I live in a large village or small town. I get a lot of power outages. Some of these last for hours. Most of the rest of the village does not get these - just a small clump of houses around the church. Our cable comes underground from Hemel Hempstead. The rest of the village gets power from the pylons that run alongside the M1. We can claim back money for the power outages.

I would imagine our group of houses has problems because (a) we are at the end of a spur (b) we got electricity before anyone else, and before the M1 was built, so our lines are particularly old, and (c) the power distribution network has probably shifted, and our little bit has not been altered to reflect the changes. If you live out in the sticks, you become more vulnerable: I remember a house where the power used to trip out when the transport cafe about a mile away turned off their grills last thing at night. One of the downsides of generating your own power may be that the network only has to fill in when we have a number of dull, still days. The US equivalent is probably hot days where everyone turns up the airconditioning.

It is not because (a) our lines are overhead, or (b) our corner of the village is particularly greedy, or (c) that the power company does not have to pay when services are disconnected. Beware of people suggesting 'obvious solutions' without evidence.

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No, but it does involve pattern recognition behaviour that is suppressed in "normal" people.

All caps, nice touch!

Nelson laugh is the best I can come up with.

He does have a point, I'm a regular contributor in your sense of the word. I recognised TempleOS as being connected to a slashdot user, so he is a "regular" in the sense that another regular recognises him. I'm also guessing that omnichad is of british descent since his use of the word mimics the way the word would be understood in a british pub.

AC but still a brave post. The fear of the "mentally ill" that "normal" people have is a major problem. I have also had auditory and visual hallucinations on numerous occasions, however it doesn't make me doubt my own sanity since it always happened after working a 73+hr shift on a fishing trawler. The visual ones always happened in a moving car, they were interesting not scary, they would go away if I shifted my visual focus. Auditory ones happened when it was quite and I was alone. They would go way completely after get a good sleep.

Perception is everything. Perhaps if all "normal" people were given a mild acid trip after xmas dinner there would be less fear of the "mentally ill".

Indeed! Vincent Van Gogh did his best work while suffering schizophrenia, Starry Night and Sunflowers are now considered the work of one of the greatest artistic geniuses to ever walk the earth. This guy is (unknowingly?) attempting to put the "art" back into the "art and science of programming", he's unlikely to succeed but he deserves credit for his effort.

C-sharp was already taken in the late 80's, as was "D-flat", both were windowing libraries for DOS. Can't remember if it was Dr Dobb's or Byte magazine that published them.

Most slashbots are absolute morons when it comes to art, social sciences and humanities. It's as if they've had a collective lobotomy.

Is that a 122 L tank or is it the volume of Hydrogen at STP?

Why not compare the distance you could travel with 122 L of liquid Hydrogen against 122 L gasoline vapors? (of course, that wouldn't fit with the narrative they are trying to put forward)

We keep launching stuff into space, and launch cost is always a concern. This isn't new business, this is existing business. Even if only structural components could be space-source, and not the electronics or optics, it can still be a financial win.

That depends on the destination for the final product. If you're building something for use off-Earth, using space-based resources from construction allows you to eliminate launch costs for the weight of that thing.

This of course presumes that the launch cost of your asteroid harvester is less than the launch cost of what you're building with the materials. Then again, if one Earth-launched asteroid harvester can get enough raw materials for more than one space-built asteroid harvester, you're on your way. Or to put it in a more Slashdot-memetic way:
1 - Launch asteroid harvester.
2 - Use harvested materials to build more asteroid harvesters, plus other neat space-based stuff. Repeat.
3 - Profit!!

If you had ever been to the UK you would know it has a lot of empty space. For example, the coast road on the West of Scotland is a lot less populated than the great ocean road here in Oz.

To school?

Agree, way too many people who should know better still conflate consciousness with intelligence. An ant's nest exhibits intelligent behaviour but it can't contemplate it's own existence, Watson displays the same kind of "mindless" intelligence and consistently outperforms the best human trivia buffs.