Nuclear "earthquakes" are a hiccup compared to the real thing, the shaking only lasts a second or so and is only experienced in a comparatively small area. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake was equivalent to a 9,320 Gigaton explosion in terms of energy released and lasted about 6 minutes.

My geology is a little rusty, but I don't think any amount of human activity can "create" full fledged earthquakes. Some activities can encourage an already building earthquake to occur before it would naturally, but not create one from nothing or even enhance one that is building. In some cases this could actually be a plus, it would probably be preferable to have a few 6.0 quakes that you can roughly predict rather than one 8.5 quake that you don' t have a clue when it will occur.

"anything close to the miles-per-tank"

No, but are there any gasoline powered vehicles that can go around 100 miles on ~$3? That same trip will cost you around $15 and rising in even a more economical gas powered vehicle. True at the moment the economics don't quite work out, electric vehicles being more expensive than their gasoline counterparts. But its getting pretty close. Unless there are major advances electric vehicles won't completely replace gas anytime soon but they would suffice for most peoples daily commute and the more people that are willing switching to electric vehicles the longer those who need/want the range and convenience of gas vehicles will be able to afford it.

Yet another reason not to buy/network these "smart" appliances. I'm all for more use of the internet & connectivity, but not with basic utilities (HVAC, Electric, Water, Fridge/Freezer, Septic, maybe TV). Maybe some basic outputs, like sending out an email warning that your furnace is malfunctioning or your water pressure has dropped but only through unidirectional protocols that are impossible to hack or secondary health monitoring systems that even if hacked would be physically unable to effect the operation of the appliance. I don't want my fridge to try to talk me into helping out a Nigerian prince, my furnace being held for ransom by a piece of malware or my TV flashing male enhancement/porn advertisements when the kids are trying to watch a Disney show/film.

"gun related "accidents" happen all the time"

"All the time"? There were only about 613 fatal gun accidents in 2007. That compared to at least 67,740 incidents of self-defense with a firearm a year and possibly far more (NRA claims 2.5 M but likely inflated). Especially when you compare the number of private firearms (somewhere around 300 Million) with the number of crimes even vaguely associated with a firearm per year (~400,000) it amazing how rare firearm related crime is (0.1%).

Aren't judges supposed to be impartial adjudicators? This judges statements read like an NSA PR release touting all of the "wonders" of the NSA program without providing any evidence or noting any of the drawbacks.

Isn't the Liver one of the easiest organs to transplant and least difficult to acquire? You can get simply cut off a moderate part of a living donors liver and sew it into a recipient and both livers will grow back to normal size within weeks. It sounds like it will practically grow itself with the right mixture of nutrients. At least start off with something a little more difficult, like a thyroid gland or a segment of skin.

"over-saturated from the rapid adoption of solar power"

Ok, even if that is true it should be possible to rig a solar installation so that it could fill the power requirements of the house during the day but not back-feed any power into the grid. It wouldn't be as advantageous for the solar installations as they would end up with a bill for the power they used during the night but it would drastically decrease their grid costs, especially if AC is the primary power cost. However it seems obvious that power grid issues are not the primary "issue" for utilities, as evidenced by this excerpt from a report quoted in the article “Not only does solar steal share of new electricity demand, it parasitically steals demand from previously installed generation, and does at the most valuable ‘peak’ part of the demand curve.”. 'Peak' power is supposed to be more expensive for utilities, necessitating higher rates and special metering. If its so difficult and costly why aren't they welcoming a decrease in the strain? The only way this would make sense is that it has been used simply as an excuse for increasing profits.

So when you go through 3+ bulk packs of CFL bulbs (8 bulbs each, with each bulb rated for almost a year of continual operation) in 6 months in a house with only about a dozen light fixtures that doesn't suggest something is up with the supposed service life? We do have an old farm house so I suppose it could be something with our electricity but even if that is the case it suggests that there are some situations where CFLs are simply not practical.

Sure there are many applications where CFLs and LED's are far preferable to incandescents, however there are some instances where at least CFLs are not very effective. In our living room and kitchen for example CFLs don't last long due to the lights in those rooms being turned on/off often (in one instance 4 bulbs lasted less than a month). There are also applications (work lamps, outdoor lights, wellhouse heating) where incandescents work far better than at least CFLs. Halogens can take up some of the slack in those instances I suppose but banning a proven, simple and effective lighting technology and replacing it with several technologies that have far better energy efficiency, but have a less than stellar quality record & contain toxic chemicals seems questionable at best, idiotic at worst.

There's no doubt that it has been turned into the "buy, buy, buy" season. But there's nothing saying you can't use it as an excuse to hang out with family & friends without spending yourself into 3-5 months of debt instead. I know our family keeps the spending to a minimum these days, $50 dollar gifts for a single person we pick out of a hat & that "white elephant" thing at my grandparents (re-gift of old junk). Might as well hijack the holiday, the same way the Christians hijacked it from the pagans.

Maybe its something wacky about our power or something but CFLs don't work with crap where I live. They last less than half as long as other bulbs and don't seem to provide enough light unless they have been on for 5 minutes or more. I swear that we changed out all of the bulbs in a ceiling fan/4 port light and within a couple weeks half of them were dead and within a month so were the remaining two. I've had good luck with halogens and I'd like to try these new incandescent and maybe LED's in a few places but I won't touch CFLs. Also there are some applications where you WANT a light that generates heat, I know well houses that need just a little heat to keep from freezing in winter use a standard incandescent bulb as a heat source.

10,000 firearm related homicides, and a total yearly mortality rate of over 2 MILLION! Thats less than 0.5% of all annual deaths in the US. Most of those are probably due to gang warfare, which isn't going to stop even if you could magically remove all civilian firearms in the US. Speaking more directly to firearms. Most estimates say that there are at least 270 Million civilian firearms in the US, that means that only 0.0037% of firearms are misused each year. You want to penalize probably in the neighborhood of 100 Million people for the actions of less than 10,000. If you're really looking to save lives we need to fix hospitals, medical malpractice is estimated to kill almost 200,000 a year.

Because limiting use of force to government personnel will never turn around and bite you. All of those countries that ban (or severely restrict) civilian firearm ownership (Mexico, China, North Korea, etc) are such peaceful, pleasant, freedom loving places.

Ah Boston PD, you show yet again how absolutely crazy you are. The saddest thing of all, suspect that lack of action in regards to stolen vehicles & and the insanely high (99.99%) false positive rate are not the reasons for their "suspending" of the program. All of those hits in the police employee parking lot that they'd rather not address is probably by the far the largest driving factor.