This is all good advice. To that, I would add this: Pay attention to what causes you to get slowed down as you're going through. I've carried a number of odd items that have caused the TSA to flag me for a bag check - cheese, a game that contains hundreds of playing cards, a bowling ball, etc. When I'm carrying one of these items, I remove it from my bag and place it separately in a bin; if the X-ray operator can see it on its own, they usually won't call a bag check. Even if they do ask for a bag check, it only applies to that item by itself, which might get re-run or swabbed for explosive residue or something - meanwhile, your other bags make it through and you can start putting your shoes on and packing up your liquids while $agent does a brief check of $item (without having to search your bag for it).

As an example, take some cheese. (I was visiting home in Wisconsin, and needed my fix of good, inexpensive cheese, dammit!) It looks a bit like a liquid or an explosive. I can leave it packed in my carry-on bag, and sometimes they'd ignore it, but more often than not they won't. They call a bag check, so I have to wait for an agent to come over, then they have to wait for me to grab the rest of my items to meet them at the table. They dig into my bag looking for what the X-ray operator found (although they won't normally tell you what). Once they find it, they'll look over it a bit to make sure it's safe, then send both the bag and the item back through the X-ray, and then send me on my way if both look OK the second time through. On the other hand, if I take 10 seconds to pull it out of my bag BEFORE the X-ray, (and especially if I mention to the operator or agent next to the operator that I'm putting cheese through) then they don't need to do any extra inspection, although they may glance at the item on its way in or out of the X-ray tunnel.

Of course, all this is neglecting the best way to make it through: don't bring anything with you. Go to the airport barefoot, with no coat, belt, watch, or anything else. Check all your bags - hopefully you're flying Southwest so you don't have to pay for checked bags. The less you have, the less they are able to inspect. (Obviously, it's probably pretty difficult to do it to this extreme - but if you check a bag with your coat and liquids and belt, and only carry a tablet onboard with you, it's more likely to go quickly.)

Yes, of course there are many locations without barriers. In my area, there is insufficient space to have a grass median, and so every highway has a barrier between directions. It's a calculated equation of cost of land versus cost of a barrier, along with accident rates and traffic density. Of course, these aren't always updated, since the interstate system was designed so long ago and receives only few updates due to funds that are typically limited. I'm sure many places would warrant barriers now that did not when originally designed.

The point is, neither of you should have been driving that speed in the first place.

I would suggest a high school physics class. Aerodynamic drag at high speeds is proportional to the square of your velocity; so going from 55 to 110 mph doesn't double your drag, it quadruples it.

Also, I drive a Prius. There is a direct correlation between low speed and high mpg. Somebody even made this handy dandy graph of mpg at a variety of constant speeds in his Prius. The faster you go, the worse your fuel economy, full stop.

It is true that the optimal speed for mpg varies by vehicle; a lot of things go into the calculation, but you typically want to be at the lowest efficient speed in your highest gear; the efficient speed may be higher if your engine is particularly inefficient at low speeds. A good example of this was Top Gear's "race" of a Prius versus a BMW, with the Prius at top speed (~110 mph) getting 17 mpg, compared to the BMW which was getting 19 mpg (because it is optimized to run at much higher speeds).

So it may be possible that your car does very well at high speeds, because they optimized it for high speeds (did you buy some type of sports car?). But most passenger vehicles are optimized for the speeds that people normally drive - or rather, they're optimized for the EPA test cycle, which in turn is meant to be representative of what people normally drive.

Yeah, this. The real "acoustic equivalent of one-way glass" would be to play some loud noise near the people who shouldn't be able to hear you - they have to yell really loudly to hear each other, which everybody else (including you) can hear over the noise. But they can't distinguish sounds you make from the noise because the noise is much closer and louder than you.

Not likely. I don't know a single EE that has gone for flipping burgers when unemployed (especially when unemployment in your field is still below 5%), although I'm sure that a few do. There are certainly lots of possibilities here; retirement, moving to management or another field, moving to a different country, measurement inaccuracies, etc. The point is, they don't say. They use the "10.4% of jobs were lost" to prop up the 1.4% unemployment increase as significant, but it's really not clear that it is.

Yeah, there's more too: Last year, there were 335k employed EEs with 3.4% unemployment, so about 347k EEs total. This year, there are 300k employed EEs with 4.8% unemployment, so about 315k EEs total. So by their numbers, sure, jobs declined by 10%, but the people looking for said work declined by 9% as well.

It's also worth noting that in their linked article from the year before, job numbers were up 25k; so the net from 2011 is a loss of 10k. Also, this variability makes me wonder if their method of counting is subject to a lot of noise, and we should be looking more at long-term average trends rather than year-to-year variability.

Wages are NEVER on individual merit, unless your HR department is incompetent (given the generally-accepted definition of competency). The company's goal with setting wages is to pay each employee the minimum amount that will keep them happy. A star performer from the midwest or India (of any race) or anywhere else with a low cost of living probably has lower salary expectations than a mediocre performer from, say, California. The HR department is perfectly justified in coming up with a number to offer that they think will meet the individual's expectations - it's up to the individual to do their own research and decide if it is a fair wage or not. If it is fair to them, great. If it's not, then it's up to them to say "hey, I know other people in this position get paid $60k; I want that much too, plus I want relocation assistance and a bonus for uprooting myself and moving to a new country." This is called negotiation.

This is why almost nobody will publicly list all their employees' salaries; it's very demoralizing to find out that the schmuck next to you who stinks at his job did a better job at negotiating and is being paid 10% more than you are, despite your superior performance.

There are some exceptions to this rule; the idea is that the tradeoff of paying their employees more (to match both their expectations and their performance) might buy additional loyalty or satisfaction. I have no idea if this has been proven, but I doubt it. It probably just makes some ethically-minded executive feel better about the whole process. Meanwhile, the vast majority of executives know that ethics has no place in an efficient workplace.

