Oh bullshit.

The US government obviously secretly spies on citizens just like Russia and most other countries. Yeah, it's annoying but you are naive if you think it's not ubiquitous.

But the US does not imprison journalists and artists for things like speaking badly of the government or singing an "offensive" song in a church.

Google was worried their employees in Russia would be held criminally accountable for draconian spying and censorship laws, and so they decided it wasn't worth risking. They aren't worried their US employers will be held criminally accountable for not turning over data without a warrant or not censoring information, because those are not illegal.

Even more interesting related to this - a patent troll tried to sue ANY APP (yes, not just the hardware, but all apps) that used an auto-rotate feature. Even though their patent was granted 9 years after the Radius Pivot.

Luckily Backspace got pissed off when they were sued over it, and made sure it was invalidated...

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/...

You say that, but when I went to look for these fact-based, entirely rational posts this is the first one I found:

The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine nearly killed me when I was a child.

Take a look at vaccine adjuvants. Doctors are not scientists, they are business people, and use a lot of hocus-pocus for financial and other reasons. For a large part doctors and biologists have no clue what they are really doing.

I'd happily mode that down if I had mod points...

*I* wouldn't, but the fact is probably something like 20% of the population would (ok, percentage made up but you *know* it's double digits...)

And you know, it might just be the kind of culling we need. Sort of a reverse-Idiocracy initiative.

1. Who cares, it just took one case to invalidate it for everyone in that municipality.
2. We were talking about electricity, not water. But nonetheless, the water hookup was required because they *did* keep the sewer hookup, and they were part of the same package. The fact is the judge was reasonable. If they wanted to go completely off the grid they should move out to where they can use a septic tank and do whatever they want with their water.

Except those are all old and have been mostly dismissed by judges. Basically, the cities tried and the judges reasonably ruled the statutes were invalid. And if you look for other sources, you quickly realize these are the tiny minority, and most cities don't really care.

Actually already saw that one, and it's not a good example. It's from March, and if YOU had actually searched better (or found a less biased source), you'd have found that almost all (including the electricity requirement) was later dismissed by a judge.

I agree - so I looked it up and apparently they *were* doing this (via investments):

http://www.solarcity.com/newsr...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

But then their new CEO decided to abandon them:

http://www.bizjournals.com/san...

And then they changed their mind *again* and wanted to invest, but the PUC decided against it:

https://gigaom.com/2012/05/10/...

So, basically WTF. It's a complicated situation...

Please provide relevant examples or citations of cities that *require* you to pay for a utility if you don't need it. It would be really interesting to see...

Actually, *many* utilities currently have net metering without significant minimum charges (like $5), usually decided by state utility commissions. Honestly who knows right now how well that covers their overhead. I'm sure utility companies claim is doesn't and customers claim it does.

But it's clear that charge is only going to go up as reliable non-renewable power gets more expensive to produce. Hopefully it's offset by the reduced hourly rates due to increased renewable use...

Bullshit.

"Night time" is not when you sleep, it's when it's dark. Which in the winter is still 14+ hours for the majority of the population and more for many.

Actually, many homeowners putting up solar panels these days are just allowing solar power companies to put them up and then leasing back the power from them. That model is becoming more and more popular. Imagine if a traditional power company bought one of those solar lease companies - they'd now own the solar panels on your roof...

I don't see how you can possibly be "certain" about it based on the tiny amount of information and unknown future of the industry. Not saying it *has to*, but when you have a HUGE amount of capital tied up in many, many, billions of dollars of power plants that could either become idle or highly underused, it can get pretty hard to turn a profit.

Not that I really care about the profit of a power company for it's own sake - but the problem is renewables just aren't going to meet 100% of the needs any time soon, and providing random amounts ultra-reliable power generation to make up for somewhat unreliable distributed sources is a more expensive, less rewarding, and very different business than what they are built to do...

I mostly agree, though unfortunately that almost by definition means they may need to be nationalized... ie. the one thing that could be done to make them lose even *more* money...

An *occasional* supplemental protein source for families who already get enough calories, I agree. But not a significant cure for *starvation*! If you are staving are you going to grow your own alfalfa, etc, then spend time breeding, raising, etc rabbits for meat? Or just hope whatever vegetable matter you grew was enough to keep your kids from dying before your rabbits?

And not that hard to research, and kind of interesting (again, because I would like to see more rabbit in the US, but it's WAY more expensive and risky (in terms of yield, weight, mortality, etc) than *chicken* to mass produce.

http://modernfarmer.com/2013/0...