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Comment Re:"Illegal" fireworks (Score 1) 340

I didn't express any hate for the people using the illegal explosives. As a friend of mine says, on a holiday celebrating the overthrow of a government, the question of whether your fireworks are legal or not really just shouldn't come up.

Comment Re:Web of Trust (Score 1) 178

I will say that I have long thought that USPO should start offering vetted keys. Just as they do passports, they would be ideal for doing state IDs and vetted keys. If more govs. offered up such things, then it would make it possible for publications and other groups to require a truly vetted key.

Comment no different than many stories here (Score 1) 178

Seriously, we read many stories here in which big deals are made of them, but as soon as I check that it has lead by Chinese Academicians (even if they are now working in the USA), I discount it. WHy? Because over and over, I see fraud in the publications, and here, I notice that many of these stories are being pushed by ACs. In a nutshell, these ppl are putting together fraudulent publications (generally, leaving out the negatives that they came across), and then marketing them to make themselves look good.

Yes, some of you will scream that I am racists, and yet, over and over and over, this occurs.

Comment Board with a Display System or without? (Score 1) 183

One of the cool things about the Beaglebone Black and the Raspberry Pi is that they've got GPUs powerful enough to drive an HDMI display, and give you 1080p graphics if you make sure there's enough electric power and not too much interference (my RPi was a bit wonky on the last display I tried), so you can drive a decent monitor for programming or use it as a TV video player.

But if you don't need that, because you're doing X windows or just doing a bunch of ssh terminal sessions, you've got more potential choices, possibly lower power, possibly more memory. It depends a lot on what the target platform for your development is going to be, and on how much effort you plan to spend getting things set up, compared to just taking the BBB or RPi and calling it a day.

Comment Who's the Spook? (Score 1) 219

You may or may not have noticed that the US press hasn't mentioned the name of the departing CIA Station Chief, but they haven't. Why not? Because it's A Secret! The Germans know who they're kicking out, but the US press goes along with the pretense that it's secret, and other people he might spy on in the future won't know he's a spy, and people who he's hung out with in the past might be exposed as having been spies too. In some cases it's illegal for US government officials to reveal the names of spies, but if they leak them for administration political purposes, like Scooter Libby outing Valerie Plame, they get pardoned, and if they get leaked by accident, like a White House Press Release "notice what name is missing" oops a few months back, the press politely pretends they didn't see anything.

If the Germans are really mad? Merkel can tell the German press the guy's name, and ask them to print it and put it online.

Comment Latest LEDs are Too New To Fail Yet (Score 1) 278

Duh, that should be obvious. The only reason they would have failed is if they were DOA or smoked when I plugged them in or something else was defective or the lamp fell over; bulbs that are supposed to last tens or hundreds of thousands of hours that I put in this year haven't had time to fail.

CFLs are different - they've been out a few years now, and I've had plenty of them fail, and worried about whether dead ones break before I get them out of the house and over to the recyclers.

My most recent not-really-energy-saving bulbs failed in 2-3 months. They were little red night-light bulbs from the dollar store post-Christmas discount, and one can argue that they're "energy-saving" because they're only a few watts (3 or 10 or something), but they were incandescents, not LEDs, so they're really not. I've replaced a couple of them with LEDs that haven't failed yet.

Comment Re:Need to make SIMPLE changes. (Score 1) 389

First off, I said equal or exceed HVAC usage. so, yes, an averge. And yeah, we need yearly
But the idea is to get builders to change how they build. Better insulation in homes. Use aerogel in windows. Fewer Windows. Likewise, geo-thermal HVAC is IDEAL for most new buildings, which really allows for low energy usage.
And yes, if you live in the northwest, then these are all things that you will want. That way, a minimum amount of solar panels will equal your annual HVAC.

Comment Re:Wrong (Score 1) 389

By making things efficient, it gives us the ability to move to other forms of energy. We need more wind, solar, geo-thermal, etc, BUT, we also need to increase our nukes. Now, Some in Europe are choosing to shut down nukes, however, as long as they drop their energy and move off fossil fuels, that is their choice. I suspect that Germany will at some point restore new nukes.

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