Some people still seem to feel strongly about it and as a pandering politician I shall leave no platform unpandered!

I'm going over the headlines today working on my pandering campaign platform. So far as president I promise to fire the entire forest service, prosecute the phoebus cartel to the fullest extent of the law and demand that my banking regulators not only do their jobs properly but to antagonize the bankers as much as possible (Up to and including stabbing them in the face if they feel it's required.) I predict this will be fairly popular on the internet but end up receiving no campaign contributions. How's that working so far?

I don't mind paying $20 for a light bulb I'll probably never have to replace again. I have some high hanging lights that require a step ladder and some OSHA violations to replace. I'll be happy to slap a LED in there next time they burn out, and probably never have to deal with it again.

Get a Kill-A-Watt meter and test the power consumption of LEDs youself. All the ones I've checked have used just about exactly what it says on the package.

They have heat sinks because the LEDs need to stay very cool to work properly. Incandecent bulbs don't use heat sinks because they need to heat up to thousands of degrees just to get a small fraction of the photons they emit into the visible range. Now which do you think is wasting more energy?

I doubt that any CFL or LED on the market is using a plain 60Hz transformer. They're using switching power supplies, which can be very efficient. That's becuase they crank the frequency up to a range where a small transformer *is* efficient.

You'd still need a switching power supply to match the low voltage to the exact needs and wiring pattern of the particular LEDs. That's why most every PC have a separate power supply on the motherboard just inches away from the main power supply to convert 5VDC to whatever the processor needs.

Not to mention the power loss of low-voltage wires. If you put 100W of LED lights (about 6 bulbs) in a room at the end of a 50-foot run at 5V, you'd be pulling 20 amps. If you used 14AWG wire, at 0.25 ohms for the 100 foot round trip, you'd have a 5V voltage drop just from the resistance of the wire. You would also be violating code, which would require you to install a dedicated 12AWG circuit just to power 100W. That's obviously completely unworkable.

In summary, all of your uninformed "gut feel" opinions on these technical issues are unsurprisingly wrong.

Look at the frigging picture in the article. This thing is to be built like a radio telescope, probably with a price tag to match.

The extreme reaction some people have to ANY debt is just as bad as irresponsibly maxing out all available credit in the first place. Running a 10K+ balance on a credit card with a 30% API obviously isn't a great idea, but keeping a credit card around for emergencies and keeping it paid off isn't a bad thing. Neither is taking out a mortgage on a home you can actually afford. A mortgage on a house is one of the few investments that most Americans (the bottom 90%) can actually make work for them. Most of the other ones require you to have a few million dollars sitting around that you can use as leverage.

Learn when and where your money can be used to work for you and live within your means. This is simple advice that is apparently pretty hard to follow. It's also the only one-size-fits-all statement on that subject that I'd be comfortable making.

No, most PV panels are flat and fixed in place.

It says it's parabolic right in the summary.

TFA shows a parabolic dish made of smaller mirrors. Those mirrors may look flat, but there's no way that they get "2000X" solar concentration unless each individual mirror is also precisely curved.

The whole setup looks far more expensive than conventional solar panels of the same area, or even a larger set of solar collectors capable of gathering the same amount of energy.

Because you have an agreement with the government that they will take possession of some types of your undesirable property in exchange for fixed fee. Part of the agreement is that different types of undesirable materials have to be segregated in order to reduce overall costs, direct and external. You did not properly segregate the materials as specified under the agreement, and therefore pay a specified surcharge. Presumably, this surcharge helps the government offset the cost of having to build a new landfill earlier because the current one is filled up with your otherwise compostable food waste.

Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to segreagate your waste according to the government's specifications. You're always free to load your garbage in your car, find a privately run landfill who will accept it as-is, and bring it there.

Flat mirrors, maybe. Parabolic mirrors on gimbals with sun tracking mechanisms, maybe not so much.

Nobody can stop you from discreetly handing your bags of spoiled food over to a man who pulls up to your front door in an unmarked service vehicle.

Actually, as soon as the garbage men show up, it's the governemnt's trash. I don't see why they shouldn't be free to do whatever they want with their property.

If you don't like the government's terms of service, you're always free to hire a private firm to come in an unmarked van and discreetly take away your food waste.

Get them in season (early winter months), still on the stalk, and cook them properly (refer to the Good Eats episode on Brussels sprouts, for exmaple). There will still be some variations in quality based on the exact batch you have, but the best vegetables I've ever eaten have been when I found particularly good stalks of Brussel sprouts.

Oh I do my own little projects at home. Lately I've been generating a fair bit of video from gopro footage of my skydives. I also do some programming for fun. Traditionally my setup at home has always been a little better than my setup at work. If I got used to working with a huge amount of screen space at work, I'd want something similar at home.

So how many Xterms can you have open with 6 30" displays?

If I had that setup at home, I'd find the fucking postage stamp I'm allocated at work to be insufferable. Actually I already do. If I had that setup at work, I'd have to drop a few grand to duplicate it at the house.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find a game I'd want to play that'd allow me to make effective use of that many monitors. Maybe if I were building a realistic VR flight simulator with X-Plane, or something. I guess you could use it for bitcoin farming or nuclear physics simulations, if you were into that sort of thing...