These bottles were banned two years ago, though not in the USA. This is hardly a bulletin.

What is the consequence if the law treats any source of information for a reporter as a source? It just means the reporter can't be compelled to answer "Where did you get that information" all the time, including if the answer is, "I got it from a web search."

Now in most cases a reporter would answer the question, but the law simply gives them the option not to ask. It may be that the commenter on the blog is *also* a secret source who decided to make a public comment. There are other reasons.

I see no harm in saying that anything is a source, because it doesn't affect what people do, just what the reporter can be compelled to reveal.

And is it not useful for a journalist site to be able to say, "comments on this blog are anonymous and we can't be compelled to give you up" if the site wishes to? At to have them be able to back that up? Must the protected source information only come via a secret meeting?

The summary made me do a double-take, and if you RTFA you will see the summary is wrong. The real plate isn't based on the fake plates. The fake plates were a copy of Armando's plate long ago, he made them himself. When Armando left New Hampshire, maddog apparently took over the plate.

I have one of the fake plates from Usenix, when Armando had dec make them.

Correct. In particular, there you are showing that if you run somebody else over, that you can pay for what you did. The government only requires insurance to cover you hurting other people on the road, as it can't be sure you will have the means to pay when something happens.

You are not required to buy collision or theft, though if you have a car loan the bank will probably demand it, as they don't want to worry that you won't pay back the loan on your stolen car with them having no repo ability.

There is no free lunch. Of course it costs you. There is a subsidy in that it is untaxed income, but leaving that aside, the plan costs the employer money. It is part of their cost of hiring you, and if they didn't pay it you could negotiate more pay.

Work out the math yourself or try the spreadsheet at http://ideas.4brad.com/are-solar-panels-wasteful-way-go-green

Note that being economically viable is *not* the same as being the most cost effective way to reduce load on the dirty grid. When it's not viable, it is silly to do it from a financial standpoint, and your only reason is to waste some money making the world a greener place. After it's viable you can come up with a more direct justification. But If you can make the world 10x greener with your money by not using solar panels, what is the right decision?

That's how bad PV is -- they don't have to recoup the energy output or savings to do a better job of being green! It's just amazing.

With PV you (or government subsidies) will spend perhaps $250 to $300 to remove a MWH from the grid, and then save $100 (10 cents/kwh, your rate may vary) by not having to buy the power.

With CFL lights, you might spend $39 giving away lights to people to remove a MWH from the dirty grid. You don't reap any of the savings -- the people you gave the lights get those -- but as you can see, better to spend $39 and get no savings than to spend $300 and save $100.

With new fridges you spend about $100 to take a MWH off the grid. Again, you get none of the power savings, the person you gave the new fridge to gets that. But you still remove more MWH from the dirty grid per buck as with solar.

If you can capture the savings, either because it's your lights and fridge, or the person you give the fridge to pays them back to you, even better!

Right. Insurance is for that catastrophic thing you can't afford to handle yourself (or which you expose yourself to so rarely that you can't self insure.) So a medical repatriation might qualify, but a damaged bag does not.

Replacing screens can be a pain, actually, and people overcharge for them.

When I wrecked a screen on an older laptop, I saw somebody selling the exact same laptop (down to the sub-model) on eBay with no hard drive. I picked that up cheap, and took out my hard drive from the old laptop and slotted it in the new one -- bingo, easy fix full working laptop. plus I had the driveless, screenless laptop as well to do things with. These can be useful, for example you can put a flash card in them or an older drive, and make them drive a digital picture frame, or mythtv station etc.

It should be impossible, in theory, and usually in practice, for insurance to be a good value for anybody who flies with any frequency. Insurance companies make profits, after all. They probably pay out half of what they take in, if that.

Insurance is only for risks where you can't handle the cost of the risk. For example, financially you could not handle replacing your house, so fire insurance makes sense. Life insurance can make sense to look after a family. Health insurance to cover a $300,000 operation can make sense, while dental or optical plans make little sense. Extended warranties (which are just insurance) make no sense and are very high margin because of that. Which is why they push them on you.

For anything small, it is far better to self-insure. That's a mathematical certainty.

Now there are two exceptions. One, if you know you are taking a risk that is far above average, and the insurance company hasn't figured out to charge you more or block you, insurance can be a value. Secondly, with medical insurance, you may find you don't want to have to consider cost when making medical decisions, you just want it covered. (Of course now an insurance company will be weighing cost as it decides if you are covered.)

Solar PV is one of the least efficient ways to take money and make the world greener. As a charitable organization, the Vatican could get 50x the MWH offsets per buck by giving away efficient lighting, or if that is too abstract it could get 3x the MWH offset per dollar by buying new fridges for the poor who have old fridges from 1990 and earlier. Those fridges from the past use 2-3 times the energy per year that a modern one does, and so it is much greener if the Vatican buys them for the poor and uses grid power itself rather than putting up wasteful solar panels.

As I said, I know there are scripts, and I have used them. What I am saying is that this should be the new expected way because it is really superior in every way except on a machine that won't boot from the drives you have in mind.

(It's even the superior way on a system which won't boot. In that case, burn a generic CD which will boot for you, and have it then complete the process from the external drive/stick. That booting CD would not need to change for new distros.)

As I result, I encourage distros to offer the USB stick/drive image by default, and a script to turn it into an ISO, rather than other way round as it is done right now.

Work to convince the big distros of the world -- I'm looking at you Ubuntu -- to switch from using CD Rom Images as their prime mode of distribution to bootable flash/usb/ide disk images. Once you've tried it this way you will never go back, and you will now have a use for little drives.

Of course there are scripts that will turn the CD images into usb stick images, but they are time consuming taking away some of the time you save booting from a quicker medium. Instead of releasing a CD and a script to convert it, release a drive image and a script to turn that into an ISO, or release both.

(Plus, with writable media, it's easier to add a 2nd partition where the user can stuff drivers, localization scripts, answers to install questions etc.)

Then you could also donate all these media to linux distros who could fill them up with linux live disks and installs, and mail them out to people for postage.

This is brilliant because it's simple. People have dreamed and worked on flying cars for ages. And failed. They could not figure a way around the trade-offs. Make it too much like a plane and it's hard to get the wings away for driving.

With a cloth wing, this is mainly a car, but if you come to something you can't drive across, or want to fly over, and the weather is good, you can fly over it.

It is not the car that takes off from your house like Moller or the Jetsons, nor a plane that only goes to airports. I think it's a very clever compromise. No reason for it to cost 50,000 pounds though, and soon it probably won't.