It is testament to the naivety and stupidity of some people on here that your comment is modded 1 and the one above you is modded +5 insightful, which is wrong for all sorts of reasons, including the one that you state. Most importantly, ethnic/racial background is vastly different between Sweden and the USA, and that is the number one factor in crime rates around the world. Just take a look at a map of homicide rates around the globe. Take a look at rates of homicide within the USA. I guess the crime rate in Detroit is because of the schools or something.

Just repeat after me, "people are fungible", "people are fungible", "people are fungible", and all your dreams will come true. That dumb kid you knew in the first grade - his problem was that the teachers just would never try hard enough. He could have been Don Knuth if only his parents gave him the Tiger Mother treatment. Ted Bundy - with a well enough designed re-education camp ("Murders are bad, mmmmkay?"), would have been a great contributor to society.

I'm generally conservative, but if there are other conservatives who are up in arms about this, it's because they are stupid. The fact is that more efficient and cleaner burning stoves exist right now, they are not prohibitively expensive, and they will pay for themselves over time anyway.

If it's about being selfish, better my kids and I don't have asthma than someone else has to fork out some money for a new stove that will work out better for them anyway. On this issue, if stupid inefficient wood burning types want to form an armed revolution about it, be my guest. I hope the revolution gets put down as brutally as possible. Think Tianamen square or Waco.

Thank you.

Obviously you've never lived in a place where everyone has a wood stove and your kids get asthma. I guess the 1960s rules for car emissions were bought by the tram companies?

Actually, no they won't. What they don't tell you is that a RMH will only heat the (small) room it is in, and things in close proximity.

I've done the math on rocket mass heaters and there is not enough energy in the amount of wood they claim to burn and heat a whole house the way they claim to. There is only so much energy in wood, a RMH is not a Mister Fusion. If a RMH is heating a whole house it is because they have managed to insulate the whole house very well. The key then is in the insulation, not in the form of heating.

The fact is, commercial wood stoves like the Burley range (and I don't work for Burley, but I've looked at what I would buy if I was going to buy a wood stove) heat at ~90% efficiency, burn very cleanly, and are inexpensive to buy. There is only one stove I know of that has a higher efficiency, but is many times the price.

Not really. Radeon 7770 is about the same, maybe a little better than the 9800 GTX. As for most cards, yes.

http://www.hwcompare.com/11997/geforce-9800-gtx-vs-radeon-hd-7770/

Not only are the games cheap, there is no compromise on idle power draw. Your system can be silent and cheap to run when it's not doing work, while having enough power to game or do whatever you want in the duty cycle. It is a great time to upgrade either CPU or GPU.

After five years, it's really not that expensive to upgrade a lot of stuff if your mobo was cutting edge at the time you bought it. Memory is now cheap and very useful - no slowdowns with lots of tabs and VMs open. A new CPU is probably 4 times faster than your old one, and also inexpensive. It won't be top of the line, but it may hold its own with a mid-range solution. And you've probably already bought an SSD for a boot drive because it was stupid not to.

At that point, for half the price of a new PC (as you haven't upgraded case, PSU, mobo or heat sink) you've just made yourself a non-upgradable, but respectable mid-range computer that will last another 5 years or longer depending on duty. Even your GPU is not wasted, because if you want to make a new machine you can just put your old GPU back in it and migrate the new GPU to the new PC.

Some games hit the CPU much heavier these days than they used to. Many games really don't perform well if they aren't given multi-core CPUs with reasonable speed.

One thing to bear in mind with gaming benchmarks - they are performed running just the game, to keep everything else equal. In real world use it's nice to have the flexibility not to have to close down your browser and other applications, especially if you aren't the only user logged into the system. For that reason, you want more cores than you need just for the game. Maybe a quad core if you want dual core performance, or hex core if you want quad. And given how games have adapted to using multiple cores, it would pay to get more cores than you need if you are going to futureproof.

You don't want the DONKEY. You want an advanced recon model, the one that pairs Data Acquisition Technology with the Autonomous Sumpter System. Included of course are HUD sunglasses.

