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Comment US Political System (Score 1) 374

The right-wing thinking seems to be that since businesses bring in money -- which is A Good Thing -- then anything a business does or wants must therefore be good. I'm not sure what a political system run by businesses (or at least unduly influenced by businesses) is called but we can summarise it with the acronym USA.

Comment Re:Interesting... (Score 1) 330

I agree that mandating a physical switch would have little effect on consumer habits. I've also measured most of my appliances and computers with my Kill-A-Watt and while many are close to zero or a watt or two some of the older stuff is around 10W. Energy efficiency is a large factor in my purchasing decisions -- bought a Wii instead of a PS3 or XBox, for instance -- and I tend to unplug (when not in use) devices I know have more than 1W power draw. Only a few essential things, like TiVo and refrigerators, are regularly left on. Now that we live in the US, I do miss the Australian power outlets with their built-in switches http://placelessness.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/powerpoint.jpg

Insulation is a huge factor. Our new house of ~2000 sq ft. with double-paned windows and floor, wall and ceiling insulation means a peak electricity usage in late southern California summer of around 20kW per day, 12kW per day last month (

Of course, if you really want to influence consumer behaviour have the price of the energy reflect its true cost, including clean-up and investment in new technologies. Fairly good chance the lazy people will make it off the couch when it has a large enough impact on their wallets.

Comment Re:You surrendered. (Score 1) 521

Agreed. For instance, the Californian DMV seem unable to process a driver's licence (or renewal of such) without one. The claimed they needed it and, when speaking with Social Security about getting the number to comply with the DMV demand, DSS pretty much said, "No they don't. Good bye" As an identifier for Social Security it's fine. As a unique public ID that is corralled into systems it was never designed to be in, that's a dumb idea and one does not find it surprising that identify theft is so high in the US.
Science

Submission + - Sceptical climate researcher withholds code (newscientist.com) 1

xav_jones writes: New Scientist is reporting that Nicola Scafetta, a physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina — whose work is often highlighted by climate-change sceptics, including US senator James Inhofe — is refusing to provide the software he used to other climate researchers attempting to replicate his results. Emails between Rasmus Benestad of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in Oslo and Scafetta over the past week had Scaffetta repeatedly refusing to provide the code. "If you just disclose your code and data, then we will manage to get to the bottom of this," Benestad writes in one email. "I really do not understand why you are not able to write your own program to reproduce the calculations," responds Scafetta.
NASA

Submission + - Voyager Makes an Interstellar Discovery (nasa.gov)

azoblue writes: The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

Comment Similar problem happened to me (Score 5, Interesting) 386

While watching the latest Batman movie the screen went dark and stayed that way for about 20 minutes. Speaking to the attendants afterward, they said their projectors had lost the internet link which authorized the movies to be shown. All projectors in the cineplex went down since all were digital (theatre was in Riverside, CA).

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