I wouldn't say that Electric Car development was at a standstill for oh those many decades between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s. Development of the Technology for electric cars has continued, the power electronics that goes into today's electric cars is closely related to that used in forklifts, golf carts, and other industrial vehicles that have been widely deployed for decades. Batteries have always been the limiting factor for developing an electric car that can compete with the range and duty cycle of an ICE powered vehicle. The development of Lithium batteries for electronic devices with several times the power density of previous Lead-Acid, Nickel-Cadmium, and Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries has brought us closer to a practical electric vehicle, but we are not quite there yet. Yes you can go a hundred miles or so with your 800 pound battery pack (if you go easy on the lights and A/C or heater) instead of 25-40 in the EV1 days, but the hard facts are that 110 pounds, or about 15 gallons of medium chain liquid hydrocarbon fuel (gasoline) in the fuel tank of my Accord will take me about 450 miles on the open highway, and 375 miles in rush hour traffic, with the headlights on, and the heater, wipers, and the stereo all going full blast. I don't want to have to worry about running the battery down if I have to take an extra service call, or have to buck a 30 mph headwind on the way home. If the electrics can deliver even a 250 mile range, that would go a long way toward making them a viable alternative to the ICE.

There is sort of a standard, and you can buy a "universal" remote at the local Wal-Mart or even CVS. The problem with Universal remotes is that they only support a limited number of features on each device. I'm with you bro, I have 4 remotes to control my patchwork home theater. My remote for the Cable Box has functions for the TV, but not my newer Blu-Ray player, and only limited functionality on the TV. I can manage to get a few functions to work on my 5.1 receiver. My TV remote has no functions for the cable box or receiver, never mind the new Blu-Ray player, and the Blu-Ray remote can control part of the TV, but not the receiver or cable box, and so on and so on....

I just gave up and dedicated a side table next to my recliner for the remotes.

In addition to my personal smart phone, laptop, desktop, I support numerous embedded systems in the course of my work. Many of the machines I work on have full on PCs to interface with the user, and they use combinations of keypads, mice, touchscreens, and regular old keyboards, and some have more than 1 PC. All of the machines with full on PCs have keyboards, in addition to the touchscreens mice, and keypads. Other machines have a somewhat simpler interface, using an LCD display and keypads with 4 Arrow keys, plus Start, Stop, Enter, and Cancel. At my largest site, there are 14 full on PCs, plus 8 machines with LCD Displays and Keypads only. Once I leave there, I am dispatched to similar venues via my Smart Phone, so it isn't uncommon for me to get my hands on up to 20 computers in a day.

Dire predictions on Friday for the areas west of the I-95 corridor of up to 7 inches of White Death from Above prompted me to get my snow tractor (an ancient Cub Cadet with a blade) ready to go, so I spent Friday evening wrestling and bolting on the plow, then strapping a set of rusty tire chains onto my spare set of wheels, then discovering that the battery was dead. I got it all together, and with a battery borrowed from my sprayer, I made a victory lap Saturday afternoon, pushing almost an inch of quickly melting snow aside. Hopefully the mere presence of this fearsome snow-fighter will divert the weather patterns and push the heavy stuff up into the mountains of Pennsylvania, and leave the roads of Central Maryland bare. Such seemed to happen for several years after I traded my old 2wd pickup for a 4 wheel drive in 2005. For several years afterward, I had little need for the 4wd feature, but my luck ran out in 2010, with about six feet of snow falling that winter.

As a typical worker bee who maintains such labor saving machinery in a large metropolitan area, I don't believe that increasing leisure time by having shorter work days is the best answer. As a typical worker bee, I get up, and typically spend an hour each way commuting on overcrowded roads to get to my worksite, so if I work 8 hours a day/5 days a week I am devoting 50 hours a week to my job. If my workday was cut to 3 hours, I would still devote 25 hours a week to the job, just half of the time as I originally spent. Now if I worked the same 15 hours over 2- 7.5 hour days, I would only have to devote 19 hours a week to my job. Of course, customers would still often demand full-time availability, but that could create an opportunity for someone else to work the other shift or shifts. Unfortunately, with the cost of payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, healthcare, and so on, its a safe bet that most employers would still rather have just one guy working that 40 hour week.

