whats wrong with the power companies charging two costs: One for the amount of next electricity drawn per month and a second as a line cost that everyone must pay in order to keep service? The line cost should cover updates to service to the house and stuff like that.

While I personally see a device like this (sorry... ROBOT!) of rather limited use for testing prepared dishes, I can see great utility for it for testing ingredients. You could have a standardized, unambiguous way to rate the quality or at least properties of a given product, be it meat, fruit, vegetables, etc. I bet cultivar breeding programs in particular could really benefit from this - "Well, I was hoping that this new mango would be a huge innovation, but actually it's almost identical to a Keitt. Though to be fair its mouthfeel is somewhat like a Carrie, and it does have a small amount of a new novel aromatic compound..." Just a single mass produced sensor package that measures a wide range of different properties at once in a repeatable, universal manner. If such a thing could become widespread, I'd bet half of the "cultivars" out there would pretty much disappear, having been shown to be essentially identical to others.

I'm a little unclear how I, as a user, can get exploited by this. (I know that it's bash (which pretty much makes MSWindows users immune), but what about the rest of us?)

Do I need to just browse a website on my computer?
Do I need to install Apache/PHP or some other server and open an appropriate port on my system?
Do I need to have port 22 open?
Do I need to have a root user?

The EPA guidelines are in line with the level of risk: very, very little. If you want to cut your mercury exposure, don't stop using CFLs, stop eating seafood.

As for the Bridges case, you should read the Maine EPA's account. CFLs were new back then, and they had decided to use her case to learn more about what sort of advice they should give for dealing with broken bulbs. So they sent someone with a meter because they wanted to learn more, not because that's standard practice. The carpet was already intended for removal as part of a rennovation. They took readings all over the room. The only place with "high" levels was right where the bulb broke - not in the ambient air, not anywhere else on the carpet, not on the toys, not even under the carpet where it broke. I say "high" because even the levels right where it broke weren't actually high, just over Maine's long-term exposure guidelines (which is obviously not applicable to a temporary event). Moving the meter even six to eight inches away rom the breakage point dropped the levels way down. She was told that the bulb breakage was "of negligible health concern". However "the homeowner expressed particular nervousness about exposures to mercury even in low numbers", so they told her what she could do if it bothered her, one of which was calling a cleanup contractor. And of course any private cleanup contractor will charge you an utter fortune. The Maine EPA came back two days later after the story hit the news, before anything had been done in the house. The area where the bulb broke had dropped down below Maine's limit.

The case was ridiculously blown out of proportion.

Are you reading the same webpage I am? Where does that say you're supposed to bag up your bedding and pillow and toss them into the garbage - "EPA's words"? It says no such thing. It basically says open the windows for 5-10 minutes and shut off your HVAC, scoop up the fragments, use tape to get the little bits, wipe it, put all the waste in a sealed glass jar or plastic bag, and properly dispose of it. Ooooh, terrifying! And at the bottom of the page it says:

What if I can't follow all the recommended steps? or I cleaned up a CFL but didn't do it properly?

Don't be alarmed; these steps are only precautions that reflect best practices for cleaning up a broken CFL. Keep in mind that CFLs contain a very small amount of mercury -- less than 1/100th of the amount in a mercury thermometer.

Clearly you're reading that page from a bizzarro universe where it says something like "If you break a CFL and don't move out of your house and entomb it in a concrete shell then you'll get electro-cancer that will kill you and all of your descendants."

Link.

I know the guy who runs the company - they're serious about good making good products and being honest with people. Compare with the sort of chinese stuff you see cheaper on Ebay. First off, the stuff you see on Ebay usually lies about the output - they give "nominal watts" instead of actual watts, the nominal watts usually being double that of the actual. And then compare the weight - the Black Dog ones are twice as heavy. Which may not seem like a good thing, but it's because they have such a vastly larger cooling system, which means much greater expected longevity. Also Black Dog goes all out on their spectrum, they use a lot of different bands, including UV.

I'm probably one of the few people in the world using the lights legitimately, lol ;) I grow tropicals in my apartment in Iceland.

Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you - are you saying that there's something extraordinary about the concept of thermal spraying to lay down material? Perhaps you should look it up. Usually it's only used for high performance coatings, but there's no reason that with computer control you couldn't lay down whole objects, rate is (mainly) only limited by nozzle size, so you can trade off between speed and precision.

What "extraordinary claim" is being made?

What praytell is so unreasonable about discussing technological possibilities? Is this not Slashdot? If there's something ridiculous about technological speculations on something that they do not currently have the time or resources to work more on, then almost all all of modern technology was at some point ridiculous.

