How can you possibly cast an informed ballot before the first debate?

You don't serious think that the "debates" are actually debates, do you? If that's where you got your information about the candidates, you're going to be just as ignorant as the people basing their votes on TV News and other scripted sound bites.

Your only reasonable way of assessing a candidate is to look at a) voting records and/or legislation sponsorships as applicable, b) primary campaign funding sources, and c) all the other spin. This gives you some insight into what (if anything) they've done, who they're beholden to, and, lastly, what they want you to think they represent.

The problem with this study is that it's from the US-ian perspective that lumps several separate and unequal groups into one uncomfortable amalgam. "Conservatives" can be one or more of the following: a) fiscal conservatives (e.g., "Chamber of Commerce Republicans"), b) social conservatives (e.g., the "bring back the pre-60s culture" crowd), c) small-government conservatives (i.e., libertarians), or d) religious lunatics bent on theocracy.

Groups like "d" are going to be fundamentally anti-science, for obvious reasons. Others may or may not be anti-science; for example, libertarians are generally against "big science" funded by the government.

Note that "Liberals" also comprise a similar hodge-podge of groups with different beliefs (some of which share a knee-jerk anti-science response), but that's another topic.

So I get power off the grid when demand exceeds what the solar panels provide, but I push power onto the grid when I'm generating more than I use.

It sounds great, except for a few things:

1. the game is rigged so I can't actually make money by generating power, I can only zero my bill
2. I have an automatic shutdown, so if the grid is down, my power is off (safety, of course. We don't want to cook any linemen trying to fix the circuits). I could manually throw a disconnect and hook up my generator and get the benefit of both solar and generator, but the solar won't power the house in the absence of another power source.
3. I don't really have enough roof space to put up the number of panels that would meet my power needs, particularly in Winter. I can only fit a 2kW system, when I really need a 3kW system.

Yeah, it tells me my Mac-based Firefox doesn't "benefit from Windows Operating System features that protect against structured exception handling overwrite attacks?"

Oddly, it thinks that I do derive benefit from "Windows Operating System features that protect against arbitrary data execution" and
"Windows Operating System features that randomize the memory layout to make it harder for attackers to find their target."

Whatever, dude.

An overwhelming majority of Americans have more than the average number of legs.

After the EMP, your digital cameras (and other electronics) won't work. Then again, neither will film -- the high background radiation will fog any emulsion after a few seconds*.

* obligatory nuclear obliteration apocalypse may be provided separately, and may not be available with all crumblings of civilization.

Is it morally worse to kill and eat an intelligent creature than to kill and eat an unintelligent creature? Why?

Or, as Gordon Bell allegedly said in the 90s, "in ten years, computers will just be bumps in cables."

The ten years may not be exactly right, the the overall sentiment is.

Flickr's nice for JPEGs, but they won't handle RAW images.

I have a USB drive backup at home, and a drive at the office a few miles away. I swap 'em at least weekly to minimize the risk.

LDOS was pretty cool.

So you were doing DS-DD 40 tracks? I thought I was the only one doing that. It took me about a week to figure out the NEWDOS-80 settings that would work with that density/track count. Then again, I didn't have the Radio Shack disk controller, either, it was homebrew.

The old TRS is still out in the garage. I wonder if it'd even power on. I don't think I've fired it up since 1989.

'cause ... uh ... well. Nevermind, I guess I'll stick with Mac OS X or Linux.

But I do watch movies using a DVD player and projector. But mostly old movies.

<curmudgeon>You just don't get dialogue and sparkle like Powell/Loy or Bogart/Bacall any more.</curmudgeon>

I'd write the equivalent of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1800, and skunk Mark Twain.

Then I'd invent the transistor or something.

Sorry, but real pros replace ALL of the HTTP status codes at random to prevent the client / browser from detecting a pattern. Similarly, pros override "true" and "false" constants to be functions that return random booleans, just to keep the code guessing. Sure, standards are great, but pros make sites that are secure, not standard.

Most US-ians though the name was "Lemons" misspelled.