What about a non-PED version of Saturday Night Live? It would be funny in a "meta-humor" sense in that it would be incredibly lame?

Or a non-PED version of a Presidential campaign (cough, Mitt Romney, cough)?

You mean your Patrick McGoohan look-alike British PM requires you to genuflect?

In the sport-arts or whatever you want to call them (gymnastics, figure skating), in other words, anything that isn't a race between people, the judges are what make the whole even interesting.

Wee wuz robbed! If it weren't for that Russian ice dancing judge!

C'mon, people, this is easy. Matt Damon (as Jason Bourne in "those movies") has the martial arts skills and reflexes making him a human weapon. Hence, "weapons grade" PEDs. Sheesh!

I second that recommendation, and get the biggest "Dob" that will fit in the back seat of your car.

If you can't transport it, it won't get used.

We are doomed, I say, doomed as doomed can be! (y' know)

C'mon, that video was funny. It is as much a satire of Independence Day as a dig at his employer.

Yeah, the guy dissed the people letting him go. Dock him a day's pay. Mr Corporate Big Shot, show yourself to be . . . really small.

. . . would be to set back the development of a reliable automobile by over a century! (ba-doom, boom)

LOL at your own jokes.

The fixtures in question come on automatically for about 60 seconds when someone passes from the house through to the garage. The fixtures use about 2 W each in standby, so yes, I have checked. As to the "low tech" solution of simply operating the light switches, people forget to turn them off, and spouses don't cotton to being called names or being scolded as is the custom in Slashdot comments. The motion detector is convenient and energy saving, and it is a sad day when the "geeks on Slashdot" deride such an approach.

Yes, halogens are a (pricey) answer, and I will probably use halogens if they are available, but my experience is that halogens are only marginally more efficient than incandescents (they are a type of incandescent). They may not be available with the new regs.

I have had 100% FL and CFL in the house, with the exception of 3 of these motion detector fixtures -- the outside of the door, the garage, and the stairway from the garage. The manufacturers recommended against CFLs in these fixtures. Two of them make a click as if there is a relay contact, the third works with an electronic switch like a dimmer, but there are warnings against CFLs in all three. No matter how many times you flip your LEDs on and off, you are not flipping them on 120 times a second with a triac, generating a waveform rich in harmonics that will fry the electronic ballast in an LED bulb not certified for this use.

The argument against the ban is it treats homeowners like primitive peoples who don't know where "babies come from" (never proven -- many alleged primitives have elaborate cultures and rather "conservative" moral standards). A home owner is said to be clueless as to where their electric bill comes from and can't be trusted to make decisions about whether to reserve incandescent light bulbs for light-duty use such as motion detectors, closet lights, lightly used rooms, and so on.

My argument is that with modern natural-gas fired power generation, yes, delivering heat "by wire" is only half as efficient as burning the natural gas in an efficient home furnace. But if you need a spot application of heat, the safety and convenience trumps the higher efficiency of burning your own gas -- 100 watts of heat in a plumbing closet may subsitute for 1000's of watts of turning the heat up in the entire house, even if those 1000's of watts (or BTU/Hr equivalents) are generated more efficiently in a natural gas central furnace.

So hydro as a source of electicity weakens my argument? Huh?

The peak efficiency I have heard for a combined-cycle natural-gas fired power plant is 60 percent. Knock that down a little to 50 percent to account for transmission losses, etc..

A really good gas furnace is 96 percent efficient.

So if you have some spot application, where maybe you don't want the pipes to freeze but you don't want to dial up the thermostat for the whole house, you may come out way ahead on CO2 emissions. And maybe even cost.

I installed motion detector fixtures in the basement staircase and garage, long before saving electricity was fashionable.

Thet manufacturers specify incandescents -- maybe, maybe, dimmable CFL's for LED's won't burn the house down. So there is a place for inefficient incandescents -- in very low duty apps such as these motion detectors, that take advantage of their tolerance of being switched on and off a lot?

These fixtures have saved large amount of electricity as their use is only a couple minutes per day. But I suppose into the landfill they go and I buy new fixtures?

Are you talking about Healthcare.gov? Or are you talking about the virtual-reality helmet for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter?

There are a whole lot of folks out there running XP. Out of inertia (reinstalling all my apps would be so . . . hard!), cheapness (those P-III Intel Coppermine boards ran better than P-4's, and they are limited to 512 K).

So how 'bout Microsoft offering, i.e. selling for coin, a 32-bit in-place upgrade OS that works on 512M? Nah, fuggetabout!

So you can call the great masses of XP users rubes, idiots, and reservoirs of software infection. But guess what, there are rubes, idiots, and people not practicing good tech sanitation. But this will be like the people who won't vaccinate their kids. It isn't just their kids at risk, it is your kids, and maybe even you for getting chicken pox as a 50-year old.

So idiot, idiot, idiot, let's shame people, but what is this going to do? Is Congress going to pass a Computer Protection and Affordable System Patch (CPASP) law? Provide subidies to persons too poor to upgrade. Provide free computers to persons qualifying for Medicaid?

My plan is to buy lottery chances for a mega Powerball drawing.

In the off chance that I win, my first phone call will be to Gilbert Levin, the Principal Investigator on the Viking Labeled Release (LR) experiment that gave ambiguous results.

LR was developed by Levin as a way to assay sewage treatment plant effluent without having to wait days for streaked culture plates to show anything. By using a radioactive tracer, organisms can be detected at exceedingly low levels and very quickly by the radio-traced metabolism products.

Levin has been claiming that the Viking LR indeed detected life on Mars, and he has been pleading and scheming to get a "Chiral LR" life-sciences payload onto the surface of Mars to follow up. With NASA, it is nothing doing on this score since the Viking controversy -- they simply don't want to touch another life detection experiment for some reason. I thought the largely British Polar Lander was supposed to have a Levin experiment on it, but it crashed.

On the off chance that I win at Powerball, on the chance that this is enough money to fund a Mars mission, especially after the gummint gets its tax payments, and the chance the rocket works and the payload lands softly on Mars and everything else, and maybe on the remote chance that there is life on Mars and that Gil Levin's improved Labeled LR convinces people, Gilbert Levin will be awarded a Nobel Prize and become and immortal historical figure.

As for me, maybe I will go down in history as the chump who gave up his Powerball winnings?