The idea really isn't to backup your power during an outage. The idea is to store power collected with on-site measures such as solar/wind and use the battery during times when these local power measure's aren't supplying enough. Another point would be to purchase power from the electric company when demand is low, and store for use when demand is high. Power companies could signal that demand is too high and the load is about cause problems, and people could switch to their reserves, in order to prevent damage to the grid. (Such as happens frequently when everybody runs their air coolers in the summer). I think that this would be a good measure to prevent the problems that cause blackouts, but I don't think it should, in all cases, be the consumer putting forth the effort to fix things. (At least in the US they need fixing). The power companies should put a few of these in the ground, and THEY can activate them when the need is there, rather than asking customers to handle it for them. Else they can damn well charge us a lot less than 60 cents per kilowatt hour. (Newark).

It depends entirely upon the warranty provider and the terms within. Some of them really are worthwhile. Radio Shack had a great warranty about five years back (they've changed it now). And it used to be one of the best anywhere. Now, of all places, Officemax has a well thought out warranty offer. (Which I bought and used last year). Look at how the pricing is done, because that is where you can determine whether it is worth the extra purchase. They usually bracket the prices, in sections like $0-50 and $50-100 and so on. If the product is near the top of that bracket, it's going to give you the best warranty for your money. If it's in the middle, or near the lower end of the bracket, it probably would be best to walk away from it. I know it's hard, but if you read the terms and conditions, you can see precisely which ones are worth the money.

Printers make a really bad example. The vendors sell printers at a loss, because they know you will have to buy ink for it, and the ink is where they hide their margin. Forcing the customer to buy a new printer would cost them money, as well as you, and so be in neither party's interest. Worse still, printers or brands that accumulate bad reputations will be avoided, and if the product isn't sold at all, how will the company make money. Add that to the fact that printer vendors have real competition with each other, unlike microsoft, and it works even less in their favor, since the customer has alternatives. What makes microsoft so bad is that there really isn't an alternative. They have usurped control of an entire section of the market and can force their customers to comply with unreasonable demands if they so choose, and their customers lack ANY alternative to such measures, aside from not participating, which isn't an option at all. Monopolies need to be destroyed, and microsoft is the worst example of such.

Radar isn't the kind of radiation that causes damage. It passes harmlessly through you.

Not necessarily. I wouldn't want military weapons systems to use open-sourced software, and I believe that any work that takes time, effort, and an investment in resources should be properly rewarded, so not releasing the source-code in such instances is entirely forgivable. Provided, of course, that it is released within a reasonable time frame. I'll freely admit to stealing other people's work in the past and adapting it to my own ends. The difference being that I understood what was done and was capable of doing it myself if I had the time and resources to invest in making it, but without their original work I would have lacked the foundation upon which my own is built. It's called evolution, and it applies to more than physiology. Keeping code closed forever is like making a species extinct. Something else might come in and fill the void, eventually, but it has been removed from the gene-pool. But maybe that's a bad example.

It doesn't matter what the reason is, the fact that they are doing it at all is what matters to me. I'd accept a company bragging and boasting about themselves for doing something good in a heartbeat, as long as they did something worth doing. Likewise, I don't care what the motivating factor is in this instance, as long as it gets done, and really is open-sourced.

We need more investment in open-source projects like this. Such works are building a better future for us and I, for one, thank them for it. Though I doubt we will see any major commitment pushing for open sourced works from private operations, so the quote is a little optimistic, IMHO.

Most of the profits of news media come from advertising, not subscriptions. In television, the advertisers know that they will have a large audience when the news plays, and pay a heavy premium to put their ad in that timeslot. The same applies to newspapers. The Sunday paper commands a higher price for advertisers because more people read it.

I hope it's only a cookie, because that would be easy to circumvent. More annoying would be IP tracking, but that just requires a few seconds to reboot the modem. If you need to set up an account and log in then you can just set up multiple accounts. This is just annoying though. I like my news, but I don't like it enough to pay for it. I might only use such services twice a month.

A few years back I remember hearing about a bacteria that was being breed to produce electricity. It ate really nutrient-rich mucky dirt and produced electricity, and the structure of the bacteria was similar to a nerve cell branching out to other cells and carrying the current. They were trying to make a battery out of it. But for the life of me I could only find stubs of articles on it, and nothing that said anything about viability or even gave a measure of what has been achieved. Anyone else heard about that work? Wonder if the conductivity of these bacteria would be genetically added to the battery bacteria to improve the flow of electricity? Maybe the projects should be married.

Something about this has me wondering, isn't devolution easier for life than evolution? Usually life builds off of itself, becoming more complex as it goes, but retaining most of what was already there. From previous studies it seems as though lots of bacteria are able to adapt to space much more readily than was expected. http://www.infoplease.com/spot/spacefungus1.html (infoplease.com) Watch out for aggressive ads on that site. Doesn't this suggest that bacterial life was previously adapted for space?