Yeah I always knew that. The charge leaks away after a couple days, but the first thing you do is find them and short them out. Then you remove them, charge them back up, and sneak up on other kids with your new disposable taser.

In any case, Radio Shack just died, so you might want to head over there for parts.

If you now have both your grandmothers' TVs, you can make TWO flyback coils and set up a kickstarter to raise money for a drone that flies over your lawn and fires vinyl Frisbees at 33 RPM.

You can make a tesla coil out of an old CRT TV- the older the better. Once your grandmother dies, rip her TV apart and pull out the flyback transformer. The original primary coils can be ripped off and thrown out, but the secondary coil (the one that looks like a rubber tire, and has the lead that looks like a stethoscope attached to the glass CRT) is the one you really need. There are circuits that use a 555 timer, but the one I made had a self-tuning circuit with two primary coils (eight turns each) and two feedback coils (four turns each). Those connect to two power resistors (collector leads and gate leads respectively). The emitter leads were grounded, along with the ground clip of the secondary coil, and the other ends of all the coil windings were at 12 volts. (There were also resistors to keep the transistors from blowing out; I forget the details.) I made it in high school with a bunch of alligator clips, and it threw a high frequency spark about an inch long from the secondary lead. The spark hurt if it hit your finger. But you could hold the secondary lead, THEN turn it on, and a metal object in your other hand would throw a spark. You could hold a fluorescent tube by the middle, and move the other end near a grounded object until it threw a spark at it from the prong. Then the half of the tube between your hand and the prong would light up. And it threw off all kinds of RF crud. The North Koreans could probably make a drone crash with one of those things.

I just have too many anti-vaxxers to yell at today.

These comment sections are always riddled with a dozen dittoheads that gravitate to these stories and ruin the threads by parroting the same stupid conspiratorial talking points over and over- "scientists are cherry pickers", "scientists used to think the sun revolved around the earth too", etc. Sometimes I see a real skeptic bringing up interesting points- then I have more to say. Since I don't want to waste my time replying to every thick-headed numskull who pastes the same bullshit, all you're going to get is an insult. Bye.

I knew when I clicked on "Read Comments" that some of them would be stupid enough to make my head explode.

Intuit is notorious for lobbying politicians to make tax filing complicated for anyone not using TurboTax.

"Small businesses" in this context are ones that hire 499 or fewer employees. We're not talking about pizzerias here.

Thanks, now I'm imagining Stephen Hawking yelling at his marketing team from that wheelchair. "Why is Kim Kardashian more popular than me? You think her space-time is more curvy than mine?"

I laughed when I saw this story. I've seen several videos posted online where open carry idiots run into people who get pissed off at them. They follow them back to their cars and carefully zoom in on their license plates for a couple seconds to make sure all the other armed dimwits out there get a good look.

I have to agree that Slashdot has gone to hell over the past 15 years.

Hey, how's that merger going, bitches?

Ancient predictions made in CE years? STFU, moron.

What? Who are these few people who are going to get rich off a carbon tax?

There has been a lot of attention given to space weather, like solar dynamics. So far there has been no evidence that space weather is having warming effects. That doesn't mean that nobody has been looking. People have, especially in the energy industry, and so far what little evidence there is actually points in the opposite direction.

I've heard this point made a lot- we can't reduce CO2 because that means a one-world government would take my guns away and force me to be an atheist, or something.

Have any reference to that other than geoengineeringwatch? Scientists do talk about that as a possible idea but so far it remains speculative, and nobody is actually trying it. Those jet trails you see over your house are from carrying passengers. Sulfuric acid just doesn't have the money to afford the ticket prices.

(If anyone got confused by that, the "compounds" he's talking about are sulfur aerosols, not CO2.) To my knowledge the idea strikes everyone as fanciful and distasteful; it only gets discussed as a possible last ditch, desperate option. Cities would have to be pretty flooded before anyone would actually seriously consider doing that. The main argument in its favor is that one ton of sulfuric acid would be potent enough to offset the warming of about 100000 tons of CO2. That's about all that can be said for it. (FWIW, CO2 is also an acidic gas, and obviously it also "shoots the atmosphere with radiation".)

The Senate just voted 98 to 1 that the climate is changing, but refused to vote on whether humans were in any way responsible. I think that if anything qualifies as "paying honor to the creation but not the creator".

I think that's because we can see them under the streetlamp- if we're the type who even bothers to look at all.

IIRC it's 97%, not 100%. But that's still a really good consensus for a scientific theory, especially given the financial incentives for scientists to dissent.

That's definitely true- a typical CO2 molecule remains airborne for about 10,000 years before being reabsorbed. in several million years the planet will have forgotten about us, except for any mass extinction event that we might have triggered- similar to what happened during the Carboniferous period, when today's fossil fuels were actually fossilized.

Rush Limbaugh said this the day after the storm. Weathermen and climatologists aren't actually the same people. In fact most of the "skeptical scientists" that appear on TV to deny climate change are actually weathermen. But even if a weatherman can't tell you whether it's going to be warmer next week than today, he can predict with good confidence that exactly six months from now it's going to be warmer than today was. You're demanding a perfect weather forecast over every possible timescale before you'll even pull your fingers out of your ears.

Actually, climatologists are pretty irritated that they can't talk about their science in public without the discussions instantly getting mobbed by Rush Limbaugh fans. I see these articles and I figure, there might be actual scientists posting intelligent things in there somewhere, but I'm never going to find them through all this crud.

I've heard a lot about scientists who are supposedly scamming the government with a giant hoax so they can get piddling NSF grants, but this is the first I've heard about wannabe trillionaires.

But some people can. Then Tesla can get more business, they can come out with better and cheaper cars, other companies will be incentivized to sell similar cars, and someday your car will work that way too.

Say what you want about pencil pushers, they can usually do math. Most households pay about $3000 on gas per year. If you're worrying about paying $30K a year on gas taxes, that's some pretty serious driving.