Incandescent? Are we stuck in a time warp? What city has had the money to waste on incandescent streetlights since the 1960s? LEDs are less efficient than the orange sodium streetlights but probably more efficient than the more common high pressure sodium. They have some key advantages. The first is that they can be physically much smaller than high voltage discharge lights which means it takes smaller optics to throw the light where you need it. But where light trespass remains, LEDs present an interesting option. I how many of us end up having to put ugly black-out shades in front of bedroom windows to keep unwanted streetlight glare from keeping us awake? What if an LCD shutter were synchronized to close exactly when street light LEDs were on and open when they're off. Suddenly you see the natural night sky from your bedroom window, are awakened by natural morning sunlight.

The original series built upon a longer history of art, literature, war and peace. It referenced the bible, Greek and Roman classic literature, Shakespeare. You ended up quoting Milton, Dickens... when you thought you were quoting a playboy starship captain. That tradition held until this most recent reboot which had numerous references to previous Star Treks, but no grounding in the real world that that Star Trek plagiarized its ideas from.

I don't think anyone is pretending we'll jam 10,000,000+ allegedly illegal aliens through our court system so who exactly are we talking about with the sneering accusation "illegal?"

Do you really understand US immigration law? Some of the visas granted this year were applied for as long ago as 1988. Do you know how many changes have been made to US immigration law in the past 25 years? Have any of these been reviewed as ex-post facto laws?

I have a friend who was born in the US of Australian parents but because he sensibly chose to go to university at Oxford UK which is half the cost of the cheapest American state college. INS flagged him and now he can never return to his birthplace to visit his friends and family. BTW he is a tech genius who would have qualified under H1B if he were not already banned from contributing to America's future.

Of course they're in favor of it. As I said, xenophobia is always popular. Even this "reform" abolishes the green-card lottery and militarizes our borders.

Including the campaigns where the candidate advocates "reform"? You should really be careful with those generalizations, as generalizing about groups is at the heart of prejudice.

In fact the immigrants with more native-American blood are more likely to be thrown out than those with more European blood. Arizona codified what was otherwise an ad-hoc policy.

If you prefer, but I think "criminal" or "felon" are better words. By comparison the word "illegal" is pretty mild, as it can refer to something as minor as a civil violation. Do you think we should use the milder term to refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes?

Even our sloppy news media usually tries to maintain a spirit of "Presumed innocence" for thieves, murderers, pedophile rapists, fraudsters and other criminals/felons. And so, they typically have the word "alleged" associated with their crime until a trial by jury. Are you saying that everyone who has been tagged as Illegal by the tea party, neo-facists, racist union thugs... has had a fair trial by jury? No, the common American usage for the word "illegal" in reference to a class of immigrants is a crutch for muddled thinking it serves the following purposes:

• It simplifies the hundreds of different problems and circumstances applying to millions of people who may have violated one or more elements of US immigration law and lumps them into a single category of criminal with a simpleminded solution with a one-size-fits-all punishment. Should we have a one-size-fits all punishment for errors in income tax filings?
• It allows us to dehumanize and scapegoat a group of people as the cause of internally generated economic and criminal problems.
• It allows politicians of every party to pretend to do something without having any obvious negative effects on any voters.
• It allows us to be racist and nationalist in polite company, without fear
• It provides a focus for the xenophobia which is at the core of nearly every successful election campaign.

Why does the noun "Illegal" always refer to a person who did not hire enough lawyers to weed through the reams of arcane paperwork and pay the fees necessary to become a legal immigrant? Shouldn't the word "illegal" also refer to those who haven't filed the proper paperwork to pay their taxes. Or when the word is said with a particular level of disgust, shouldn't the word also "Illegal" refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes? Why also does it almost exclusively apply to paperwork-deficient immigrants from Mexico, particular those with much native American blood in their family tree but it almost never refers to the hundreds of thousands of lighter-skinned illegal immigrants from Ireland and other parts of Europe.

When you hear the word "Illegal" referring to a group of people, you should be thinking of Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, Jack Abramoff, Tycho corporation at least as often as you think of the guy who'll mow your lawn for $5/hour because it's the only thing that keeps his kids from starving.

I was in one of the first if not the first desegregated school system in the US but in the years prior to busing, we had only two black students in our school. My mother noticed that the school photo was a square grid of white kids with the black girl all by herself in the bottom right corner. We wondered if that was intentional re-segregation or whether some parents actually cut the poor girl out of their version of the photo. Later while working in the high school darkroom I noticed that sometimes I needed different exposures for the dark-skinned kids but even with the unforgiving dynamic range of tri-ex on print paper, I don't remember ever having to dodge or burn in photos of particular students based on their skin color. If exposure was off for the black kids, it was off for everyone.

