It'll last longer than 88 years. The half life is 88 years... that means it's only halfway done after 88 years. All it's going to do is lose efficiency over the next thousand years or so.

He's actually correct. The problem is that we don't have meaningful competition in many sectors of our economy, we have industries tied up in regulatory capture (patents, copyrights, etc. overreaching, no-bid contracts, regulatory rules that benefit incumbents, etc.).

The other issue is that "true" capitalism requires complete, perfect information and zero transport costs for the consumer. I can choose from any supplier with no cost of switching, and I know the full differences between all of them. Given that that is impossible, it's impossible to have proper invisible hand capitalism here in the real world.

What we need to strive for is making sure the regulations are in place to protect the consumer against information "warfare" from the producers while simultaneously preventing corporations from abusing those regulations for their own benefit. Given the money that flows through government and corporations right now, I'm not holding out high hopes of that changing meaningfully any time soon...

Part of the problem is that CFL's do color banding, whereas incandescent is full spectrum. So even if the color profile is tuned to a reasonable value, it's still lacking output in fairly large color bands. Which, incidentally, is probably why your wife doesn't like it... women are more likely to have better color sensitivity than the average male, especially in the red/green bands

You should try some different bulbs... I live in the Denver area, and I have a CFL on my porchlight that lights up instantly every time, no matter how cold it is. Different brands can make a lot more difference than they should.

Did you have a choice of which CPU to match with which motherboard? Would you miss that choice if it were taken away from you?

I'm reasonably certain that "liberal" and telling people what to do are a bit at loggerheads...

So... if I go get some food and my expectation is that I get the right thing, and they give me the wrong thing, it's entirely possible that my expectations are just off, and I'm expecting too much?

They showed that the kids were all very good at getting answers when given a structured set of data and tests, but not when asked to design an experiment. That means that design skills are lacking relative to analysis skills. There's no running study needed.

You can teach an engineer to be a manager, or at least take over management tasks. You can't teach a manager to be an engineer.

Oh how I wish you were right. In some areas and with some people you might be correct. However, especially in the US, there is still a deep ingrained culture that assumes women know nothing about technology and math and engineering. > Also for decades movies have influenced culture to where it is well accepted across most cultures that women are intellectually equal to men, and can do anything they want. I WISH this were true. It's much better than it used to be, I'll give you that. But a large majority of people still view women unequally in intellect.

The systemic bias is in the culture. Despite the attempts that we keep performing to get more female engineers, culturally there is still the idea that math and science are for boys and language and communication skills are for girls. This ridiculous notion still exists in society and creates the "image" problem that most engineering has as a "not for girls" job.

To some extent. But it could be pretty strongly argued that disallowing tethering is part of an unconscionable contract (what with their right reserved to change terms whenever they want). Which, IIRC, generally renders whole contract null.

You specifically stated an editorial. I have never seen any newspaper that had an editorial that did not have a disclaimer that stated since it was an editorial it did not reflect the views of the company as a whole. Thus, the editorial is a private citizen expressing their views, not representing the company.

As I said, an editorial is the same as a blog post edorsement. These are not the same as a campaign advertisement. However, could it be construed as a campaign advertisement? Perhaps, and if so, then they should be penalized for breaking the law.

The entire point here, is the effect that was bad from Citizens United was not who can make advertisements, but the fact that companies can donate unrestricted amounts of money to political campaigns and do not have to disclose it. Which results in the fact that corporations can effectively buy elections.

This, this, holy fucking crap this!

I keep seeing people arguing about cloning products and whatnot, and I keep saying this exact thing. While people call those who don't like patents "entitled", I say it's them who feel they are entitled to own ideas, simply because they were given the problem first...

I agree with you on that. Guess what, that's why there was a court case. The judge decided that the particular tone and content of the movie they made was nothing different than an elongated version of a 30 second television advertisement. If the decision was limited to the interpretation of the law and stated that the judge was wrong based on the content and tone of the movie that would have been fine. The problem I have is the expansion to remove any limitations on corporate spending with politics.

In the same way that a blog endorsement is different from a campaign advertisement. A private citizen making a statement (regardless of the platform) is not the same as an advertisement paid for from the general treasury of a corporation.