Gave up on trying to call into the IRS and went down to the a nearby (well, 40 miles) office yesterday early afternoon. It wasn't actually crowded surprisingly, but the guy that handles real things (as opposed to taking checks and other minor receptionist duties) wasn't there, so I had to come back today. Got there bright and early and got it taken care of with a "they say up to 180 days for your refund". The receptionist had said "he can push it through" but apparently not really. Oh well, hopefully it won't take that long. They recommend filing a local police report, so I stopped in on my way to work and did that too. That actually took longer because they had to call a cop in off the street to take the report!? Although this tax refund fraud isn't usually taken beyond that to real identity theft, I filled out a form with a password that puts a flag on me so that if they deal with someone who claims to be me, they ask for the password to make sure it's really me and not an imposter.

But at least my state refund got deposited last week...

Since you have different DC voltages you either need DC wall warts (not achieving anything), per outlet transformers (sounds expensive and turn the socket into a wall wart) or one circuit per outlet (sounds expensive and needs big conduits). And because of fire risk, property damage and whatnot you'll never get to use the same plug, tripling each outlet. Then you need something fancy to flip each socket at the source and what part of the socket is powered at the sink in a safe way, for every outlet. And I doubt 9VDC/500mW-2A matters much economically, if you want the aesthetics embed the wall wart in the wall, it'll probably be less hassle than the alternatives.

Any idea why they're allowed to emit the CFCs, rather than trapping them? I would expect it to be a closed system. Is this just tiny, unavoidable leaks, or is it deliberately releasing them to the atmosphere?

The body is inefficient at dealing with heat very young or old.

The more money people have, the less they tend to do for the poor.

According to your logic, the people who do the most for the poor are the poor, which is a paradox since they have little to no resources to begin with. And I'm not sure how we expect the most wealthy to give a greater percentage of their income when we're already taking a greater percentage of it through progressive taxation. But let's go to the numbers. According to the IRS's 2011 numbers, charitable giving is on a bell curve. Apparently, the most charitable are on the income extremes.

It's a shame the middle class won't band together and come after the rich, but those poor idiot fucks won't realize that they have a better chance to win the lottery than to actually work their way into the upper echelons of society

I know you mentioned the lottery in jest, but the poor actually are the ones spending a large percentage of their meager resources on state lottery tickets. Maybe government should get out of the business of suckering poor people into gambling.

It's the statist "I'm all for personal freedom, but..."

The solution to the ozone problem is a proof that we can do it.

No, it's not. The solution to the ozone layer issue was to ban a narrow range of chemicals that included CFC. We can't ban CO2 because that's like banning life processes. Misguided people want to use the government hammer to get the job done again, not thinking about the impact. Just cutting government loose will give it power over nearly the entire energy industry, on which our entire lifestyle and livelihood rests. It's de facto control of everything. A measured response is required, one that requires as little government mandate as possible.

Freon does not burn.

At all.

You can't breathe burning Freon because it doesn't burn.

But propane does, which you hand-waved away.

We were using freon because its predecessors were flammable. Freon was basically the last invention Thomas Midgley was responsible for that actually helped instead of hurting people-- until we found out it hurt the ozone layer.

Here is how i interpret this. A users buys a cheap android device, it does not integrate well with Google services, or becomes obsolete when the OS is not upgraded, so the user buys an iOS device. Here is how Google fixes this. Provide services to the end user. This is in fact how Google became the powerful ad company it is. Way back when, most ad companies did not provide a service, and were quite obnoxious. This meant that many people tried to avoid them. End users turned off cookies and blocked them outright. To counteract this, instead of provided services, the had name like 2o7 that less sophisticated users had trouble deciphering. Google was innovative in that it provided an increasing range of services in exchange for the end user not blocking ad service. What has happened now is that Google is not provided a high level of services. One of their products, Google docs, which cannot be that expensive to service compared to profits, has not been developed. We all know of other products that have been retired. For instance, MS has Skype and Office 365 for only $100 a year that integrates across all products? What is google offering now? Google, like Apple and MS has to develop a more compelling stack, and convince some users that it is worth money. However, as Google is an ad company, and people expect things for free with ads, this is the source of it's profit. Also, Google tends to not be able to hit a price point. This means that actual interesting products, like the glasses and the original google made phone tend to be far beyond the ability of the average user to purchase.

Do you even allocate memory in the sense that most people think about it (in other words, calling malloc or something similar to do dynamic allocation), or just have a region defined for data in your linker scripts and have constant addresses for regions of memory hard coded for certain purposes?

Long ago, after writing C++ like Java, I decided it would be much easier and I would be much more productive if I just actually used Java. Many headaches of trying to write C++ like Java go away if you just use Java (or C# instead) and you get easier to understand and easier to maintain software systems.

Found this:

http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawki...

It says that a 3K black hole has a mass of 4x10^22 kg, a bit larger than the Everest-sized black hole.

The Everest-hole hole is extremely hot, 10^8 K, but it's still radiating so slowly that it'll take 10^21 years to evaporate, so it would be more than enough to destroy the earth.

I'm not quite sure how to solve for one that would be hot enough to suck in the earth before evaporating, but I see that a black hole that would last 1 second is a mere 70 million kilograms, with a radius of about a picometer.

It's denser than that. The Schwartzschild radius of a black hole with a mass around 10^15 kg (a rough guess) is about 10^-12 meters (about a picometer). Give or take a few orders of magnitude. Wolfram Alpha has a convenient Schwartzschild radius calculator. The evaporation time for a black hole that big is 10^30 seconds.

The smaller a black hole is, the denser. The number you give is for a star-sized black hole. There isn't any known way to form grain-of-sand sized black holes, though they might have formed in the very early universe. In which case one could be wandering through the solar system at this very minute....

It has electrolytes! You don't want water. Water comes from the toilet!