Let us know when US elections aren't influenced by billions of dollars in bribe-funded propaganda, hanging chads, voter registration fraud, gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, evoting bugs and fraud or the social media data mining that handed Obama the presidency over his pdf, inkjet-printer, email, web 1.0-focused Republican opponents.

Then ask yourself this: Imagine a low-level contractor such as Snowden who has access to much of your online activity, your list of friends, what you "like", what music and movies you download, what news you pay attention to, even these words we type and read on Slashdot... could that person influence an election? Clinton, Obama and the TLAs must answer that question for the American people. The obvious answer is yes which means the TLAs should be subject to the same campaign finance transparency and scrutiny as Grandma Jones is for her 10$ donation to the Iowa Tea Party.

This paragraph was not paid for by the RNC, DNC or Hillary Clinton election campaign committee. Your mileage may vary.

"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
-- Commander William Adama - Battlestar Galactica

When a tornado swept through Barneville Wisconsin, it flattened nearly the entire town. But the water tower remained standing. Now water towers are pretty heavy but their center of gravity is obviously very high. Traditional construction techniques favor rectangular homes or homes with right angle flat sides. Tornado survivable buildings should be another shape, something more like the domes used in Antarctica.

Consumer digital cameras and portable camcorders were available before the takeoff/landing ban and they were used. But some of the high-sensitivity motion-capable DSLRs and EVIL cameras would be able to capture much more of the beauty of flight. It would nice to see these taken off the ban as they are mostly harmless. I've often thought of bringing a vintage wind-up (mechanical) 8mm or 16mm movie or 35mm film camera to photograph the interesting early part of a flight.

During later parts of the flight atmospheric haze makes photographs dull but I found that the camera's "infrared" RAW developing profile (fiddles with the red channel), really does cut through that haze. Some night flights (especially transatlantic great-circle routes over Greenlend) go far enough from cities and far enough north to give passengers a view of the northern lights. I've seen some airlines broadcast a view from a cockpit camera on one of the TV channels. It is a shame we're told to close our cabin windows so we end up watching some ridiculous B-movie when one of the most beautiful sights in the world is just outside

Somewhere where I saw a lot of lightning rods (possibly one of the theme parks in Florida, lightning capital of the world), I saw a dragonfly perched on the tip of every lightning rod. Now I know dragonflies like a high perch so they can see mosquitoes, but I began to wonder whether something else was going on. Were they attracted to the ions or ozone streaming from the lightning rods?

That's not pedantism, this is Slashdot! ;-) But why restrict your scale to assume we know everything about the earth and compare that to the visible universe? We don't know everything about the earth but let's assume we know all there is to know about a plank-length radius sphere (we don't but bear with me). The universe's volume/ plank volume is on the order of 3E60/(4/3*pi*(plank-length 1.6 × 10E -35)^3) =~ 5E-105. If you're talking mass, remember that we don't know all there is about a photon and its rest mass = 0. So the knowledge to ignorance ratio by mass is 2E30 / 0 = infinity. ;-)

Those whom Heaven helps we call the Sons of Heaven. Those who would by learning attain to this seek for what they cannot learn. Those who would by effort attain to this, attempt what effort can never effect. Those who aim by reasoning to reach it reason where reasoning has no place. To know to stop where they cannot arrive by means of knowledge is the highest attainment. Those who cannot do this will be destroyed on the lathe of Heaven. -- Chuang Tzu

When you have faith, true faith you see the weird man-made scaffolding of intelligent design theories as unnecessary and counterproductive. Where God seems to conflict with science some choose to believe that one is right and the other is wrong when the truth is that both are in harmony and it is our understanding of both that is flawed. Those who read only their own ephemeral rules, theories and prejudices into the bible have not accepted the spirit which is necessary to guide each of us through the poetry of God's creation whenever it seems to conflict with the logic of what we think we know.

A faithful person also knows (as any honest scientist should know), that those "gaps" where God must exist are enormous. The amount of her universe(s) we truly understand is vanishingly small, far less than 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the universe is known to us. What we know is certainly smaller than ourselves, our brain, a leaf of grass, , DNA, atoms, quarks, strings and everything. While we've come to learn more about each of these things with each passing day, we should accept that a scientist 50 or 100 years from now would look at the social constructs we know as scientific beliefs as being remarkably simplistic. Even for agnostics and atheists who choose to disbelieve in a universal creator with more embedded intelligence than the 3 pounds of chemicals within their brains, the Judeo-Christian bible contains remnants of the human story which pre-dates agriculture and civilization. In this age of short attention spans we need such an anchor to counter-balance pop-cultural fads and give us a longer view of humanity.