Republicans threatened it, but Reid actually did it. He's also blocked all Republican debate and amendments to bills, which is a pretty unprecedented power grab in an institution that has always tried to pay lip service to minority rights.

> Don't call it a come back, Valve/Steam has been doing it for years.

And ID before that. They made a lot of their money by releasing highly modifiable games. Team Fortress was originally a Quake 1 mod, which became a Quakeworld mod, which became a Half-Life Mod, which became a standalone product in the Orange Box.

Valve reaps the rewards of the mod teams they buy, but ID profited by having everyone and their mother buy the game so they could play TF.

>Meanwhile, some appointees can never get approved under any circumstances.

Google Harry Reid's "nuclear option" he took a short while ago.

>In your opinion.

In my professional opinion. I've worked for over a decade as a professional evaluator of teachers.

>Nice straw man.

Do you even know what a straw man means?

>ohh, making up number to fit your narrative, well done. Right their with the finest anti-vaccines, young earth creationist.

I work as a professional evaluator of teachers. Do you?

No?

Oh.

>Pff, you can't even learn how to do an insert after 6 years of using ribbon, and we are suppose to believe you went to community college at 11?

I prefer using this method of text input. Fortunately Slashdot doesn't force us to use the same text input methods they wrote for children.

>But the truth is that "bad teachers" are the minority.

Doesn't matter. They're a sizeable minority.

All you need is one bad math teacher, and your math career is over. If you have a terrible trig or precalc teacher, you're going fail AP Calculus. If you have a terrible AP Caluclus teacher, you'll fail differential equations in college, and so forth.

So if even 10% of teachers are bad, that's a line of Russian Roulette that will hit most kids by the time they finish school.

When I happened to me, I had to enroll in a local community college class to get the education I didn't get from my middle school.

While I did it, I don't expect many 11 year olds would do the same.

> A 1000 square foot flat-roof house could support up to 111 solar panels for 22kWh per day

111 solar panels? Are you crazy?

I have a regular sized house in the suburbs, and my roof supports no more than 20 panels.

I've never seen a normal house with 100+ panels on it.

>And yes, everything that consumes finite resources is everybody's business, that's why water and energy policies are so often in the news -- you can't separate water and energy from consumption, since whether it's food, lumber, or home automation equipment, everything needs water and energy to create.

I propose we create a system that will regulate how society allocates limited resources to people. We could even set it up so that people who contribute more to society are given more allocations, in order to incentivize them to contribute to society instead of just consuming resources. We could even create a secondary market for allocations, so people could choose what interests them more - energy, housing space, water, location, etc. We could even set up the government to operate by just taking percentages of these allocations, and trading those allocations to accomplish things like building roads and parks.

We could call this system "money".

Solar produces at 5PM anyway, but also: http://papundits.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/load-curve.jpg

>>Thats the other thing, we don't need all this extra power in the middle of the day, we need it at 6 oclock at night when everyone turns on the big screens and ovens.

That's the winter power curve. During summer, consumption peaks around noon to the early afternoon, as people run their ACs full blast. This peak is also much higher (~33% or so) than the winter peak draw.

Summer at noon to early afternoon also happens to be the time when solar is at peak production, so it's very useful at helping to deal with the highest levels of draws which lead to rolling blackouts.

>Basically they become a free power storage and backup facility only paid for any extra usage) for the customers, which is great for adoption, but means that non solar customers are adding further subsidy to the solar customers (over and above the common subside via taxation/government grants).

Not here in California. We get to pay a monthly fee to be hooked up to the grid that is independent of our net power generated or consumed.

Even still, PG&E has lobbied (and is still lobbying) to not have to pay customers for net power generated. Why? Because, hey, free money, I guess. I don't imagine any other reason they could justify that.

I got into an argument with a guy on Reddit who claimed solar only saved utilities on fuel costs for generation, but fuel is the lion's share of power costs involved in natural gas plants. So rooftop solar really does save them money on generation.

There's no excuse for them to be able to charge for net watts I generate and not even reimburse me the pittance they do now.

>LED's and CFL bulbs use between 5 and 25% of the power an equivalent Tungsten or Halogen bulb might by converting all of the energy input into light instead of heat.

And look like shit. And often have a bad form factor that doesn't fit into places where incandescents can go.

>Saudi and Soviet Oil is what powers your SUV

No, it doesn't. It's pretty much all produced in North America now.

>he wanted to take all the oil and keep it for America

He turned it all over to the Iraqis, dude.

Precisely what I find ridiculous about the situation. They want to have it both ways.

>How can she prove she is on the list when the airlines are instructed not to let the passenger know the reason why the passenger is denied boarding...

Malaysian Airlines actually provided her a copy of the letter from the DHS.

The judge, though, said that it's not a sworn statement, so it has no validity. You know, the letter that was used to block her from travelling. That one.

Fucking unbelievable.

Yep. The Secret World is awesome.

No monthly fees, just a daily fee (more or less) to pay for double XP when you're actually playing.

But I love the classless design of it. Build your own class, via a point-based system. Make your own combos! It's great.