No one's speaking up about their collection of high-tech sex toys? Bummer. You know, there's a convention for that in Vegas every year. Look it up.

I wonder if my skydiving gear and wingsuit would count. I guess the sky is now my playground and they're the toys I always bring when I play in it.

That's a useful chart, but it shows that the growth of coal in Germany is far larger than the total portion of solar. So if you want to call that growth a "fluctuation," you should call the contribution of solar a "rounding error" or something. What I learned from the chart is that in Germany, the burning of household trash produces twice as much power as solar, and this is growing much faster than solar. I bet it's also costing the customers far less and provides other benefits, like municipal hot water. So yes, Germany is having a bit of a trash burning revolution, and I applaud this. The solar thing though, I don't think that's going so well for Germany.

Soo, their CO2 output in increasing, their energy prices are highest in Europe, and a broad coalition, which includes the chancellor, is now pushing to have the program cancelled. ... SUCCESS!

Um, you tell me about the coal burning plants that Germany shut down, and I'll hunt down the links for the 12 ginormous coal-burning powerplants that have opened up since 2010. The largest of these are designed to burn fucking lignite (brown coal, the dirtiest thing we have ever used for power in the history of mankind). This is not 1812, it was 2012. CO2 emissions are growing faster in Germany than anywhere else in Western Europe, while US emissions are sinking over the same timespan. Germany acts like it's some model citizen because everyone loves to hear about solar this and that, but most of their power comes from coal. Also, most of their new capacity comes from coal. Every year this decade, even the proportion of German power that has come from coal has increased. Yeah, coal. For this I hardly think they deserve any congratulations.

The retail replacement cost is why it's insane to put it in your pants pockets.

"I just dropped a grand on this. I know, I'll subject it to huge forces and see what happens!"

Why would you do that?

I frankly don't see any difference. Big, fat force, tiny little space. That's not good for a sheet of glass, a sheet of metal—hell, you've seen what happens to a sheet of paper after spending all day in your pockets. People learn that in grade school.

If it really has to be on your waist somewhere, get a holster. Otherwise, just carry the damned thing, or put it in a shirt or coat pocket, briefcase, backpack, etc.

Since the '90s, I've never regularly carried a mobile device in my pants pockets. Obviously, it would break, or at least suffer a significantly reduced lifespan. On the rare occasions when I do pocket a device for a moment, it's just that—for a moment, while standing, to free both hands, and it is removed immediately afterward because I'm nervous the entire time that I'll forget, try to sit down, and crack the damned thing.

Who thinks it's okay to sit on their phone? Why do people think they ought to be able to? It literally makes no sense. It's an electronic device with a glass screen. If I handed someone a sheet of glass and said, "put this in your back pocket and sit on it!" they'd refuse.

But a phone? Oh, absolutely! Shit, wait, no! It broke?!?!

On the other hand, nothing tastes quite as good as the tears of an engineering group that put several million dollars into R&D for a DRM scheme, just to have it broken by a Swedish teenager three days after their product goes live.

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.