I think you failed to mention how much current is being pushed down that pair of 16AWG wires. The power loss comes from (current * resistance (of the conductors)), not from the voltage.

I do/have done both (run electrical and understand the implications), and GP has a point. When I think of the things in our house that *must* run on AC, it's only our fridge, freezer, and HVAC. Everything else in the house either converts it to DC or could run quite happily on DC. For certain you'd want to have a different kind of plug for DC devices, but even that would give us an opportunity to 1) standardize on one global plug standard, at least for DC, and 2) allow us to design a small, rugged, safe type of plug.

Or is there some implication that I'm missing, and that you decided not to point out, in favor of flaming GP?

There's a difference between "potential" and "actual". IIRC (and please correct me if I'm wrong), there has yet to be a case where fracking has actually been shown to have impacted groundwater, despite the claims of the local population. This is likely because the oil/gas companies do lots of environmental studies before they even start drilling--they don't just start punching holes in the ground willy-nilly.

Folks, this is exactly what you get when your elected representatives delegate regulation to appointed bureaucrats. I've said it before, and it bears repeating: if a regulation is important enough to enact, it's important enough to have the legislature go on record passing it, rather than letting political appointees create rules which have the force of law. Unelected = (largely) unaccountable.

What they've confirmed is that there was indeed a warming trend from about 1970 (or so) through about 2000. Before that, nothing significant. Since then, nothing significant. So we have a 30-year period of warming. That's an extremely short period when you're talking climate science. It also inconveniently doesn't match up with carbon dioxide emissions growth.

So the questions remain, as you say: "is it caused by man?" and (if I may paraphrase) "what, if anything, should we do about it?" Those two questions are quite significant, and completely separate from the furor about the earth warming/not warming.

For what it's worth, things still aren't on the up-and-up regarding the data, even in this case.

As a parent of a high-functioning autistic kid, I also enjoy the extra services which are required by federal law. However, I don't agree with the idea that such services are required on a national level. Let the school districts and states compete for the students and their tax dollars. If those services were to go away in my area, I would then need to choose whether to spend the extra time/money/effort to procure those services on my own, or go somewhere else. Why should I feel entitled to it?

I worked hard in high school, got good grades, and got some scholarships. That paid for a good portion of my schooling. I also worked a part-time job during the school year and got a much-higher-than-minimum-wage internship each summer, working full time. And I chose a cheaper-than average university. And I graduated with no debt.

You're making an assumption that the Federal Government is the only entity out there which funds schools, parks, urban development, and infrastructure. In the process, you're forgetting the several layers of government which could arguably do a more effective, efficient, and accountable job of administering those same functions: states, counties and municipalities. I, for one, would welcome the elimination of the Department of Education on the Federal level--I don't see it causing any actual improvement in our education system for the billions we spend on it, and it only insulates decisions from the voters it affects.

The same goes for HUD. Why must this kind of issue be managed on the federal level? Wouldn't the state and local governments be better informed and more invested in having an effective outcome?

Sure, houses are more expensive now than they were 40 years ago. They're also bigger (2700 sq ft today vs 1400 sq ft in 1970) and better-made, with more features. The cost of building the same house today that was the average 40 years ago hasn't changed nearly that amount. In addition, minimum wage makes for an absolutely useless measure of average household income. The ratio of median home price to median income (a much more useful statistic) has roughly doubled in the last 30 years, and if you ignore the housing bubble, the ratio increased from 3:1 to about 4:1. That hardly constitutes a tripling of housing price/income ratio; in fact, it means that price per square foot has dropped.

I worked through college. My parents paid for my transportation to and from school and for phone calls home, but other than that, I was on my own. I'm now 30, and have a very good paying job (I'm in the top 20% income-wise). It's possible, but you gotta 1) choose the right school, 2) choose a useful major, and 3) work your tail off, all which requirements are increasingly ignored. It's also worth pointing out that the perception of a college education has created (in my opinion) a bit of a bubble. Just like the housing bubble, people are investing ridiculous sums of money into something which doesn't have near that amount of value. You can point the blame in any number of directions--at parents for pushing kids into college when the kid isn't made out for it, at the kids for choosing majors which provide no marketable skills, at colleges for helping perpetuate the perception that a college education is necessary to lead a comfortable life (and who can blame them, from a marketing perspective?), or at the government for artificially inflating demand by guaranteeing loans a ridiculously low interest rates.

There are still LOTS of good-paying, non-college-degree-requiring jobs out there. The trades particularly are (and have been for some time) suffering from a shortage. Plumbers, electricians, welders, and the like. A good welder with his own equipment can make a very nice living.

While your points are all valid, I think the single biggest factor standing in the way of Thunderbolt is simply this: backwards compatibility. There's a huge number of USB devices of all speeds out there, and exactly zero of them will plug into a thunderbolt port. The advantages of Thunderbolt over USB3 aren't significant enough to overcome that obstacle. The number of people for whom 6Gbps is insufficient but 10Gbps is enough is a small slice indeed. The same goes for the 10W vs. 4.5W power availability.

This sounds like the kind of thing that should be decided by Congress and the President, rather than by an unaccountable political appointee. We're talking an awful lot of money here, and I'm quite leery of letting a government agency decide more-or-less arbitrarily to redirect billions of dollars in such a manner.

What's also interesting is that the coverage coming out of the protests is rather one-sided. It's all coming from the protesters. And there's little interest in posting any non-controversial/non-sensational footage, or even to post footage in context. What we get instead is the video equivalent of sound-bytes--enough to get a non-cynical viewer riled up about something.

That was precisely my thought. While my cumulative time spent in the bathroom may reach an hour per day, I would estimate that less than five minutes of that is spent "in front of" the mirror, and the time spent *looking* at the mirror is some fraction of even that.

And I would guess that those people who *do* spend a lot of time looking at the mirror already have something holding their attention--themselves.

And this is a prime example of why government subsidies of production are a bad idea. I haven't firmly settled on a position with regards to federal funding for R&D (although certain examples, like sick shrimp running on treadmills, should be an obvious choice for budget cuts...), but trying to force adoption through subsidies only distorts the market, without adding any value.

In this case, the US Government effectively forced every US citizen to invest $1.60 in a company that had never been profitable and showed no prospects for profitability. The investment was not for development of technology that would make solar power economically viable, but rather it was for purchasing capital equipment for existing, uneconomic technology. The results were perfectly predictable. If no private investors see the value in the company, we should be thinking awful hard about whether it's a good idea to force them to invest in it anyway.

I would love to see solar power prove profitable, but such a goal will come as a result of research and development, not as a result of government subsidies for production of inefficient technology.