of my first 2 CFLs (23W Philips, incidentally) one still works after ~ 6 years; I've moved 4 times since I bought those (yeah, I actually took my light bulbs with me, they were worth about 10 beers each); one of them died due to being used in the bathroom (went through a lot of power cycles)

Right now, I have the remaining one in a rather low usage area (kitchen, rarely used at night), and for the room I spend most of the time in I have some no-name Chinese thing I bought 2 years ago from Mega Image; it eats 13 W, was 1/4 of the price of my older Philips bulbs and takes about 10 minutes to reach full brightness, but it emits about the same amount of light when it does. It was ~2.2 USD.

When LED lights can beat that price, I'll be interested. Right now, both commercial offerings and DIY are too damn expensive for my taste.

Stupidity tax: we collects it!

now seriously, the parent is right: somehow, some (a lot of?) people have lost something that is a very useful evolutionary trait: skepticism; for most of our fellow mammals, the lack of it usually means an early death (think mouse who eats poisoned food or walks into a trap without sniffing around, think the La Brea pits, think predator trying to bite more than it can chew)

Unfortunately for our species, these things most of the time only cost some discomfort (money lost), and are not life endangering; methinks we would have a much saner world if the latter were the case.

except it's a bit reversed: businesses are the ones suing :D

Mr Crichton's points in that book are still pretty much valid, though.

this is (slowly) changing, as more and more people can afford high quality cameras and lenses; while most of them will be just as crappy a photographer as before, some are bound to out-talent (and eventually outnumber) the so-called "pros"

and some of those who are really good are bound to do it as a means of expressing themselves (giving the results away for fame - getting laid being the ultimate purpose :P) rather than as a means to make a$$loads of money (which only happens to a handful of high end photographers, anyway, the rest are left simmering in their own mediocrity and decrying the state of the industry being ruined by those pesky amateurs)

yep, just like you can't find anything on bugmenot any more, everyone "opted out"

kinda defeats the purpose of ad blocking.

I'm rather sure that if religious types would keep their religion for themselves and contain their own wackos nobody would have a problem with them.

But when:

• my kids - if I'll ever manage to have any - will have to study christian orthodox religion in school and learn that if they don't say their prayers they'll get hit by a car - this being in a country that's supposedly secular, mind you
• the education minister says "we don't want to raise godless robots"
• a senator says the atheists are dangerous
• the prime minister is consulting with the head of the church whether to uncriminalise prostitution or not (I'll leave you to guess the result), and about the definition of marriage (ended up with "union between man and woman")
• some other MPs gather a crowd to protest against a (non-public) lesbians' meeting (I dislike the attention whores' parades, but a private, no-media, event? wtf?) - and they're from the governing party
• a nation-wide HPV vaccination attempt has failed due to religious wackos spreading FUD
• religious fundamentalists have monopolised the discution about RFID passports and turned it into "omg they'll brand us with the number 666" crap, so people who have reasonable complaints about this can't get their voice heard any more
• this year's budget gives money for 806 new churches, 242 schools, 36 hospitals, 37 cultural centres

it starts to become annoying. really annoying.

not very likely, taking into account that browsers have been waging war against self-signed/free certificates for a while and the "warnings" are getting worse with every release (I, a geek, had a hard time finding the tiny "add an exception" in Firesloth^H^H^H^H^Hfox 3, and found it impossible to explain over the phone how to do it to someone not so computer literate)

yeah, according to that page, they are winners of the "Red herring Europe" award ;)