It's Serge!

Unless they're allowed to compete in the same markets, I'm really not sure how that would help.

Quick pedantic note: the unit is kWh, not kW/h. Watt is energy over time. So Watt / hour would be energy over time squared. Your energy consumption per year is 1700 kWh or 6120 Megajoules.

Yes, this is correct, and my bad for perpetuating the myth. I read once that Shetland was closer to Oslo than Edinburgh, but that's also blatantly false. The more relevant Norway/Scotland fact is simply that Shetland used to belong to Norway, so their historical ties to Scotland are weaker.

The interesting question to me regarding Scottish independence is what will happen to Orkney and Shetland (the latter of which is closer to Norway than Scotland). Shetlanders often don't consider themselves Scots, and so the thinking is that they might seek their own independence if Scotland breaks away from the UK. And that would likely have huge ramifications for Scotland's oil trade, since a lot of the resources, as I understand it, are in the North Sea.

I've been hearing about batteries being needed for sun and wind is as long as I've been hearing about sun and wind...

I was really excited to see that new builds of ffmpeg (which is FOSS) implement the hqx family of filters, but I've also read that these filters are pretty outdated at this point. So I was hoping that this article would be a comparison of upscaling algorithms, both free and proprietary. But alas...

Wow is this uneducated. I can't speak to the federal workforce as a whole, but for a variety of technical fields, like the one described in this article, as well as my own (data science), the federal government pays "competitively" but salaries in the private sector tend to be quite a bit higher. As for the hours and the benefits, that's largely a function of where you work, but I will point out that federal pensions for new hires got slashed as part of a recent round of budget negotiations.

Sandtrout were pretty tiny and just as integral to the Dune ecosystem (IIRC, melange was their excretion).

What if your mobo shorts out and that's all you need replaced? That, to me, is a lot less of a change in computer than a CPU upgrade or a new hard drive: replace one of those, and your computer will run noticeably differently, but if someone were to come into your house and swap out the motherboard of your computer in the middle of the night, you might not even notice a difference assuming the BIOS was the same.

That's what I thought I remembered from reading The Hot Zone, but I think this strain might be a bit more virulent--there've evidently been reported cases of contracting the disease at funerals of infected individuals.

The manufacturer clearly fucked something up with that Windows machine, since, as I said, its twin (purchased at the same time with identical hardware) worked out of the box. As for my xorg issues with my Linux tower, I'm not actually sure that it *wouldn't* work out-of-the-box, if I had installed from the LiveCD with the monitors plugged into the graphics card instead of the IGFX. But trying to switch to using the card now, post-install, would be an unnecessary pain. And trying to run one display off the IGFX and the other off the video card would be a nightmare. Shameful in a modern OS? Sure. But we've known that X11 needed to be replaced for a while.

Really? Setting up a PPA is pretty straightforward. And who's bashing Windows? The OP asked for advice concerning a Linux build. The xorg.conf stuff I'll give you, but I just spent 2 hours trying to figure out why the new Windows machine at work wasn't recognizing its monitor when its twin did out of the box (the answer turned out to be the FX card drivers, and a more Windows-savvy user would have diagnosed the problem correctly in 5 mins, but that's not the point), so don't tell me Windows doesn't have display configuration issues.

Uh... no. If I wanted to play games, I would have invested in an actual decent FX card rather than the cheapest POC I could find that would allow me to run D3D. I use Windows for three small applications whose authors never bothered to write Linux software or ensure Wine compatibility. Two of the three are pieces of software that came bundled with specialty USB devices.

As for me being a "Linux whore," I don't pay for Linux, and Linux certainly doesn't pay me, so I think that analogy fails.