Another consideration of the human factor is productivity over the course of the day. Unless you are a line worker, cashier, or the like, it takes a while to get oriented to the day's tasks and gather the information, tools, parts, or supplies to efficiently do what needs to be done, and at the end of the day to put things away, finish administrative tasks, and get ready to leave. 8 hours a day seems to offer the largest sweet spot of peak productivity, much less you spend too much time commuting, setting up work, and cleaning up afterwards. Think about shop class in junior high, (I may be showing my age talking about shop class) you had a 50 minute period to try to get something accomplished, and you spent 5 or 10 minutes listening to the teacher explain the task for the day, another 5 or 10 minutes gathering the stuff you'll need for the job, and the last 10 minutes to clean up. You'll be lucky to actually spend more than 20 minutes working on the project.

On a seasonal basis, this automatically happens in most homes and small businesses anyway. Heat generated by the servers helps contribute to keeping things toasty in the winter. It is not a reason in itself to not increase their efficiency though. Fuel, such as natural gas or oil burned in an onsite furnace results in 85-95 percent usable heat. The typical electricity generation cycle using a coal, oil, or natural gas boiler is about 33 percent efficient , Since this heat would be generated anyway, you might as well use it if you can, but furnaces or heat pumps are more efficient ways of providing heat.

In the summer the situation is reversed. All of that waste heat needs to be removed, meaning you pay for electricity to run the server, and the air conditioning to remove the excess heat. Same goes for lighting and all appliances that generate heat. The strategy is to find a way to circulate that heat in the winter, and maximize efficiency of all of the electrical devices year round. That's about as simple as I can make it.

An inexpensive wet tile saw with a with a blade that contains diamond abrasives can be found at most home centers for as little as $100.00

I had the Farmville virus for a few months last winter, until the program got impossible to load. Fast forward 6 months, I decided to try again just for the heck of it. I had something like 30 neighbors at my peak, but when I looked around about 80% of the farms were withered, fallow, or plowed with nothing planted. Same with Mafia Wars, which I had also given up on and not really looked back. Got tired of all the stupid stuff the games put up on your wall if you want the game to help you. The messages sent to friends that have already quit the game are an annoyance to them as well.

I still check in daily, mostly for a few characters that tend to put up entertaining links or posts. Mostly I am a lurker, but I occasionally comment on someone else's post, but 90 percent of the stuff in my Top News is trashable.

I live near a little village that is in the outer fringes of the Baltimore Metropolitan Area, on part of what used to be my grandparent's dairy farm, so I have a bit of historical perspective on the area. These days I, like many others around here and even further out hop in their cars every morning and endure a grinding commute to their jobs in and around Baltimore, Columbia, and even DC. Local employment opportunities in nearby towns are limited, so unless you are employed in local agriculture, or are of the Landed Gentry, a grinding commute is the price you pay to live out here. Not having a car out in these parts is equivalent to being under house arrest.

  About 25 years ago, the opening of I-795 put this bucolic backwater within feasible commuting reach of much of the rapidly growing business centers surrounding Baltimore, and down the I-95 corridor. Until the housing collapse a few years ago, it was common for giant new houses to be built wherever chinks in the RC2 zoning, which required ridiculously large lot sizes to build were found and exploited, and for many of the existing, and mostly modest homes in the area to either be torn down to make way for McMansions, or additions larger than the original house added onto them. A combination of the housing collapse and the congestion that development up the 795 corridor created has put the brakes on new construction, and existing homes for sale in the area seem to linger on the market, sometimes for years.

Total dependence on the automobile wasn't always the case, there was a time I could live where I am now and be able to walk to the local general store, catch a train, and commute downtown with relative ease, since the trained stopped in all the little hamlets, from Owings Mills to Glyndon, on up to Woodensburg, Boring, Upperco, Hampstead, and so on up to Hanover PA. Back during WWI, my grandmother told me as a teenager she took the train into Baltimore every day and worked in a munitions plant before she settled down to life as a farmer's wife. Even in the '40s, my dad was able to take the train downtown to his job. Sometime after WW2, the trains didn't stop in the little hamlets anymore, and only freight travels on the rail lines these days.

Have you ever paid for short-term parking on Manhattan, or for that matter any other major city? The cost of parking IS the congestion surcharge. Seriously, in Downtown Baltimore it costs a minimum of $10-$15 to park for more than an hour in an off-street garage, as the supply of on-street metered parking is totally inadequate to meet the demand. I have paid $35 to park for the day in DC while working a trade show. A monthly space in a garage near a skyscraper on Manhattan cost about $600 a month 15 years ago, today it is probably pushing $900-$1,000 a month now.

