At our house, electricity usage goes UP in the winter -- We heat with a geothermal heat pump with resistance heat as the back-up for very cold days.

I had a heat pump once...was a bit of a shock to find my electric bills in the winter were about the same as in the summer, having moved from a condo with gas heat where the combined bills were lower in the winter than in the summer. I'll never have electric heat (whether heat pump or otherwise) again if I can avoid it. The difference in cost between it and gas heat is ridiculous.

Even if Iran had ICBMs and nukes on a scale of the US or Russia they would not attack anyone with them. That is the whole concept of M.A.D. If Iran nuked Israel the nukes from the US, UK, France and the distributed nukes of Israel would completely destroy Iran within days.

MAD only works when dealing with rational actors. The Russians were rational enough. Iran? Not so much.

What I want to know is this: how did he afford an Apple Watch on a record-store clerk's pay?

I'm a Java developer. I have a decade of experience doing that. Why are all these companies hiring .Net developers not even giving me a chance at an interview? It's all computer programming. They're discriminating against me!

That's more a function of IT outsourcing hiring to HR. HR asked for requirements. IT replied with what it's currently using. HR doesn't have the domain-specific knowledge that would indicate that most anyone worth a damn can pick up a new language fairly easily, so if your resume says C++ when they're looking for C#, it gets circular-filed by HR.

(I got lucky with my current job...was referred to the director of IT by one of his acquaintances, so HR only got involved after the decision had already been made to hire me. I went from doing streaming video/audio with C++, DirectX, and our own compression algorithms to doing business-specific web apps with C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server...rather a different skill set, but that's the kind of adaptability that the HR droids never take into account.)

Guess the thumb-wrestling match

You know what I do to my kids when they want to thumb wrestle? I use my index finger and tell them it's "outside interference", WWF style.

There's also a lot about holding on to the traditions of the early Catholic Church. :)

Here's some.

Trust me -- I'm well aware we're on the same team. I attended a Protestant Church with my wife before she converted to Catholicism. Some of my comments are as much for others as they are for you. There's an old saying -- no one hates the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they think is the Catholic Church.

If you think that's bad, sugar causes a WingDing font.

Better that than Comic Sans MS.

Do you know why we Catholics call her the Mother of God?

It's not because we're placing her above God, it's because it's our way of affirming and re-affirming the divinity of Christ.

Here's how it plays out:

Hitlary is going to come out of the closet, and much like the race card was overplayed the "homophobe" card will get overplayed.

Media coverage will be fawning over how "courageous" the first open lesbian Presidential Candidate is, and how we should all embrace the history of it. But the kicker will be this:

Jeb Bush will be her running mate. Then the narrative becomes that Ted Cruz / Scott Walker / Rand Paul is "so extreme" that even Jeb Bush, a life-long Republican, is supporting Hitlary.

After the Supreme Court crams gay marriage down our throats this week, and the fact that Hitlary is going to win, and watching Erdogan in Turkey trying to launch a Caliphate...

I'd watch the skies. He is coming back soon. Our Blessed Mother Mary can only hold him back for so long. And the reality is... well, quite frankly, we deserve it.

Frankly I was shocked he didn't roll out "synergy" but I think they wised onto it thanks to Dilbert ragging on it so many times.

Too many people would've completed their Marketing Bullshit Bingo cards on that.

Cinavia HAS been cracked.

[citation needed]

(Not that it really matters to me, as none of my playback hardware pays any attention to it: not my TVs, not my OpenELEC boxes, not my surround-sound receiver. Maybe the Blu-ray players care about it, but they mostly gather dust while the OpenELEC boxes stream from a media server.)

No, I'm not a fan of wannabe little brownshirts following Alinsky's script of personal destruction.
That's all he's doing when he continually moves the goal posts.

I'm also not a fan of cowardly little cyber-bullies, which is all he is.

Look below -- this creepy little bastard has been obsessed with me for years -- I finally give him an opportunity to meet me and ... oh, there's other things he'd rather do. Like hide in his mother's basement and cry softly.

He's a completely useless tool. Not worth any of my time.

How typical for a cyber-bully and online stalker. You're real brave hiding behind a computer screen but in meat space you're a sniveling coward.

Bottom line: You wouldn't lie about me to my face the way you do on slashdot.

I however, would still tell the truth about you to your face the way I do on slashdot.

Don't believe me? Let's meet up and find out.