Hope the bulbs don't die, hope the congresscritters get swapped out, hope the industry fails at making a lower-energy-consumption-but-otherwise-inferior replacement. 75W bulbs are going out of style in 2013, followed by 60W in 2014.

Part of the budget negotiations for a while involved cutting the funds for enforcing the ban. I don't know if that made it into the final draft or not. I hope so. My husband and I have stocked up on about 5 years worth of 100W bulbs, in the hopes that the political winds change by then.

I'll agree with the oven. I have seen LEDs inside new fridges though.

Nike: the brand for people who would kill for shoes. I never have bought Nike and this helps ensure that I continue on that course. Oh well, wrong demographic, I suppose.

There / their / they're and your / you're errors cause my mental parser to derail much, much worse than "teh"-type spelling errors. I have to get to the point where the sentence completely falls apart, stop, back up, figure out which variant is required here, substitute it, start the sentence over again, and hope I make it through the detour without derailing again.

After the second time in a given piece of writing, I start wondering how much schooling the writer absorbed. After the third time, I am likely to decide that I don't care what they have to say.

I don't bother with seasonal vaccines, I know that hand sanitizer makes my skin dry and thus more susceptible to invasion by microbes, and aerosols bother most people around me. But I'm also mostly a read-only user of Slashdot, so my opinions don't factor in much.

Vaccines for one-time, airborn illnesses that kill lots of people and where we might erradicate the disease? Yes, everybody should get them.

I did not have a cell phone, then I got a no-contract Androind smartphone (Virgin Mobile has decent deals for this). I cannot drive, so I walk and bus everywhere. Just being able to know when the bus will arrive and have Google maps calculate how to get places while out and about was a huge and instant life improvement. And I have yet to use more than 40 minutes in a given month. The phone part is a nice extra feature, but the real win is internet in my pocket.

Muscles are expensive to maintain. They require lots of calories. In the wild, these mice might not be able to find enough food to support their muscle needs (because extra strength may not translate directly into enough increase in calorie acquisition ability). Also, they live in little underground tunnels, which they dig themselves. More muscular mice are probably bigger-cross-section mice, which means a lot more work to dig out tunnels.

Even getting FedEx Ground to divulge the address of the location where they are holding your package can be difficult. You may have to call several times before you get somebody who is sympathetic enough to just tell you where you can do a pick-up. And it's kind of no wonder . . . the facilities seem under-staffed and under-secured.

I will never drive. I'm lacking depth perception and missing enough peripheral vision that I should not be in control of a machine that will collide with other objects at deadly speeds. I am hoping for a (near) future where I am emphatically not in control of the car, so that the car can drive me places without the help of another human to operate it.

Seems kind of spooky, sitting in the passenger seat, flying along at 60mph, nobody in the driver's seat. Oh well, if it works, I'll get used to it.

American here -- the problem is that while public universities certainly have lower tuition than private universities, you're still looking at fairly high tuition prices that are climbing every year (they usually have to get permission from the state legislature, which dithers a bit and then raises the cap).

Add to this the fact that in order to get the good courses (and an actual degree), you have to be matriculated (officially enrolled in a degree-granting program), and in order to stay stay matriculated to you have to stay above a certain course load threshold, . . . and it means that people who are getting degrees mostly can't have full-time jobs at the same time. Most people don't have the stamina to have part-time jobs year-round while also taking enough courses. Which means the schools are requiring a rate of schooling that is inconsistent with staying out of debt.

If OWS was a crowd that thought through cause-and-effect sorts of relationships, they might have pointed out that this is a major reason why students graduate with mountains of debt and degrees that can't pay it back.

This.

Keeping students from eating on the cheap is an obnoxious abuse of power by the housing & food department. The dorms are a trap.

And you have to be some religion. You can't be atheist.

Good Morning: http://xkcd.com/448/

Long distance is not free because there are per-minute federal taxes on inter-state calls. Long distance is just about free over the internet because packets dodge the per-minute fee that voice gets. In this case, it's the government, not corrupt corporations, turning something of almost-no-cost into something that costs per minute. And thus, the US is moving to VoIP as fundamentally a tax dodge.

Sadly, many trains have not gotten with the times. I considered a train for my round trip from Seattle to Minneapolis and back. Problems:

1. Somehow, they run out of rooms months in advance. Because I guess they can't add some more cars onto the end of the train.
2. I need refrigerated medication. Their solution? A bucket of ice. And they had no provisions for freezing my ice packs, so I would arrive at the train station at the other end with a bucket of melty ice, ice packs, and meds, and would have to bring that bucket to my final destination. Nope. Not happening.
3. The long runs don't have wifi. If you get out of urban areas, they just don't have it.
4. Wow, 36 hours each way is a long time for travel. That would mean a full 3 days of vacation just for travel, as opposed to a combined day or day and a half (part of which is driving with family).
5. Quite a bit more expensive than air travel. Plus, add in that extra vacation time.

When the trains get fast and get with this century's tech, I'll try them.