My definition of "in season" would be, soon after something is harvested, and grown reasonably locally. That said, potatoes and squash do have a very long shelf life after harvest, and are easily available. In that context, potatoes are "in season" all year.

Slow cooker recipes for beans tend to run 10-12 hours (that's without soaking, soaking involves a longer attention span than I can bring to the task.. beans that got forgotten and have soaked for a week get pretty disgusting). Otherwise, parboil/soak a few hours, and simmer another few hours.

With the beans? I use a rice cooker. Your way is probably a tad cheaper (no expense of separate heating, and one less piece of hardware), but I'd bet my rice comes out better. Eh, to each his own.

Nobody (well, not me) is advocating McDonalds. Their only benefit is fast. It's expensive and not very good.

Dude, in most of the northern USA, the only thing that's in season at the moment is snow. While it is very cheap, and the yellow stuff may even be mineral fortified, it's far from a balanced diet.

It will, so long as you don't mind waiting 4 hours for that first meal. And so long as you haven't grown to hate chili.

Well, the salad goes bad pretty fast. And the only forms of chicken that rate as edible are fried (bad for you, and a tremendous PITA to make and clean up after), and cut up in stir fry (which requires other vegetables, if they haven't turned into brown slime in the fridge).

Now, I do cook most of my own meals. But the pattern is:

1 MAKE SOME X
      EAT X
      IF STILL HUNGRY GOTO 1
  LEAVE KITCHEN
This often does not give results that a nutritionist would recognize as "balanced". Hence the multivitamins.

Quite true. Under US law, "WMD" includes any rifle with a bore larger than 0.50", and anything explosive for use against persons or property, including hand grenades. So of course Saddam's army had WMDs.

My thermostat is at 52 (hey, it's 8 outside) and I walk around perfectly happy (I took a nap today not far from the thermostat... with a couple of throw blankets over, of course). It's 56.7 in my office (upstairs, where I am now). Obviously I don't go barefoot and wear only a T-shirt, I dress for the weather. I'd much rather have it be too cold (can always put on more clothes) than too hot (there's a natural limit to how much you can take off)..

Stucco is basically concrete troweled onto steel mesh. If you pay some attention to making sure each piece of steel mesh is electrically connected to the adjoining pieces, and grounded, and used aluminum screen over the windows (or maybe used metallic film coatings on the windows), steel doors, and either installed conductive screen over the attic floor or used steel roofing (the good stuff isn't cheap, but will pretty much last forever, never need to re-roof again), you'd probably have a pretty good Faraday cage.

Maybe add a whole-house low-pass filter where the power comes in. You could get one that provided whole-house surge protection at the same time.

Wouldn't be easy to retrofit, but if you were building, or doing major rehab, it probably wouldn't add much cost.

I dunno how you'd do it for large apartment buildings, but with the smaller (4-10 unit) ones in cold climates around here it's not uncommon for each unit to have an assigned parking space, with a plugin that runs off the unit's electric meter and can be turned on and off from the apartment. Right now they're intended for plugin block heaters, but no reason you couldn't use the same for a 110V charge, or put in 220V ones.

Of course not. Very few things in life are all black or all white. The NSA is like the neighbor who poisons any dog that comes onto his property, and you're pretty sure he shoplifts, but if you need a hand hoisting an engine or a ride to the store, he's always willing to help.

That doesn't mean he shouldn't be locked up, though.

UltraVNC Single Click is a small (Win) executable customized to connect the user to your address. You run VNC Viewer in "listen" mode. It's very simple to use, doesn't require installing, can be downloaded by the user or sent via email (if they can receive .exe files), works through user NAT. I've been using it for years, directed to my dynamic IP via dyndns. You can customize what the user client looks like. Don't know if it works with Win8 though, and it doesn't work for users running OSX or Linux.

"Both sides" are the same side. The "government" side. I tend to credit the Democrats, but they don't resist the lure of power much better than the Republicans. What we need is other sides. That could go in different directions. Serious libertarians (Libertarians, Pirate Party) who champion civil liberties (if they at the same time renounced the government gift of corporate existence and the legal fiction of intellectual "property", I'd be on board). On the other hand, Greens and the like. And there's probably a third (or more) hand.

Maybe if violations (such as the NSA) were criminalized. But then we'd need prosecutors with the spine to prosecute, and juries that weren't too brainwashed to convict.

I'm not sure that the US believes that foreigners have civil liberties. Certainly not the Canadian that Bush had kidnapped and sent abroad for torture.

Actually, the US has always had a tendency to block people from entering the country, if the government didn't like what they had to say. These abuses didn't start with Obama (or Bush) or the NSA. Throughout most of the 20th century, it was communists and anarchists who were blocked from entering. And prominent opponents of [insert whichever war the US is engaged in at the moment. (This sort of abuse is not unique to the USA, either.)

The only way to completely prevent these abuses is to get rid of the border guards.

Obama is what happens when you have a binary political system. The other guy wanted to steal everything that wasn't nailed down and give it to the rich. Obama said he didn't. The other guy wanted to attack and occupy as many other countries as possible, to show how tough he was. Obama said he didn't. The other guy was an idiot who couldn't talk in complete sentences. Obama was a great talker. The other guy was a rich white dude who'd always had a silver spoon in his mouth. Obama was a black guy who'd been a community organizer.

We believed Obama was a better choice. He likely was. We thought that all things equal, it would be great to have a black guy win the post, that it would improve relations between whites and "others". It probably did, though nowhere near as much as we hoped. We wanted to believe that Obama would be a big improvement, and some people actually got sucked into believing that he would be. He wasn't. After eight years of the dumbest and worst president in American history, the guy who attacked Iraq and flew the economy into the ground, we wanted something better. We got it. But "better" is relative.

When you have to choose between dreadful and not-quite-as-bad with a few good points, you do the best you can. The fact that the result isn't great doesn't mean that the other choice wouldn't have been worse.

Of course other agencies (e.g. the DEA) are doing this. So hustle up some whistleblowers to make that newsworthy. Hustle up stories about how normal citizens (not druggies or drooling pervs, not that either taking drugs or drooling should be a crime) can be hurt by this.

The "news" follows what's hot,

Actually, SecretAgent seems to rotate with every page load. And not just the user agent, but some other headers, too. I find it works best if you edit the list of possibilities to remove the ones that often display screwy (few websites are optimized for Mosaic anymore).

You don't have to be an exit node to run Tor. You don't even have to run as a relay, though if you can, that helps everybody's speed.

It doesn't, either. I just tried installing it.

It's mostly the font list that gives the show away.