I'd rather not look this gift horse in the mouth. (Though in Soviet Russia, gift horse looks you in mouth.)

Who is doing this explaining of morals in the absence of the church? I don't see a lot of this going on. I see a generation of youth who get whatever morality they have from the media they consume, living with one parent who is working hard to pay the bills and glad to hand their children over to the media babysitter. If that media glamorizes crime, violence and evil (because selling that is profitable), then that is what they often decide to do. After all, if there is no real meaning of life, why not do what you enjoy (even if it means making the lives of others hell)?

BTW I'm atheist, not Christian - but I see where society is headed and I don't like it.

One additional comment - at the younger levels, you do not need a genius to teach a genius, provided that the teacher is smart enough to recognize a smart child and teach to his level. At higher levels this is certainly true though, whether that genius is present in person or as an author of a work (book, web page, video, game), the child learning autodidactically. Also, being able to break a given problem or skill down into all the component skills necessary to solve that problem, and teaching them in order - that in itself requires above average intelligence. Much more than is probably thought.

I'm honestly not sure that the system is actually designed to discourage this (though it certainly feels like it). It's just an unintended consequence of the relatively low IQ levels of the teachers and administrators who design such systems, and the teachers who are actually doing the teaching. IQ, intelligence, call it what you will - is distributed in something approximated by a bell curve. If you had the brains to be doing advanced geometry and algebra at age 8, you are very, very likely to be smarter than virtually everyone involved in designing, administering and implementing education at any given primary or secondary school. You have an IQ that is high enough to be very rare.

There are lots of sad corollaries to this fact. Firstly, there are no resources to design an education system around a student that is 1/500, 1/1000, let alone 1/10000 in terms of rarity in the population. As soon as we approach the inverse of school population, there may not even be any student in the school who is that smart.

Secondly, it takes a smart person to understand statistics, the concept of distributions and the like. Even understanding my first two paragraphs is above the head of the average person. Due to influence of PC, its component blank slatism and the like, the number of people who both can and would even want to understand IQ, bell curves and the implications of the distribution of intelligence is even less. The ramification of this is that the vast majority of people automatically assume that anything they can't understand is either wrong or crazy, and impossible for anyone else to understand. It is insulting for many people to realize that there are problems that are too difficult for them to ever solve, but that others can solve with varying amounts of difficulty (or ease). They have an in-built chip on their shoulder towards these concepts. Most people also assume that they are smart enough to figure out who is smarter than they are, despite not realizing that there is a class of problems for which they will never, ever solve or perhaps even understand the solution, and so are incapable of judging those who will solve such things.

Then you have the problem of recruiting teachers who are capable of teaching a very bright child, if that is what you want your school system to do. There aren't any. The vast majority of the very small relative number of bright people in a given country are taking advantage of the exploitation of IQ by companies. Those who aren't duped by graduate schools into pursuing graduate education with no monetary payoff are busy earning lots of money, with job security and great working conditions. Why would they want to teach a bunch of relative dullards, when the pay is not there and the working conditions are crap? They are off doing medicine, engineering, law, business and the like.

So what do you get when your average teacher does not (want to) realize that any kid in class is smarter than they are, and can do mental gymnastics that they will never, ever achieve? And does not have the resources to allocate to it? And do not have teachers capable of teaching them? You get the current education system.

If you want to give a smart kid the opportunities to learn, you must do as the parents of the boy in this article did. You must school him yourself until he hits the point where he can autodidactically learn anything he wants to, and then give him the resources to pursue that. There is no substitute for a smart, motivated parent, involved in his child's education.

He's half right; the article is obviously referring to an analogue of acceleration. If m:distance, m/s:velocity, m/s/s:acceleration;
GWhr:energy, GW:power, GW/hr: increase in power per unit time

Those efficient Germans must be rapidly ramping up their technology. At the rate they're going, they'll be able to power their whole country (423GW on average) within 19 hours!