bill. They also only pay you something like 6 cents a KWH, so its not worth over-sizing a system just to get a check.

Actually, I agree. I'd go a bit further, and if we all agree that for these free services (gmail, facebook, etc.) that we are the product, not the service, we should be very careful about how much restriction we want to put on these providers.

I'd vote that they MUST tell us what they keep, so we can decide if that price is fair for the service received.

I'd vote against mandatory restrictions on what they can keep. I am willing to pay some level of privacy intrusion, just like I am willing to pay some amount of my attention by accepting advertisements in TV and web pages, so that I can avoid paying actual currency for many services these 'free' vendors provide.

Because that is illegal. (indecent exposure).

Now, if you can keep yourselves covered up and quiet while you do it...
Nah, I'll save that debate for someone with a lot more legal experience than I to decide if that would be legal.

Not to be pedantic, but if your $49 is correct, that would be just under $2 BILLION in reduced profits if they did it in the US for last quarter alone. According to the press release, they sold over 37 million phones last quarter.

I think if I went to my boss and suggested it would be a patriotic move to build here and it would only cost us $8 billion a year, I would probably be looking for work.

I am a big fan of building in the US, but let's look for products like construction equipment (that take large amounts of natural resources we have, and are expensive to ship), and do those first. (See Caterpillar for a success story like this). When China's economy has caught up to ours (they want Lattes too), then we can look to compete on things like electronics that are cheap to ship.

Banning cell phones has not reduced their use in cars (at least on my drive). It has moved the cell phone from being held to the ear, to being held horizontally in front of the mouth.

Apparently, people have equated speakerphone and hands-free as the same thing.

Thus I would doubt we have seen any appreciable reduction in accidents.

As a driver of a very small / low car, I can say that talking on a cell phone does present a real danger to the rest of us. I have to allow a driver to drift into my lane where I was at least once a week. This is always accompanied by a driver using the speakerphone technique.

Excellent, I'll add:
Norma Stitz (sorry, she is real)
Jenna Talls
Amanda Lynne
Corey O'Graff
Dan Druff,
Duane Pipe

and everyone's favorite - Mike Hunt.

Are there any good freeware / shareware download sites left that are trustworthy?

There was a time when download.com fit this bill. They were early in supporting user ratings so you could tell what was crapware. I guess we get what we pay for though.

That system is already in place. Legislators rely on experts to bring them up to speed on the specific issues at hand.

We call them lobbyists.

System sucks, don't it.

As a farm owner, I have to respectfully disagree. Check out the H2-A program. Though many labor contractors choose to not use this program, when they do, one requirement is to advertise the job to US citizens first. Typically, they can fill about 10% of the applications, and then a small fraction of those will actually complete the job.

Good wages and benefits don't alleviate the work involved with many farm labor jobs (try picking avocados commercially, or hand weeding a field for a day sometime). For better or worse, Americans are not physically capable of doing the work that the Mexican laborers are doing. We used to be able to, but life has gotten too easy for us and we don't have the same fortitude.

That is not meant as a slight to the American people (I am one also), it's just the same as not being able to drink the water in Mexico as a gringo. We don't do it, so we can't do it.

If we change our attitude toward work, there is certainly nothing stopping us from regaining this ability, but you fool yourself if you think you can do it now.

So what you are really saying is the population will be much lower since it will be too warm to support life?

That's great! Now we don't have to worry about that pesky global warming problem. Mother nature already has a plan all worked out. Once our population reduces, we won't have the ability to push as much carbon into the atmosphere, thereby cooling the planet. :-)

Sorry to be pessimistic, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

If you ever coded Conway's game of life, you know there are only two possible outcomes - infinite (the earth will cool to the point of absolute zero at some point or heat to the point of turning to a vapor and dispersing) or it will reach a governed stasis (the earth has some naturally occurring phenomenon that moderates our temperature). Historically, it looks like the latter, since we have had both ice and warm ages which it has recovered from. Therefore, while I wholeheartedly agree we are experiencing a climate change, we are mere children when it comes to understanding the real causes and ultimate effects. We may do our best (worst?) to try to overheat the planet only to find it cools as a result because the cloud cover ultimately shades out the sun (or some other completely unexpected outcome).

Thanks, I was trying to figure out what San Francisco authors had to do with science fiction. Must be a local thing to think of SF as San Francisco.

There are cars that can detect if you farted and adjust the air conditioning accordingly. http://www.automobilesreview.com/auto-news/2011-infiniti-m-forest-air-conditioning-system/19071/ I'd say intelligent cars are here, or at least that's what my wife told me to say.

Great idea! I'll start towing my 25' travel trailer with my BMW Z3. That should be a lot safer!

One small suggestion - don't drive in front of me if I need to emergency stop. If I am towing using a subcompact, I'll have to use you as an intertia reducing device.