You've obviously never dealt with the Maryland state government or any of its counties. The entire MO is to make interaction with the government absolutely as miserable as possible at every turn. Then, when you play the game right and donate to the right party (it's a political monoculture, really), you get relief from the imposed hell. "Everybody is always in trouble" should be the state motto. Sounds better in Latin...

Quisque Semper Est Mala

Words to rule by.

Worst pick-up line ever.

"extreme" browsers like me. I run anywhere from 30 to 150 tabs open at a time. I'd say a nice average would be around 60 tabs

It's not Firefox and that's not extreme. I was just doing some Javascript profiling this weekend on slow performance with 1630 tabs (Tree Style Tabs, of course), with the winners for CPU eaters being HTTPS Everywhere 4.0's SSLObservatory and SessionRestore.

As much as I appreciate the EFF's efforts, I wound up disabling 4.0. Maybe 4.0.1 will be back with a vengeance.

Anyway, Firefox wasn't crashing, it was slow. Probably one of your in-profile databases got corrupted at some point ('restore from backup' is the most likely "fix"). I'm on Fedora 20, running stock Firefox.

Second that. I currently use Proxomitron to filter out all the unwanted (by me anyway) crap on Google's home page (instant, preview, sidebar, link redirects, etc...) and have to use "nosslsearch.google.com" to avoid https (so I can use my filtering proxy).

Yes, I know I can use Startpage and/or DuckDuckGo, but they're not as fast as hitting Google directly. Seriously, for simple searches, 99.9% of the time the JavaScript and crap (et al) on all these search pages (like Google and Bing) is a complete bullshit. Just my $0.02 anyway.

The advantage is that it will create a constant current in the canal.

Regardless of the length of the canal -- at least until evaporation becomes a factor.

The constant current can be leveraged to move boats, presumably fairly deep hulled so the really get in the way of the current, and said boats can carry whatever.

Two canals adjoining allows the boat to be moved from one to the other, and sent back to the other end, ad infinitum.

When you put a cork in a river, it'll go from the mountains to the sea, because the current carries it.

What I'm suggesting is create an artificial current using pumps. The two 'c's run in different directions, so you have a full transport loop.

All four ends are physically adjacent, so you only need one pumping station if you connect the two c's across one end.

Old time canals used donkeys and engines to navigate. This works like a river and a raft. You float to where you're going.

> You're assuming you'll get free energy out of this?

Um... no... where would get such an idea?

Think about it. If you put a transport thing in there (think boat) with a nice deep hull, and there's a 5 knot current along the entire canal created by the transfer at the ends of the C, what will the boat do? Now add another boat at a reasonable interval, say another boat length.

Do you imagine doing this will slow down either the current or the other boat?

That's the point, and that's all I am assuming.

Good points. Let's look at Taxi Medallions. Now, when they were originally implemented the idea was that there were too many taxis on the roads clogging things up. So let's restrict the number, move more people to public transit. Except that the cities keep expanding and issuing NEW medallions becomes extremely hard because you have these hugely wealthy taxi companies that hold most of the medallions that realize that every new medallion issued reduces the value of their existing ones.

In NYC at least as a result you have 'livery services' which are essentially taxis that aren't allowed to stop for 'flags' on the street. IE you call one up, negotiate a price over the phone(or internet) and the car will come pick you up at a designated time and drop you off. There are additional complexities involving airports, of course.

By the same token, for the longest time the only vehicle that was considered 'suitable' for a NYC cab was a special stretch Crown Vic, apparently under concerns about leg space that assumed both the driver and passengers were all NBA athletes.

As is, new 'taxicab of the future', a Nissan NV200, has some issues because it's not handicapped accessible.

Personally, I think it'd be cheaper to simply subsidize a number of cars to have the ability and use them on a call out basis so they're no more expensive than taxis. Same with apartments, really. Requiring 100% of apartments be wheelchair accessible is more expensive than simply giving the population in wheelchairs free handicapped apartments.

That depends on the DPI. My phone, very small indeed, is 1080x1920 (or 1920x1080 if I'm holding it funny.) One of the monitors on my 8-core desktop is 1280x1024.

The DPI difference between them is radical. Even so, any properly designed page will allow the user's browser to resize and reflow the content to fit the window if it's of any sane width (probably only wide enough to render the longest word in the content.) If it can't do that, the browser should hand you scroll bars. Be nice if the browser had a user setting "minimum width before scroll bars", too. That'd be a joy.

