The USPTO isn't funded by campaign contributions, it's funded by patent application fees. Much easier to follow the money than assume ulterior motive being applied in a more roundabout way.

"You're advocating privacy through self-control."

No, I'm not, I'm suggesting that the behaviour in question is damaging the value of privacy. By behaving as though celebrities have no expectation of privacy one thing you're not doing is strengthening the privacy of everybody else.

One of the reasons privacy is important is that you don't want somebody, be it the government or some random stranger, having something they can use against you. I don't have any problem with conceding that the NSA's behaviour is a much bigger deal, but when you break things down to their basic components the philosophy is still very much the same whether it's about extorting money or punishment for having that political bumper sticker on your car.

It's also possible to advocate something like privacy and immediately start fapping over unethically acquired photos because a lot of blood has left your brain. Take a guess which category this particular behaviour falls into,

It would be a better idea to just not download them. Oh, who am I kidding, nobody cares about privacy while they're holding their dick in their hand.

You get a shot at seeing boobies and all the sudden all those complaints you have about the NSA peeking at your files goes flying out the window. When that's brought up all the sudden we've got something worthwhile to spend our mod-points on. Cute.

Let me make this simple in case there's a post-fap-clearer-head lurking around this area of the thread: No, you do not have a good reason to acquire those photos. Yes, you are a bad person for grabbing them and sharing them. No, modding my posts down does not make me wrong about it. You lot, and you know who you are, are despicable.

Why is this comment modded off-topic? Not only is it perfectly on-topic, but it also illustrates why you assholes that are seeking to aquire these photos really shouldn't be!

What happens if you try shouting "xyzzy" ? Or I suppose you'd need to translate it into Japanese first...
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Just to put "some time now" the time frame into perspective, the last mainstream PC memory form-factor to use asynchronous DRAM was 72 pin SIMMs.

When PCs went from 72 pin SIMMs to the first 168 pin DIMMs, in the mid-1990s, the interface changed to (non-DDR) synchronous clocking.

...and Texas also has silly blue laws, so liquor stores are all closed on Sunday, and armed TABC agents rough up customers at locations accused of violations.

I rather prefer the liquor laws in Chicago -- if ever there was a city that learned its lessons from Prohibition...

We've been paying for roads by the mile for decades, via gas taxes -- an effective way of making people who drive more, pay more.

That might be true if gas taxes were more than double what they are now.

Funds from gas taxes go to a fund accessible to the federal highway administration -- which is to say that they don't pay for city streets at all, which are covered purely by property taxes. Even then, the FHWA only covers about 49% of highway costs, meaning that the majority of the costs of highways remain borne by the states, and are paid out of different taxes.

(This is a sore point because so many folks wrongly consider cyclists freeloaders on account of not paying gas taxes -- when the amount of wear put on roads is proportional to cubed vehicle weight, making the road wear caused by cyclists negligible, whereas the property taxes and state sales taxes paid are not).

I demand more research investigating this fart-rain connection. The fact that there is none proves a conspiracy by the fart-denialists!

Seriously, they charge an arm and a leg for prosthetic limbs!

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"Earned" offshore, when 99% of the work is not the sales but the engineering -- which is very much onshore effort.

This is a place where Europe's VAT approach has it right.

Sounds like you've got a much higher essential demand than what I figured on - desalinization?

Sorry for the delayed reply but I was re-running the numbers :)

When I was doing the calcs originally, I was really only interested in staving off power outages like we had with Sandy, which was about two weeks worth... not being completely off-grid. So focusing on hurricane season as a baseline, a 7kW system with 6kWh of storage would provide essentially unlimited off-grid capability from April through December *if* I managed my power consumption to essentials with just a little bit of creature comfort.

The winter months, however, result in a deep, DEEP deficit. I'd need 10kW of PV with 80 kWh of storage to be completely off-grid based on PVWatts data (with no power management). Of course, that's still relying only on Solar, and being completely off-grid was never the intention.

I don't pertain my own home is a good proxy for a regional or national grid, though ;)
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