"Innocent until proven guilty" and "reasonable doubt" is for criminal cases.

"Preponderance of evidence" is the standard in civil cases (lawsuits), which basically means whichever story is more likely.

>No, and I mean NO! because central wealth distribution has been shown time and again to disincentivise people from actually doing something useful with their lives. If you earn enough from benefits, and your benefits reduce if you work/produce value, then why do anything useful? And Benefit Dependency is a really nasty pernicious place to be in.

The thinking is that there isn't enough useful work to be done. Machines will do most of the grunt work, and you only need x engineers/electricians/other useful jobs per 100,000 people, so what should everyone else do? There's only so much room for artists/writers/musicians. So, since there is no work to be done, yet the person still needs to live, they need to be supported somehow.

The alternative is: there's no work for you to do, please starve to death.

The ratio of employed people to the total population has been slowly shrinking in the US. Currently 58.7% of the US population is working; the rest are not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio

What happens when that ratio dwindles lower, to 40%, or 25%, or 10%?

Three year olds can run under and around things that adults cannot, due to their size.

Just picking up oil that already exists in the ground is quite cheap, but that's using up existing portable containers of energy, not storing energy in a portable energy container. Think of it as using up already-existing buckets of paint, as opposed to producing new paint and putting it in a bucket.

Actually producing oil from energy plus other basic components is actually quite energy-expensive.

>Some of us cannot use CFLs. The pulse is visible and causes eye strain and headaches.

Normal florescent bulbs have the same issue, if they have cheap ballasts. Get bulbs with high-frequency ballasts.

>Slight exaggeration here, however it seems that you need to put small children in a hazmat suit when playing near the bulbs, you know, just in case they break. :)

More than a slight exaggeration. Just get a paper towel and a broom. The glass itself is actually more hazardous to small children.

> marriage, which has a biblical definition to many in the states.

The concept of marriage existed before Christianity, and exists outside of it today.

>I have about 100 light bulbs. Almost all 40W ones.

A large house with 4 bedroom, 4 bath, dining room, breakfast room, living room, theater room, family room, garage = 14 rooms. Do you have 7 bulbs per room?!?

>They do not turn on very fast.
>The color temperature is wrong.

Both of these are solved by not buying the absolute cheapest CFL you can find. Spend $2 per bulb instead of $1 and they turn on fast and have their color corrected. They even make CFLs with the sickening yellow color of incandescent if that's what you want.

>They cannot be fully dimmed.

Again, spend more money - $8 bulbs can be fully dimmed. Of course, if you have 7 bulbs per room, just turn some of them off!

>They are not a point light source.

?????

I've had CFL floodlight lamps, if that's what you mean.

The stations will actually make a little bit of money - they're basically solar power-generation stations that sell electricity to the grid, and also happen to have charging stations.

When the sun is down, they use grid power. It's much cheaper to sell to the grid during the day and buy it back at night, than it is to set up an electric storage system (battery/flywheel/pumped storage/etc).

The waiting in line strawman is also silly - they're not going to have one spot for one car. Like gas stations, each station will have a few spots. If it gets to the point where the charging station is always packed, well, that's great! Build another one, and also celebrate, because there's tons of electric cars on the road.

Anyways, this network is to kickstart the electric filling station network. If you're just going from home to work and back, you can charge overnight at home and during the day at work (my work has charging stations in the parking lot). These stations are for long trips, not the daily grind.

If you click through to the article that makes the 70% claim, you realize that it says "An analysis of data from 371 transit providers in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas reveals that: Nearly 70 percent of large metropolitan residents live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind."

So, it's not that 70% of Americans have access to public transportation; it's 70% of the people that live in the top 100 largest metro areas. What is the percentage overall, and what is the percentage of people that don't live in the top 100 metro areas? It's probably pretty low.

Good already does that, today.

You can look at Fusion I/O PCI cards. Not cheap at all, but certainly fast.

Who's going to buy a $1300+ Apple when they can get a Presario for under a grand?

Lots of people do that now. Not most people, just lots of people. The price difference has really shrunk anyways, especially if you care about things like size, weight, battery, material/build quality, and noise - all the environmental factors people forget when they try to do price comparisons.

Anyways, Apple still less than 20% of the smartphone marketshare, but their profits are through the roof while everyone else is just getting by (or not).

Let 80-90% of the people buy cheap clones; Apple is quite happy to sell to the other 10-20% and make tons of money, whether that's phones, tablets, computers, or anything else.

They've had this strategy for years. I'm not sure why people still don't understand that they're not shooting for dominant marketshare; they're just trying to make boatloads of cash, and they're doing that well.

Toyota isn't one of the big 3 (Ford, GM, Chrysler), and there's a big difference between "would still love to" and "are actively trying to" squish them.

The trend I've seen is to move EVERYTHING to a web page that could possibly be moved to a web page. No client deployments, client upgrades, no worries about locally stored information (lost laptops, broken hardware), and the desktops can be lightweight.

Even random in-house custom apps can now just be dumped on to App Engine or EC2, rather than finding local resources to deploy - resources that need to be managed and supported.

I had a similar problem but in the opposite direction. As a transplant Yankee in the South, I had picked up a slight Southern accent, but certainly understandable (and could still do a respectable Northeast accent if I tried). I also worked with Indians day-to-day and traveled a lot, so I was used to varying accents. However on a business trip to California, I talked to the most stereotypical surfer dude you could ever imagine (he was valeting cars). Surfer dude understood me fine, but I couldn't understand a word he said, which was a problem because he had my car. Luckily, my co-worker was able to translate between surfer dude and English.

I guess that's why they've already rolled it out? 19.9 MW plant that can run 15 hours without sun. more info