I actually agree - it's useless legislation. LEDs are so much more efficient, and so much longer lasting that they are quite capable of phasing out incandescent lamps without regulatory help. With the economy of scale and decreasing manufacturing costs, it won't be long until LED lamps are almost at price parity with incandescent lamps, which means the latter won't be manufactured except for a few decorative purposes. It's one of the rare times where the invisible hand is actually working as advertised.

Only one thing to do: Gaslights

$40? That seems excessive, was this a while back? I recently bought one for $7. I was skeptical until I realized that at 7.5w vs 60w, if it lasts 8 months it will have paid for itself.

Do any of you really expect the $12 billion a year firearms industry to just let you make your own guns, when they have about a third of congress on speed dial? Just watch, this guy is going to get it from both sides.

So unlike Apple? Has everyone forgotten the 20th anniversary Mac? Underpowered at its release, three times the price of a comparable Mac? C'mon people, I'm an unrepentant Apple user and I remember this - Apple making a really expensive version of something they have and selling to the rich is old hat.

What might be interesting with these is the opportunity to use them as trendsetters - Jay-Z wears one for a month, a thousand lesser celebs wear them for the next couple years, then the $500 version hits the streets - with two years of data to improve the user experience and make it more integrated and useful.

Nevermind, it seems like it is open and searchable. So yeah, maybe you don't want to give them your DNA.

So can someone explain to me why the FBI has carte blanche to run searches through the Ancestry.com database? It says they had a court order to reveal the name, but apparently no court order was necessary to do the check, why is that?

The person who made that accusation, Maude Delmont, had a story so obviously false that the prosecution never called her to testify at the trial.

It's still a goddamn shame that none of the allegedly "neutral" countries had the balls to take him in, but what can you do? The US is scary.

I don't think the time is yet right for him to come home, the government isn't any friendlier now than when he left and the people are only slightly less apathetic. Without some powerful public figures to support him, he doesn't stand a chance. However with the situation deteriorating in Russia I imagine it would only be a time before he was assassinated or traded back to the US, so he can't well stay there. At least this will shut up the "Why did he run if he really believes in his cause?" crowd - just kidding they'll change the script and keep on going. Always better to make it a referendum on Snowden's character than to actually talk about the real issues.

To build on this comment, one of the reasons it makes for an interesting modeling problem is that it sidesteps one of the limitations on actual pandemics - that the more deadly the disease the more difficulty it has spreading. In general (and there are exceptions) a deadly disease like Ebola has difficulty spreading because it kills its carriers(or immobilizes them) before they have a chance to infect as many people as possible. Meanwhile, 90% of humanity has some form of herpes, because it doesn't do all that much. With zombies, you have a pathogen which is fast acting and has very high fatality rates, but continues to spread through a reservoir (the zombies).

This doesn't work. The reason you get a patent in the first place is so you can market your product without fearing that it will be instantly ripped off. Let's say for example, I develop software that would say help manage data over transoceanic cables. I myself don't own any of these cables, so I would have to convince some company that did to license my software. Except that in your example they won't, since they know that if nobody licenses it then they can just replicate it themselves without fear, since I would have "no customers" and thus no claim to the patent. Perhaps if you modified your idea to where the patent has to be "in play", either a part of an offered product that is available or in development, or an internal part of a business model, and if if does not satisfy either of these for two years it is declared abandoned.

No, many of them are exactly the same, including tetracycline, ampicillin, and amoxicillin.

No, he shared two links to places people involved in beekeeping were talking about the system, one to the patent for the system, and then stated his own view that there might be issues with pest management and people believing that there is nothing but honey collection involved in beekeeping. Nowhere was there any whining, though perhaps some bemused skepticism.

I can't imagine where you are getting this information, it's just not true. Energy payback for most solar installations is less than 4 years, well within their service life. This includes inverters and mounts. Even financial payback, once not possible, now is a given.

Is...is this real? Not some wayward story from The Onion?