I can only picture that someone who looks like Dr. Evil (from the Austin Powers series) commissioning the construction of this "bigger, better" supercollider :|

Today plucked from the local news: Xcel urges customers to turn down the heat after Canada pipeline blast (www.startribune.com/local/242004631.html).

Xcel Energy is also a natural gas provider throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota. A sizable amount of their supply comes from Canada. They are urging people to turn down their home thermostats to a relatively-low 60F. What happens to the nat gas power plants now? Do *they* have to throttle down too? Other fuel sources can keep on truckin.

Wait a minute. Weren't these the same people who broke into the Democratic Natl. Committee's headquarters seeking to pilfer with documents and information?

In recent years there has been a movement to quickly shutter "old" power plants that run on fuel sources like coal, oil and other less environmentally friendly fuels and totally replace them with natural gas plants. Natural gas has come way down in price also which helps force that along. But what happens when supplies of natural gas either radically go up in price or become limited due to some other distribution problem? It's a good thing that they had these peaking units ready at the standby along with a sufficient amount of fuel.

Where I live (Minneapolis) a number of the local coal power plants have been completely converted to natural gas. There is still one large coal-fired plant though north of town (Xcel Energy's Sherco) that is not viable to convert to natural gas at this point and still runs on coal. Sherco was the quintessential baseload coal fired power plant cranking out 2400MW through three units. It has now be relegated to being a peaking unit for the most part, turned up and down as necessary. Recently one of the three turbines violently shattered, had to be rebuilt and was offline for many months. Sherco is the kind of power plant that was meant to be fired up and ran continually for a couple of years without downtime and without significant variation in the throttling/output. I can only speculate but I don't think that treating it like a peaking plant and constantly varying the output is good for it... and a number of other similar power plants around the country.

Someday I'm just going to buy a prepaid mobile phone. And register it to:

Joseph Biden
9800 Savage Road
Ft. George G. Meade, MD 20755-6623

[I'll save you the Google lookup - that's the NSA headquarters]

The recording industry, the biggest bunch of middleman thieves ever, is finally losing its free ride. You don't NEED a record company anymore, you can be your own! If they didn't think they were dying they wouldn't be violently throwing tantrums everywhere - lobbying for really radical unilateral changes to the law, suing regular everyday people for "piracy" to the point of bankruptcy, hassling bars/restaurants (usually mom and pop operations, barely making it as it is) into paying commercial licensing fees for music, etc.

A band now can cut their own album and sell it on iTunes, Amazon or a host of other music sites and retain a lot more of the proceeds. Back in the day even large, famous acts were getting stiffed by the record companies! Thanks in part to the way that record companies have pushed musicians up against the wall now for many years the market is now to a point where the artists don't even make money on the albums themselves. Instead they make the money at concerts, both on tickets and on merchandise. An artist now almost has to *give away* the music (many seem to - look on Youtube for all of the "full album" videos) as the loss leader in hopes of getting people to their concert. Artists can post samples on Youtube (at no cost) to drive sales and exposure. The record company middleman has less and less importance in a marketplace like this.

I'm glad to see that more and more musicians are standing up for themselves and taking advantage of the offerings that don't involve RIAA-related entities. If the entity doesn't add value they shouldn't have a role in the marketplace anymore.

Many people have defected from IE due to its problems with malware and adware. Firefox, but more so Chrome seemed to be safe. So now that the awesome, "safe alternative" browser is compromised, what's next? I can't imagine there an easy fix to this. Is it time to go to yet another browser?

This is almost like how pharmaceutical scientists keep having to modify and discover new antibiotics. The current batch of drugs eventually becomes less and less effective and the bacteria become resistant, prompting us to constantly evolve the offerings.

Murdering people is barbaric. That's what all of these people are on death row for. And often for gruesome murders combining things like kidnapping, rape and torture! How is it not barbaric to say that someone who has viciously murdered someone has more rights than their victim was ever afforded?

News like this just reinforces that drug enforcement in the US (and much of the western world, at the puppet-strings of the US) is a job program and political game. Lots of "Hank Schraders" and "Steve Gomezes" make their living trying to eradicate a product that people will spend hard-earned money and get into gunfights to obtain. They are trying to empty the ocean one teaspoon at a time. And the prison industry... ah the US prison establishment. We now lock up more people than all of those supposed communist, totalitarian nations we hate!