(My university, which is a public state university, also published its employee salaries, as part of a state law requiring every agency to publish employee salaries for all state jobs. This was very helpful to the other universities so they could find the best and brightest, and offer a 10% raise to move.)

I agree wholeheartedly. But when somebody launches "Ca$ha", I'm totally in for that.

Pssssh, get rid of all those silly metric units like Dynes and A4 paper. A large number of us here are in the good ol' US of A and hereby demand that this be rewritten in terms of Imperial or US customary units - how about sheets of Letter paper?

I'm with the sibling post - if it's really the electrical conditions socket, that could be the result of a dangerous wiring defect. On the other hand, it could be unrelated - like an enclosed light where not enough heat escapes to keep the electronics in the CFL from overheating. Or a crappy brand of CFL; I used some dirt-cheap Ikea CFL bulbs in a bathroom fixture in an apartment about 5 years ago, and about half of them burned out. None of the other CFLs I bought around the same time or earlier (even the ones that were used just as often, if not more) had any issues. The ones that didn't burn out became so dim when first turning on that I had to turn them on at least 15 seconds before they were really beneficial relative to the ambient light most of the time.

But yeah, I have some incandescents hanging around too, for sure - mostly in areas that hardly see any use (like a laundry closet), or where I figured I'd just let the current bulb burn out before replacing it with something else.

I'm keeping a bunch of the old incandescents around, though. Maybe I'll use them if/when I sell my house, or maybe they'll appreciate in value now that they're becoming extinct...

After replacing most of the lightbulbs in my house with LEDs, I calculated the total lifetime cost of the downlights I replaced. Surprisingly, the cost of the bulbs is about even in my case for LED ($30), CFL (3 * $10), and incandescent (12.5 * $2.37), taking into account the shorter lifespan of the cheaper bulbs. So there's really no minimum amount of energy savings needed to make it worthwhile. Over the 23-year lifespan (25,000 hours on, 3 hours per day) of an LED bulb, it will cost $39 in energy, compared to $48.75 for a CFL or $211.25 for an incandescent.

LEDs are also now available in a variety of color temperatures and shapes - some traditional, some slightly less so. Many of the ones in my house are Daylight temperature - about 6500K - because my wife likes the bluer (and often, perceived "brighter") light. Similar bulbs are also available in warm and cool white (2700-4500K).

The only thing they don't do is become warmer when dimmed; many people might be used to incandescent dimming, where it gets yellower as you dim it - LEDs will remain the same color, and that might not have the same effect, although I like it a lot - that makes it a lot easier for me to keep my kitchen and dining room lights at half brightness (further saving electricity) without looking like the rooms are being lit by the same yellow sodium vapor lights out on the street. If only I could climb the light pole and replace those too!

Not gonna lie... When I saw the headline, I was mentally picturing Morgan Freeman for several seconds before I mentally slapped myself.

Probably because there's no test for it. If they put the CPU on the board backwards, they'll notice when they try to turn the system on. Too much paste (or too little), and things will work just fine as far as any test is concerned.

When I did computer repair, I once encountered a PowerMac where the heatsink had a manufacturing defect; one of the posts that fit in a hole on the CPU card had a large extra blob of aluminum on it. It was impossible to seat the heatsink on the CPU, though it could still be strapped on (it's just that there was enough extra clearance caused by the malformed post that the heatsink didn't touch the CPU). As far as the customer was concerned, the computer worked just fine for close to 3 years (though I imagine it probably ran fairly slowly sometimes). Then, the CPU finally died and the computer wouldn't boot any more. Luckily, Apple agreed with me that it was totally their fault, even though he was well beyond the warranty period, and they covered replacing both the CPU and the heatsink. But it's not something that any manufacturing test would've caught, unless the CPU got hot enough to literally fry itself. (It was one of the slower models of the day, with not even a heatsink fan, so it couldn't have fried itself immediately.)

Yes, this. My sister at one time was using one, I think a service provided by her phone company. It was mildly annoying the first time I called her and I think she needed to do something to approve my calling her - but maybe you'd be willing to inconvenience a few people to keep your current phone number?

I also like LED bulbs. The biggest areas for me were the kitchen and dining room, which have 5 and 4 can-type lights each. I changed each from a 65W incandescent to a 13W LED. They're also on dimmer circuits, and I find that I usually don't need full brightness; measuring at the power meter, I see that my kitchen lights take around 25-30W when on now, instead of up to 325W. The dimmable bulbs were a little more expensive ($20), but especially considering the reduced rate of failure compared to CFLs (and even more so, incandescent), it's a net win starting in a couple of years.

Over CFLs, I love that LEDs don't need time to warm up for full brightness, and they're available in more color temperatures - my wife tends to like daylight bulbs the most. They're also available in a lot of shapes and sizes, and different models project light in different directions (which can be bad, if you don't pay attention to what you need).

Lucky - my electricity price is about the same as your on-peak price. I use quite a bit less though - on par with the GGP, around 6-7 kWh/day. Most of my major appliances (heat, water heater, stove) are gas; most of my lights are LED; and I generally try to avoid using power if I can - so my desktop is normally only on when I'm sitting in front of it.

From my hourly usage report from the utility, I can see that my baseline power usage (i.e. overnight or when nobody is home) is about 160W; this includes the fridge maintaining its temperature, which is around 80-90W of that. The rest is random little things, like the router, other appliances, etc. I generally avoid A/C - it cools off enough at night and I'm rarely home during the hottest part of the day, so I just open all the windows.

Some day, I might even get solar panels. It probably won't save me much until like 10-15 years in, but I'm a nerd and solar is nifty, soooo....