I just weighed them, here's the weights: 356g, 355g, 357g, 354g, 355g, 358g, 354g.

Tell me which one has all of the critical nerves and blood vessels in the right place.

I for one am tired of the government from being slowed by locks whenever they need to find a terrorist suspect, I think the government needs a master key that can open any lock, and everyone combination lock needs to have a master unlock code to unlock it.

Since the master keys would only be available to a few thousand (ok, maybe a few hundred thousand) law enforcement personnel, I fail to see how the "bad guys" would ever get access to them. The government has our best interests at heart, and they carefully screen employees to ensure that none of them are the "bad guys".

Isn't that what I just said? Consumers may not be paying less overall with time of day pricing models, but regardless, they can't ignore time of day pricing or they will pay much more overall.

This article is about a technological solution to work within time-of-day pricing models, if your problem is that time-of-day pricing is just a way for utilities to charge more while reducing their costs, that's a political problem and you should bring it up with your regulators. (assuming that you're in a regulated electrical market)

Finally, something good can come out of the "war on terror" and it can be a good use of the NSA's resources -- they can track down and eliminate spammers to prevent terrorist attacks.

Whether or not you really save money over not having such a system in place is open to debate, but once utilities move to time-of-day pricing models, then consumers that don't reduce usage during peak pricing periods *will* pay more. So you can't just ignore the pricing and expect that you won't end up paying more.

But maybe you'd be willing to let the temperature in the house dip down to 65 degrees at 2am if it turned out there was a spike in pricing then... but it knows you want the temperature back up to 70 degrees by the time you wake up at 7am. The furnace is one appliance that has a lot of flexibility in exactly when it runs - most of the time you can shift its runtime by 15 minutes (or longer) without a noticeable difference in comfort, so you can take advantage of short-term power price fluctuations.

A naive setback thermostat might turn the heat on full-blast at 6:30am to warm the house by 7am, but a smarter thermostat that can look at power prices might warm the house back up to 70 degrees at 5:30am before the 6am peak pricing kicks in, saving you money.

Have you ever used public transit or trains? Changing trains *is* a big deal... for most of the same reasons people avoid connecting flights, I'll happily pay more money to avoid a flight connection.

First, it makes the trip longer (even if the connecting train is waiting and ready to go, the dwell time is limited by the slowest person to make the transfer, so figure at least 15 minutes for everyone to gather their luggage and move across the platform). But, and probably worse, it interupts whatever you're doing on the train, whether you're sleeping, working playing cards, whatever, you'll get an announcement 30 minutes before arrival to prepare to transfer so you wake up, get the family and luggage together, unplug your laptop, etc, then you carry everything to the new train and have to get all set up again with whatever you were doing (and if you were sleeping, you may not get back to sleep at all before you arrive in SF). And since Caltrain has no reserved seating, you may not be able to sit together with your party, and may not even get a seat at all and have to stand.

Transit connections suck, they are unavoidable in many cases, but convenient transit should not require them unnecessarily.

Caltrain needs to be modernized and electrified regardless of whether HSR travels on their tracks or not, so what different does it make if HSR trains travel along the tracks or not?

Depends what that data is -- when my sister lost her house in a fire (even the fire safe melted, all that was left was the fireplace and half of the 1920's era cast iron stove), she lost a *lot* of irreplaceable photos that she had scanned in over the years. Hundreds of old family photos dating back nearly 100 years -- she had the originals carefully packed away for safe keeping. Fortunately, most of her more recent photos were also stored in online photo albums so those were saved.

She was smart enough to keep a photo record of the more expensive items in her house... also on her computer, so that was lost too, but at least she emailed the spreadsheet to herself (not as backup but so she could edit it while traveling).

Her "backup" for everything was keeping a copy of everying on her laptop computer, which was also in the house.

Of everything she lost in that fire, the photos are the things she misses most -- and those would have been trivial to keep safe through any cloud based backup service. (or her own offsite backup by shipping hard drives or DVD's, but that requires more discipline to keep current)

Airports are fundamentally different than trains. When a plane takes 90 minutes for a trip and a train takes 4 hours, getting the train to where the people want to go (or start from) is what's going to get them to take the train. If you stop the train at the far end of existing transit lines and the trip takes 6 hours and requires making 2 connections, few would take it, especially when it only takes about 6 hours to drive.

The only way people will take transit is if it's more convenient than the alternative.

I believe the plan is to run HSR on the Caltrain tracks all the way to the new Transbay building, which does require electrifying and upgrading caltrain tracks (and tunnelling up to the Transbay Terminal).

It takes the Muni Metro L line at least 15 minutes to travel underground from the Forest Hill station to downtown and that's not nearly as far as traveling from the outer Richmond, so even if they spent billions of dollars digging a light rail subway for the 38, you're still not going to see much better travel times than 30 minutes to get downtown.

BRT is the way to go, building a new subway is hugely expensive, and doesn't buy much over BRT -- and light rail bstops tend to be more spread out because the stations are so expensive, so you might trade in 5 minutes less travel time for 5 minutes of extra walk time to the station.

I don't think Muni cares about saving a few billion ollars in (mostly grant funded) capital costs, but they likely can't afford to take on any work on a new subway line while they still build the new line to Chinatown, and Richmond residents like yourself probably don't want to wait a couple decades for a better transit methord, BRT is not only cheaper but it's much faster to build.

Besides, when BRT breaks down, you're not stuck in a dark tunnel with no where to go, at least you can get out of the bus.

Why add an hour+ to HSR by stoping in Gilroy instead of downtown SF and make passengers transfer to already crowded commuter trains? Unless your goal is to kill HSR, that seems unreasonable -- people don't want to transfer among 3 modes of transit (which is inconvenient and adds unnecessary time).

I'd be a lot less likely to take HSR if I had to fight commute hours loads on Caltrain with my 2 suitcases.

HSR must be run in the center of cities to get passengers.

I thought it was supposed to compete with airlines where the "last 20 mile" problem has already been solved -- the HSR is even better in that it can go closer to downtown areas.

I'd be more likely to take the train to LA rather than fly if it really makes the trip in less then 4 hours. It takes me 30 minutes to get to the airport (an hour early to make sure I can get through security), then 90 minutes to make the flight (add 30 minutes if I checked a bag), then an hour to get to my destination from the aiport (only about 10 minutes from one of the proposed stations).

As it is now, I usually drive since the gas costs less than the plane ticket, and even though it's couple hours longer to drive, I have the convenience of having my car when I get there... and I can leave when I want to, I don't have to leave my aunt's birthday party early to catch a flight -- which would also be the case if there were frequent train services, a 1000 passenger train doesn't sell out as quickly as a 200 passenger airplane.

They were trying to ride the Maker wave, they advertise pretty heavily in Make magazine, and had a sizeable booth at the last Maker Faire I went to, but their in-store selection seems too limiting to really be successful -- for $100 on eBay I can order component kits that cover 99% of what I can find in Radio Shack's inventory.

Even though pfSense can act as a Samba server, I'd put the firewall and Samba server on separate hardware. The Alix or APU from PC Engines board makes a nice low power firewall.

Agreed, it's weird, but I guess their OTA update process assumes that everyone will update to each version, so it can't handle the (apparently rare?) case where a user skips an update. No matter how many times I click the "Check for Update" button on the System Updates screen, my phone says "Your system is up to date."