Why exactly do you think that 3d printers must inherently always be glorified hot glue guns? Wht is so unreasonable about the concept that there could be alternative methods to lay down material in alternative shapes?

Once upon a time, there was this stuff called "Read Only Memory". Not EPROM or EEPROM, but ROM. Once it was created you couldn't change the contents of it.

If I was worried that scammers were going to take a board that I was selling as a Whizzo rather than a Whizzo Plus because it didn't meet Whizzo Plus specs, and flash it as a Whizzo Plus anyway to rip off customers, I'd put "Hi there I'm Whizzo serial number 987654321 born 2014-09-24-18:58:56 GMT at the Utopia Planitia assembly line, signed <digital signature>" somewhere in a bit of that old-fashioned Read Only Memory soldered to the board in a tamper-resistant manner, and also have that serial number etched into the board.

And a home injection moulder is impossible why? Bed of pistons on one side (doesn't' need to be high res), attached to a stretchy surface (even a high temperature stretchy surface if you need one - graphite felt can tolerate most molten metals). Exact same thing on the other side. Thus they can make a mold shaped like any object. Your system can spray release agent or whatever else is needed. Hollows can be made either by inflation of an air bag inside the mold; casting and releasing an inner, re-applying release agent, then recasting; or a combination of the two. If the bed of the moulder was openable, you could use the mould as a layup for composites.

I think people's conceptions of the potential of garage/small business solid printing is way too constrained, people envisioning only half-arsed extruders. Personally I'd love to see an attempt to 3d print with thermal spraying; your material could be anything you can have as a sufficiently fine power or fibers, and you can have it impact the target at whatever temperature (cold to thousands of degree) and speed (slow to over 1000 m/s) you want, depending on the type of material, by varying the partial pressures of the fuel and air you feed into the chamber. You have the potential to print out materials that are even stronger than cast objects (high velocity compaction). You can use the same system to do finishing work (finishing the main purpose of thermal spraying today) - sanding, polishing, coating, painting, etc. It could build support structures and then later sandblast them away. The potential seems tremendous. Not super fast (although you can vary your nozzle size, bigger for greater flow rate at the cost of less precision), but still, I find the concept very interesting.

All of my lights in my apartment are either fluorescent or LED, mainly LED, yet I still consume about 2k kilowatt hours per month / 65 kWh per day / 2.7 kW average.

Hmm, I should probably mention that my brightest LED light is 570 watts (real consumption, not incandescent equivalent) and is on 24/7 ;)

Where's your controlled, statistically significant comparative study data? Or are we supposed to go on an anecdote? Because we do have lots of data - for example, here Consumer Reports talks about their testing results.

Mercury? Every bulb CF tested contained less than 5mg. Let's go with 4mg as our figure (even though some are under 2%). 17-44% of said mercury will vaporize if you leave it sitting around for 8 hours. Let's say you clean it up and 10% gets into your air, which is probably a gross overestimate. What percent of that will you breathe and have actually get incorporated into your body? Probably in the low single digits, but lets be pessimistic and say 20%. So 80 micrograms. The mercury of a mere 1 1/2 cans of tuna.

But wait, there's more. The mercury in CFLs is "inorganic" (metallic, unbound) mercury, while mercury found in food is almost exclusively "organic" (methyl and dimethyl mercury). "Organic" mercury, being much more bioavailable, has many times worse health consequences per microgram.

The short of it? Don't stand in a closet and smash dozens of CFLs and then fan them while hovering over them and breathing deeply for a day or so. Otherwise, you're fine.

I haven't had any trouble finding incandescent light bulbs for sale lately, but I haven't been looking very hard. The local Home Depot has a whole pallet of the super cheapo 60 watters for the hoarders to buy. The high quality halogen incandescents are available and nice choices for those last niches where you have to have incandescents before LEDs completely obsolete them for general lighting.

I did the math on our porch light (it's pretty easy easy math) and it saves me money to put in a CFL and just leave it on 24/7 over buying incandescents and turning them off during the day. And the bulbs last forever -- a couple of years each -- what is that about 16,000 hours? My security floodlights outside are CFL floods on a photocell switch ($10 from Home Depot, marked suitable for CFLs). Those bulbs also are lasting a couple of years each. But this is all water under the bridge because the LEDs are obsoleting the CFLs.

Just put up some of the latest pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is still up there snapping away at 1 meter resolution. The following is from http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/mro/bo...
"The track left by an oblong boulder as it tumbled down a slope on Mars runs from upper left to right center of this image. The boulder came to rest in an upright attitude at the downhill end of the track. The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded this view on July 3, 2014."