Mounting sllghtly off the roof, to the roof, gets decent solar generation and shades the roof in high summer and ... minilmizes the danger from high winds. Having panels up in the air on one of those rare 50MPH winds is... scary.

Currently using an inexpensive single-led backyard white light. 6 inch square solar panel. Small battery hidden somewhere inside. Stays astonishingly bright all night illuminating a rose tree (pointing a bit down, not up at the sky). Way more than enough to read by. Something to free much of the world from darkness.

I had a bunch of old home movies converted to CD and unfortunately they are still boring.

Any voting system can be subverted. The cool thing with electronic voting is that the subversion will of course make recounting meaningless.

"Social security and disability checks are why the USPS matters today. They have guaranteed delivery" Maybe they do, but nothing else has guaranteed delivery. Some 1st class mail never makes it here...every month.

What Snowden was turn a suspicion into knowledge. That is a big deal. (Hal Berghel pointed this out first).

I too have worked on projects with seemingly infinite bugs. I concluded that feeling just meant a big (BIG) chunk of code (perhaps the entire project) should be discarded and rewritten from scratch. Not, of course, that the company would ever agree to that...

Sonic.net guesses 14000 feet (will be 18000 if it got measured rather than guessed) There is only one set of phone lines (installed in 1940's) and one physical base station. Long long ago Rhythms (a company) had better modems and we could get 356Kb/s for $55 a month, but company paid for that pitiful service. Satellite is of course pitiful compared to hard line Comcast speeds. At one time (for a few lucky people) there was a microwave link to San Bruno Mountain that gave a few Mb/s for $65 a month but the company lost rights to the spectrum, leaving that business, and anyway few homes really had good line of site (a single tree could block the signal). It is an effective monopoly now, just one service is any good at all.

Comcast works here within 10 miles of San Francisco, but DSL maxes out at 128Kb/S because of old copper wires and 18000 feet to the TelCo office as-the-wire-exists. It's the norm unless you live in a narrow corridor near 101 and El Camino on the peninsula. Just one choice.

In 2013 (I think) a Fortune magazine article (I recollect) discussed the serious weather changes in the US midwest with farmers there. The farmers know the climate there is changing and are preparing for continuing changes, but the farmers deny it is "climate change."

Ask True Believers about this, and they reply with variations on "Oh, that part of the bible does not count." Really.

Senators and Congressmen have threatened to assassinate the people doing the reporting (such as J. Assange). We know about it, but that is not exactly what one thinks of as 'press freedom' when the leaders of a country say they will kill the reporter.

It's unclear why a simulation would be necessary since Douglas Adams already revealed the answer: 42.

Wait. What? You said Iowa?

"cramp your style for fear of oblitering an instrument which costs as much as does an automobile." Some individual instruments in the violin family are worth $millions.