Point is, that if you want to do business downtown and are driving in, you have to park somewhere, and whatever entity has the parking spaces will charge what the traffic will bear.

Antenna performance (in this case a parabolic dish) depends on several factors. The old C-Band dishes needed to be 10 feet across due to relatively low power on the downlink, and because the gain of a dish depends on its size relative to the wavelength of the signal. C-Band used a 4.7 Ghz signal, which has a wavelength of about 6.3 cm, or about an 2.5 inches. Later dishes received Ku band signals, where were about 11 Ghz, which have a wavelength of 2.7cm, or a little bit more than an inch. Proportionately, a 4 foot Ku band dish has about the same theoretical gain as a 10 C-Band dish. The newer satellites are also more powerful, and preamp performance is improved as well, which is why a 2 foot "hubcap" dish can pretty much do the same thing as the old 10 foot C-band dishes.

Too much gain can have drawbacks as well. If you can aim one of the old 10 foot dishes adequately, you will get EXCELLENT performance on Ku band, but with increased gain comes a narrower beamwidth, which makes the dish harder to aim at the desired satellite. The smaller dishes are a much more rugged, stable, and less expensive platform than the 10 footers of old, which needed massive foundations and supports to maintain stability, particularly in high winds.

I have a 10 MP point and shoot Casio EX-1050, but I take the majority of my pictures is my 1.3 MP Samsung ACE mobile phone. A couple of reasons come to mind, mainly that I am always carrying around my mobile phone, so I can get "shots of opportunity". The second is that I often find the battery dead on the Casio, it uses power when connected to my computer, while the mobile phone charges. As far as ease of use and picture quality, the mobile phone camera is good enough for working snapshots of stuff you want to post on a web forum or to send to friends or family. As far as the Casio goes, while it claims 10 MP, by the time you account for the blur because of the cheap lens and small CCD array, it really doesn't have more than 2 or 3 MP of usable resolution anyway

I live in a modular home here in Maryland, and for all intents and purposes, it is the same as a stick built home as far as the county and the mortgage company are concerned, and as far as quality of construction, it is better than most stick built homes. There is a distinction between types of modular homes though. One type very common in the South is the Double Wide, which is built up onto a chassis and uses construction techniques similar to those of an RV or office trailer. They typically have relatively thin walls, a low pitch roof, and look like an obviously manufactured building.

The other type is a modular building is one that is built in a factory using techniques similar to a stick built house, and is delivered in modules to the building site on special trailers. The house is set onto a previously built slab or foundation, the same as a conventional house, and is about 90 percent complete once the modules are set. In the case of my house, it features 2x6 walls with R19 insulation in the walls, R30 in the attic (yes it has a 9/12 pitch roof), and a full basement. In order to survive the stresses of the move from the factory to the building site, these houses have more solid flooring, walls that are glued and screwed, and are built to tighter tolerances than the typical stick built home. Construction costs on a per square foot basis are about 10 to 20 percent less than a conventional home, but certain features (such as masonry and stonework) that don't travel well in modular construction that must be added later can drive up the cost.

Compared to the 20 percent smaller 1940s era house I used to live in nearby, my energy bills are less than half of the old house, which leaked cold air in like a sieve.

There were plenty of other things, both terrestrial and astronomical that can wreak havoc with the climate. Major volcanic eruptions such as the ones on Krakatoa and Mount Tambora are repeat offenders, and there are dozens of other volcanoes that can wreak similar havoc with the climate, including America's very own Yellowstone Volcano, and Santorini .

We also face similar hazards from space on a timeframe that people can relate to. The Tunguska Event of 1908 is believed to be a comet that exploded in the upper atmosphere, and resulted in a release of energy equivalent to a large Hydrogen Bomb, and Hiroshima size explosions from meteoroids happen every couple of years. . Events such as this can happen on the scale of a human lifetime, but there are larger objects out there that will likely eventually collide with earth that can have the potential to ruin everyone's day, such as Apophis .

We regularly run DOS based systems at work which interface with 15 or even close to 20 year old control hardware supporting older mail processing equipment. They do their intended jobs just fine and are only replaced when there is a hardware failure. Ironically, some of the most reliable hardware seems to be some of the old Pentium 100/133 based systems, which often operate in a dusty environment 24/7. The newer service replacements are tend to be low end commodity hardware, and often fail within a year or two because of power supply or CPU fans failing.