Since you're using "spare" energy which you can generate "for free" does the specific efficiency even matter? The efficiency of not using the energy is zero.

The only efficiency that seems to matter is the money cost of the equipment relative to the value of the produced synthetic fuel.

If you have 10 wind turbines and on a windy day you can only use the power from 5 of them, you would probably brake the other 5. The only cost to turning them for synthetic fuel usage is the wear associated with having them turn. I don't know how significant this is -- maybe they aren't designed for a 25 year lifespan of continuous rotation, maybe all those wind surveys and grid analysis they do get plugged into the engineering so that they can say the finished product has a 25 year lifespan because they know they will be idle/braked for 15 of those years.

Thus the free power is a lot less free because it will wear your turbines out much faster because you're spinning them more than for grid power.

What's the biochemistry associated with aspartame or sucralose and an insulin response?

AFAIK, artificial sweeteners trick the tongue into tasting sweet but don't contain the chemistry (namely sugar) to induce an insulin response.

Now, that doesn't mean it couldn't happen (insert complex biochemistry here) and I wonder if there is possibly some kind of adaptive learned response associated with the taste of something sweet triggering it, sort of like a Pavlovian response. Or maybe there is some indirect connection with our taste buds and our insulin response -- it's not hard to see where taste and an instantaneous biological response would be beneficial, either in helping us reject poisons or in making some foods more quickly absorbed.

It also makes me wonder if could be un-learned -- if a person never ate anything sweet tasting that had sugars, would the body stop associating the taste of something sweet with an insulin response if there wasn't a corresponding increase in blood sugar?

It's easy to talk about material goods as being "unnecessary" especially if they do not contribute to one's physical safety or health, like shelter, food and water.

For better or for worse, though, we are a consumer society and some things almost start to seem to become needs not because they contribute to our physical safety or health but because they contribute to our ability to integrate socially.

You may not "need" the latest smartphone but at the same time, especially among younger people, you could almost say you need to have a smartphone capable of accessing social networks in a reasonable manner because it's extremely difficult to integrate with many peer groups without one. You will not be able to participate in group dynamics or posses the same social information as other people.

The same thing could be said (more tentatively, because there are other outlets) about Netflix. If you're not able to engage with people socially because you are unaware of the types of programs they consume and cannot participate in discussions about them you are also hindered in group dynamics.

Outside the electronics/media sphere, you can make similar judgements about clothes. You don't "need" clothes that fit a specific fashion or brand paradigm -- you can buy used clothes or dollar store clothes and meet the minimal functional needs for clothing. But style and manner of dress is very important for engaging in peer groups, and like it or not people are in/excluded or find it easier or harder to engage in social activities if their mode of dress is compatible with their peer groups.

Now it's easy to make a lot of value judgements -- especially about social networking (the companies, phenomenon, etc) -- but their existence, usage and impact on social life is a reality and at some point I think some of these things become needs for reasonable social integration. Excluding them because they don't meet some minimalist description of "need" starts to sound myopic and mean spirited because I don't know anyone who just lives based on minimal need.

1) Ability to print life size
2) Ability to print with a jointed endoskeleton and soft, skin-like silicone body around endoskeleton
3) Ability to generate 3D model from 2D photos (especially extreme telephoto photos)
4) Shame-free "plain brown wrapper" shipping option

The summary seems to indicate that the value of "Stellarwind" wasn't clear because it was one of many sources and few had access to it, not that all NSA spying was seen as ineffective.

The NSA does so much spying that it seems like it would be hard to ever calculate the marginal value of each additional unit of spying. Probably more so because of the fragmentary and unreliable nature of clandestine information and the need to develop multiple sources to achieve any kind of confidence about a particular conclusion or piece of information.

The latter bit is probably what leads to never-ending development of new data sources and methods, especially as each new spying method becomes less and less specific and requires more and more analysis to tease out information. Call metadata doesn't tell you what was discussed or necessarily who was called. You need parallel data from some other source to tell you who is associated with those numbers, where they were, etc.

I've had one problem with my 6 Plus which was annoying enough to care about, crashing Safari when rotating the phone from portrait to landscape once a certain amount of tabs were open. Googling the problem I found a couple of threads on Apple's support web site, so it appears not to have been just my experience.

The fix with the initial release was to close all tabs (an annoying task in Safari), as there is no "close all tabs" function. I don't know that it's been a problem in 8.3 so far, and it seemed to be better in 8.2.

I didn't experience the issue with Chrome or with other apps, just Safari. I suspected something wonky with the nitro js engine improvements and the 6 Plus display size as occasionally not long before crashing would occur, js-heavy apps rotated web pages would not respond to screen taps or would respond in the wrong place as if the running js code didn't have valid screen dimensions for portrait.

I theorized that closing tabs also nuked cached nitro-compiled js code so that subsequent page views didn't have issues.

Other than that, my 6 Plus has just worked. Historically, I've had to reboot my iPhones to fix a random issue with phone calls more than any other problem and that's been very rare and probably less often than power cycling it for other reasons, like airport security.

If it's so dangerous to go out, how will he manage supplies? Even the 8' sphere won't hold a year of food and water.

