It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable

Agreed.

I started buying CFLs 12 years ago. I have had four fail in that time, out of 40, spread over two different physical houses. 90% lasting over a decade? I'll take those numbers over replacing every single one every 3-6 months!

That said... "It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable" that they last two months when everyone else has them lasting for several years. Someone in this discussion has stated an irrational conclusion. Me, I still have 36 out of 40 CFLs working more than a decade later, so I don't think I have the logic problem...

BTW, all those "sensitive" electronics you describe? Each and every one of them have beefy power supplies designed to deal with brief poor power conditions, whether they simply turn off or buffer a few seconds of suitable power to make it through momentary rough patches. A 3-for-$10 CFL has no giant filter caps hidden in some nearby pocket universe to help it magically weather a brownout that would cook all those devices you describe if they didn't possess exactly such safeguards.

This case should not have anything to do with religion in the first place, people that run businesses must not be abused by the government and having their freedoms revoked just because they are running a business.

Government must not have any authority to dictate to people what type of compensation the employer and the employee agree upon. Government must not have any authority to dictate that compensation must be provided in a form of insurance or contraceptives or in form of any other product or currency that goes against the agreement between the actual 2 parties involved - a person buying labour and a person selling labour.

This is a win for freedom but not completely, because it mentions religion in the first place. Religion has nothing to do with this, it's about INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM.

Insurance only works because of uncertainty. The very concept of getting people to buy insurance depends on aggregating risk over a sufficiently large population.

When the insurance companies can actually offer people rates that come within a small margin of actual payouts (plus a hefty bit extra for the insurance company's cut) - Why would any sane person still pay for insurance? Put the same money in the bank and cut out the middle-man.

Communism has been done correctly in the past, but never on a scale as large as a country.... at best, I think it has only been achieved at the scale of a modest community, and generally involving no more than a few thousand people or so.

Basically, when everyone in the community personally knows practically everyone else in it, there is a social obligation on everybody to conform to expected behavior on account of a complete lack of anonymity, and communism works. Individuals who do not fit in to such societies are unceremoniously kicked out and left to fend for themselves.

No. It means that certain people are going to get richer faster because not as much money needs to be delegated for salaries

And at Martian gravity? Or at a pressure that compensates for the difference in gravity?

Mars has lower gravity than the Earth. If it works at Mars pressure and Earth Gravity, it will work better actually on Mars.

That said, I''d say the GP's assertion requires a cite - As far as I know, virtually no "Aero"dynamics-based means of propulsion or lift works on Mars. Any viable copter on Mars would require blades the size of a football field, which leads to a not inconsiderable problem of how you mount more than one of them to a probe the size of a small car.

Fly by wire still has a manual backup.

You can't exactly have a manual backup if you've designed the plane so that the pilots can't actually see anything.

Still use "Dinosaurs". Kids make "life size" dinos or parts by using those diagrams with the scale human and blow them up on a projector to trace on huge art paper and paint / color / decorate. Tough finding a fridge big enough to put them on at home with the rest of the classroom art.

Oh. Wait.

tell him he can have a 50 year exclusive getting DVDs and geegaws to martian settlers.

I'm unsure why the part of your brain that figures I shower infrequently (evidently deduced from the weekly total that I cited) can't figure out that I usually only spend 4 or 5 minutes to take a shower in the first place.

I have a waterproof watch and it wouldn't be harmed by the shower, but if I wore it in the shower all the time, then I couldn't effectively wash my skin under the watchstrap. Since I don't tend to take my watch off otherwise, dead skin would build up underneath it, and it would get rather disgusting in short order.

- government doesn't have anything "to provide", it can only take away from somebody in order to subsidise somebody else, it doesn't produce anything and has nothing to give to anybody for free. If you are talking about government stealing even more resources from those, who are already being stolen from in order to provide bread and circuses to those, who are already on welfare anyway, then all you will achieve will be more corruption, even less production, as those producing, will be moving their productive capacity out of the country even faster.

Not everyone takes their watch off at night. I don't. It comes off my wrist for what is probably about 30 to 40 minutes or so cumulatively a week, which is about how much time I spend in the shower.

But then it occurred to me, it's not the card/usb-stick the dogs are smelling, it's the fact that some human touched it

No, the dog simply smells the chemicals in the device - Hell, if we can smell them, so can a dog. We just can't smell them well enough to find one hidden inside four containers at the back of a filing cabinet, whereas a dog can.

To your other point, however...


There's no way the dog can smell certain memory cards with certain content on it

Absolutely true, but largely irrelevant. They had a warrant to seize storage media, plain and simple. The dog just helped them find all of it.

That said, I still see a dog alerting to the smell of electronics as increasingly useless in the modern world. Assuming no malicious intent on the part of the handler (false, but let's roll with it for now), a drug dog can sniff out your bag of weed precisely because you don't have hundreds of bags of hypothetically-legal weed hidden around your apartment and they need to find the one illegal one. With electronics, however, I do have hundreds (possibly in the thousands) of circuit boards randomly scattered around my house - I'd dare say that even Joe Sixpack easily has over a hundred boards around the house, when even things like car keys and teddy bears and thermostats have them nowadays.

So while the police might love cataloging 150 individual drug charges for every seed they find in your carpet, they won't take quite the same sick pleasure in documenting your three computers, your smoke detectors, two external HDDs, your TVs, 18 thumbdrives, random old PC parts you have lying around, a third of your kid's action figures, your vintage SNES and dozens of games, a few hundred burned DVDs... And then someone actually needs to check out almost all of those to decide whether or not they have any storage capacity, and if so, what they contain? In all seriousness, if they raided my house for storage media, even narrowing it down to "real" storage devices (HDDs, burned DVDs, flash drives... as opposed to every recordable greeting card etc), someone could literally spend the rest of their life trying to decide whether or not they had found anything incriminating in the collection.

Doubtful, there are all sorts of housekeeping steps the brain needs to perform while you sleep, like moving short term memories into long term memory. Failure to perform those steps eventually leads to insanity.