Fixed aspect / resolution webpages are horrible.

That, and "hover" menus and windows are the #1 reason why I surf away from web pages.

Tip to "designers": If I didn't CLICK on it, I didn't WANT it, and that means ITS IN MY FUCKING WAY

(cough) Sorry.

Desktop screens have had two sizes in the past 10 years to my knowledge: 4:3 and 16:9 (or close to it),

Irrelevant. All you really need to know is that pixels are square. It's been some time since we had to deal with non-square pixels. Everything else should be up to the user's browser window.

layout constraints

...doing it wrong. The BROWSER should control the layout. Not the data source.

> A single combination of web browser and operating system can be used on both low DPI displays and high DPI displays.

If the image is wider than the window, you get scroll bars; also, browsers can resize. It's not the server's job. We don't have a bandwidth shortage. We have a decently flexible content shortage. If you know it's a mac or a PC, you know it's got a desktop range of pixels. Likewise any particular smartphone. There's no mystery here worth noticing.

Don't resize images with the viewport. That's very annoying. They should reflow with the window according to the browser's settings. If you set a constant width, then you're asking for scroll bars if the window can't fit that width. This all works very well. It has for a long time. Stop trying to make it not work.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do something. You could make both the text and the background black -- but you wouldn't, right? Because it's highly unfriendly, to say the least. Well, so is locking the user's browser view to particular widths and heights and sizes and positions. HTML was intended as the content provider; the browser intended to be the content formatter, using only hints -- lines, paragraphs, font styling, etc. The closer you can get to that in web page design, the better web page designer you are, because then the user gets to fit the thing into the window the user wants it to be in.

Every time I run into a page that makes me resize my browser to make the damn thing work, I curse. Every time. Every time some whackjob decides that menus should drop or windows should open when my mouse pointer crosses some object, I curse. Every time I run into some page (like liveaquaria.com's) that won't run its cart or checkout through the usual standard ports and protocols, when everything else from Amazon to the tiniest little retailer and back to EBay will, I try to find somewhere else to shop.

Stop trying to be clever with the page. Instead, be clever with what you put on the page.

You know, I think it's true that Europe had a much higher rate of fraud, which convinced them to move to chip&pin sooner.

Yes, I've heard that they're working to move to chip&pin, my bank sent out a notice that they're working on it. When I get closer to the expiration of my card I might call them up and ask to be moved over as I actually travel internationally occasionally and it'd be nice to be able to use my card in European stores.

Perhaps, but they impose half the problem that wind does, because wind is pretty much variable by design. Outside of emergencies, you can time a base load power plant's outages so that it's up and at full power when the demand is peaking. You can't even count on that for wind/solar. Ergo the ratio of backup you need in case production drops is much higher, costing money. Whether the backup is natural gas, battery systems charged during lulls, etc... You need more backup. Of course, I'm serviced by the largest NiCd battery in the world...

Most base load power plants don't operate at 100% all the time just because they have to, it's because they have the cheapest marginal cost per kwh, so it makes sense to use them to produce as much power as you can. After that you start running into economic decisions often made decades ago - IE they 'knew' it was always going to be a base load plant, so they designed it to be a base load plant, giving it very limited load following capabilities.

One thing to remember is that in most cases base load plants are owned and operated by their associated electric company, so the electric company itself manages the mix of baseload, peaking, and storage systems. It's not quite the case with renewable systems, with lots of small operators and even for the big dedicated systems the power company typically owns only about half of them itself.

Of course, I didn't say 20% hydro, did I? I said 20% 'other, including hydro'. As in a subset of the 20%, meaning less than 20%. The other category would be a grab-bag of stuff including hydro, biomass, geothermal, tidal, etc...

I'm well aware that hydro in the USA is effectively maxed. New dam construction barely keeps up with demolishing badly placed old ones and increasing efficiency through upgrading existing ones such as installing new turbines can only do so much.

If I don't list hydro, people complain. I list it people complain. I can't win, can I?

I did this too and noticed the same (though not above 160). I found the following helped reduce those spikes: (a) split one meal into two meals 3-hours apart (b) long walk and/or brief intense spot exercise - which, I've read, helps burn off some of the stored energy in the muscles causing them to pull fresh from the blood stream. Either case, though especially the intense spot exercise, showed about a 30 point reduction in blood sugar.

You might also be interested in this: Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system.