Many incandescent lightbulbs aren't used for hours a day, which is what the break even price calculations are based on. My bedroom lights maybe get 45 minutes a day, and my guest bedroom perhaps 45 minutes a week. In my garage, it's 45 minutes a month. CFLs will never break even there.

Tme for all the hypocrites to come out against apple who is offering a free, perpetual license for the relevant patents, in favor of those who won't do the same, only because they have an irrational hatred of apple. Just look at the first post.

Why not just track us all, because it's not fair to anyone when people commit crimes? Once we lose an underlying presumption of innocence, any invasion of our privacy or erosion of personal liberties seems to make sense.
It's not my job to help the government do theirs. They can catch tax cheats with good, old fashioned detective work. To presume that my heavy use of cash is somehow illegal or fraudulent is ridiculous.

The point is that the shareholders, to the extent that they have votes, control the company. There's no issue of "being held captive", because it is theirs. If you don't like that, you don't sell shares to the shareholders. Nobody forces that. Heck, you can take a public company private by buying it out if that's what you want.
I don't understand all this angst towards shareholders - it's not like anyone forces a company to issue stock.
That's real-life. Textbook is the fantasy that you take money from someone without them owning you.

At $38B total revenue, that's less than $1.5B in total non-ad revenue, which is pretty much chump change.

The difference is that Bell Labs did pure research. While Google may be doing pure research, it isn't evident based upon the projects that are publicly visible. Pure research is what yields the long term society–changing breakthroughs, whereas R&D on fantasy projects often have higher capital expenses with nothing to show for it even if the project succeeds.

Some people don't want their living room to look like a scene from Brazil. $100 is a small price to pay.

Nowadays, people don't seem to even understand the definition of a fact...

They tax you on the difference of what you paid to Oregon ($0) and what you would pay to California (~10%, or $200k for the example).

He pays more than AMT. AMT caps at 28%, but he'll pay at 35%. The crossover point is somewhere around $400k.

You pay state sales tax based upon where you garage or hangar your vehicle. When you buy a $2M aircraft and hangar it in California, the state sends you a bill.
Of course, you can hangar it in a tax friendly state like Oregon, but then the aircraft isn't nearby.

Let's say you save 200w for 6 hours per day by using a more efficient lightbulb. That's 1.2 kw hr per day, or roughly 4mJ.
Given that a gallon of gas weighs about 3 kg and therefore has about 120mJ of heating value, this saves the equivalent of about 4 oz of gasoline per day assuming 50% efficiency. Is legislation for is really warranted?
If they would fix the awful public transit in the SF bay area, we'd be saving something significant instead. Or if we had diesel cars, or stopped drinking bottled tap water.

Foxconn is Taiwanese.

There is no substitute for ForeFlight on an iPad. I'm not carrying a laptop in the cockpit to view charts, and it saves me hundreds of dollars a year compared to paper charts. You go fly a plane with a smart phone and a netbook in your lap and tell me that it's better.