I don't disagree that blocking was the right choice. What I question was whether Comcast's current monopoly practices in the face of pressure across all business sectors (some more than others) are enough to make this merger make sense as a strategic business decision.

2-3 years ago where I live, you had a "choice" of high speed Internet -- DSL from CenturyLink, permanently stuck in the sub-2 Mbit/sec range or Comcast at 10+. A local Internet provider has been wiring part of the city for fiber -- it's a pretty small area now, but they just announced an expansion and are even offer 10 gig. CenturyLink has been running fiber in residential neighborhoods over the past month.

So by the end of the year, it's possible that there will be far better choices than Comcast for high speed Internet. Obviously this isn't enough, only one place, limited availability, etc, but it shows that other providers "get it" and see that Comcast is ripe for the picking.

I think the pressures on Comcast's cable TV service are even greater from Netflix, Amazon, HBO's new streaming option, selective download services like iTunes, Roku "channels" and so on. You can get most content now without cable.

I'd be most worried if I was Comcast about the original content. Most of what underpins cable is having content, and it may not be unlikely that in the near future the content people want isn't even available on Comcast or any other cable service at all.

My sense is that it maybe wasn't good business.

The sectors represented by Comcast (content, cable, internet) all face a ton of pressure from various competition. Amazon and Netflix are actively creating content and building alliances with production companies. Cable is being decimated by streaming and downloadable content (accelerated by excessive cable pricing and poor customer service). Even Internet is showing signs of competition from municipal broadband and other providers -- CenturyLink, who is just about as awful as Comcast from a customer service perspective, just ran fiber optic cable down the poles behind my residential address. The utility guy I quizzed said it was for residential high speed internet.

The only way this deal made any sense was as a holding action -- give Comcast a bigger local monopoly slice and hope that they can milk the customer base and Netflix, et al, for enough cash that they can keep the wheel turning. Regulatory pressure, net neutrality, etc may even have limited that strategy, at least on the milk-the-content-providers department.

Mergers are expensive, from the deal costs to the business integration side and I really question whether at the speed their markets are changing that they can maintain customers and margins long enough to profit from the merger.

It also makes the business a lot bigger, which makes it slower to adapt and innovate, especially when it represents a sector that has traditionally relied on monopoly power and not innovation. Being a bigger dinosaur didn't help the dinosaurs.

I think your reasoning makes sense from a team productivity perspective, but I agree with the other poster that such practices when they involve cultural behavior and can be (even remotely) attributed to race, age, etc would be considered illegal and discriminatory. And you might even argue if your team is so easily disrupted by "differences" like this that they may not be the greatest overall employees (naive, narrow-minded, unworldly, inexperienced...), either.

The funny thing is I have heard many complaints from people I know about business not caring at all about the productivity friction caused by hires -- not just "hey, learn to get along with someone different" but actively ignoring/denying that the conflicts even exist.

I had a friend who worked at a local hospital system's IT department. About 3/4 of the workforce was native born Americans of various ages and genders and about 1/4 were south Asians. More than a few of the south asians had simply awful personal hygiene -- they smelled like bathing was only an occasional afterthought.

Numerous employees complained to line management and then HR. Line management ignored it because the employees were OK producers and apparently inexpensive. HR tried to gloss it over until one of the employees brought in some kind of note from a doctor who said that she was extra sensitive to odors. HR finally came up with a list of the worst offenders hygiene wise and told them there had been complaints and that "as a hospital system, we have a vested interest in cleanliness and hygiene and expect employees to respect the standards of cleanliness."

I think about half "cleaned up" their act and the rest just got moved to some corner of the office.

I've also seen kind of the reverse, at a college I did some consulting at there was a "clique" of Vietnamese employees there with long tenure but awful skills. They often spoke to each other in Vietnamese and seemed to use their tenure/culture as a way to edge out other employees despite the total lack of skills and abilities. The result was the other employees (mostly white, but one hispanic) ALSO cliqued up and these two groups did not cooperate well at all -- there was often real hostility between the two. When one of the Vietnamese fucked up a wireless config and blackholed half the wireless traffic, one of the non-Vietnamese taunted her verbally about fixing the problem "So are you buying us all lunch if you can't fix this in an hour?" The manager seemed to ignore it all.

I'm kind of surprised that this deal had investor support. The larger business model is under attack on many fronts, content delivery by streaming video, Internet by municipal-backed and private fiber vendors who are seeing opportunity -- CenturyLink, one of the few companies who compete with Comcast for poor service, just strung fiber optic cabling on the poles behind my house which is supposed to support gigabit residential Internet speeds. And even NBCUniversal's strength in content creation is under assault by Netflix and Amazon original productions.

Even if you assume greater profits from increased monopoly abuse by a combined Comcast/TWC, huge mergers face big costs internally and I'd question whether they will have time enough even as a monopoly to recoup those costs and the investment expenses of the merger deal itself.

Plus, the larger the entity, the less it is able to adapt to the huge changes sweeping the video content and Internet markets. Cable is already a dinosaur, being a bigger dinosaur has never proven helpful.

I don't know, the experience with company towns makes me think big business can do erosion of liberty on par with the government and with greater efficiency.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

That's great, but you were too soft on millennials. .