My experience is that GE makes, or at least MADE as of two years ago, the worst CFLs. They die within a year, especially if installed upside-down. I had a Sylvania that I bought 7 years ago that went through two moves and three light fixtures finally die after about three years in an open can fixture. The GE that replaced it died in six months. Well, sometimes it works if you fiddle with it.

A side story on unintended consequences...

The meddlers in Congress wanted to stop the serfs from using inefficient incandescent lights. So they passed (and W signed) a bill in 2007 that, besides the phaseout we all enjoyed, required that all CEILING FANS, of all things, include an energy-saving bulb. However, they included an exemption for ones with candelabra sockets. Naturally, to save the $1-2 per unit, the manufacturers started putting candelabra sockets in every ceiling fan, even when there was plenty of room in the design for a standard socket. So now, where I would have easily swapped out the bulb for a medium-base CFL or LED myself, now instead I use the inefficient cheap incandescent they included, or I pay 2-3 times as much for an LED that actually fits the socket, or I have to buy a replacement socket and wire it in myself. Socialism FAIL.

At least they didn't give you the "I don't care, you still have to register" bureaucratic BS.

Actually, I started off generally believing in GW and AGW, but the evidence presented for AGW (not to mention GW) has itself changed my mind.

It doesn't help your case that the word "denier" is used exactly as is the word "heretic".

That was exactly my thought. If his work is used to influence public policy, then everything related to his work should be public, including any relevant emails.

"I don't claim Obama is not an American. I'm just saying that the White House, for reasons of its own, has put up a faked document."

That's pretty much my view. I don't know one way or the other what his legal status is, tho I know of no reason to disbelieve the Hawaii statement of information accuracy. What we do have is an image that was unquestionably altered (as anyone with experience editing compressed or layered images could instantly see), rather than a pristine copy. I lost interest after that and if anything else came to light, it's missed me.

And the one big reason it matters is because you can't prosecute a non-citizen for treason, in the event.

As to the rest of this thread, looks like you've encountered the slashdot equivalent of the UFF. :(

The trouble is, we may in the future discover that the sequenced DNA does not suffice. Or that there's an error. If we don't have reference material, we can't fix any such errors, or even discover them in the first place.

This is kinda like deciding a project is no longer needed, so instead of archiving it, you compile one last binary, then destroy all the source code.

I wonder if any of the milder diseases we see are actually attenuated or mutated smallpox, still in the wild.

Well, I've got my smallpox vax scar... nowadays that's how you ID an old fogie!

Considering all the other stuff Dubai has built, how does this mall rate more than a passing mention?

Reading the summary, I thought this would be about actual hacking... say, making the car do something awesome it couldn't do before. Maybe, like adding a special performance mode, improving its charge rate, or adding features to its entertainment system. I see it's really all about pwnage. I'll pass.

How about Microsoft/IBM screwing Gary Killdall out of DOS

Uh... he didn't create DOS. He created CP/M. You could say MS screwed DR out of a _deal_ with IBM, but it's likely he did that to himself.

You could say the same about the difference between shopping malls and individual shop units. With housing, terraced homes are more energy efficient than detached homes since the common walls are usually at the same temperature compared to the outside.

Imagine you divided the space up into cubes, each the side of a shop. Each side of a cube can be outside air, insulated wall, uninsulated wall, open space. Suppose you have 1000 units. With individual stores, that's 5000 sides that need to be insulating. If you have one shopping mall, with shops side-by-side, there are only 500 sides that need insulating. Even with the extra floor space for plazas, staircases, that's still no more than a few hundred rooftops.

It's no different from an office block. Some modern designs actually have separate frameworks for the exterior walls and the floors, so you have a greenhouse architecture where each can be modified without affecting the other. It's just a dome but with flatter sides.

Ideally to power something like that, they'd really need to a giant massive solar power plant somewhere in the middle of a large desert, and maybe some energy storage based on pumped water.

No, not particularly. I think that people will learn to exploit the weaknesses, though - and that is why I feel that constant change is necessary.

I learned BASIC in 1977, about the same way, and about as quickly.

And I was writing a few BASIC programs shortly thereafter. But they are today what I would call TRIVIAL. Things that I would do in a single method of a modern language. With much better style, correctness, comprehensibility and maintainability.

Having just learned programming myself doesn't mean I was by any means an expert ready to work on big commercial problems worth lots of money. It took years more to learn a lot of important things. Structured Programming (aka giving up GOTO). Encapsulation. Information hiding. Data structures and dynamic memory. Algorithms. Understanding performance classification of algorithms. Understanding how the machine works at the low level. Writing toy or elementary compilers. Learning a LISP language (pick any one, they will teach you the same important and valuable lessons). Learning databases. How they work as well as how to use them. Read a few good books on human interface design before building a complex GUI program. I could go on and on.


> You can't learn how to build a highly optimised, always available, secure e-commerce trading platform in 8 hours.

Correct. The point here I think is that to have all of the valuable skills that makes you good at something, and fast at it, and apparently able to recognize the solutions to problems very quickly is -- lots and lots of study and practice. Years of learning. Failures (hopefully on some of your own toy problems first rather than commercial ones). Figuring out how to debug complex systems -- without or prior to the existence of source level debuggers.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for those who cry because employers want skilled programmers. Well, professional sports teams want skilled players. And modelling agencies want beautiful people. These things come with some combination of luck of the draw and effort to take advantage of it. (Those models don't eat donuts, for example.) I also think computer geeks should be able to cry and whine that humanities studies are unfair.