Like the OpenSuse laptop this and the previous posts were made? I have done my fair share of reading on the NSA and a linux machine will not help you, unless you become your own ISP and maintain your own mail server, DNS, tor node, etc. This however will cover only part of their entry points. You still have a phone and you also communicate with other people who are less skilled or just don't give that much thought about securing their communications. Even if you spend the time and effort to secure both ends of your communications, you still stand no chance if you are targeted. Read more on the technique they call 'Quantum Insert'. The most practical solution involves making sufficient number of US citizens to actually act as citizens and exert pressure on changing the current law and instituting proper supervision. Here I also have done my part by calling my senator. Hopefully US corporations loosing business opportunities will work better than the US citizens suddenly starting to make educated decisions about how their country is ran. Short of being a citizen you can make the NSA's job a little more challenging by using encryption whenever possible and generating large volumes of garbage data for them to dig trough.

Because most of them are in the homes of people who shop at walmart, and reading your post you rarely visit such places. Nevertheless they are a huge market.

I bought a samsung chromebook for the kids and it is still with the original ChromeOS. Perfect for what they need - web browsing, simple document creation. Even I occasionally pick it up. I will likely buy one later this year for my parents to replace an old Windows XP Netbook. Again it is going to do all they need to do and at the same time require a lot less maintenance than Windows. I think google has found a nearly perfect balance here. The only drawback is the somewhat finicky printing. Let's face it the operating system has become a cheap commodity, as far as the the average consumer is concerned. For consumers the hardware and the OS are inseparable parts of the same package, and the nature of the OS is a little concern for most of them. In this mindset the price takes a lead in the purchase decision and windows hardware with its price premium for the OS is bound to loose. And before you jump up and start telling me how much more windows and MS office can do, let me make clear that we are not talking about business PCs. The chromebook primary market is the home users.

I specked an "equivalent" at newegg and crucial (newegg didn't have the 16GB RAM DDR3 1866 ECC chips that apple uses). It comes between $9800 and $12000 depending on what SSD you are going to stick in. $14K is a bit excessive. Apple's price is in the ballpark, considering that they save quite a bit on whole sale prices and large scale manufacturing, but have invested considerable amount of money in a design for a niche market. What is more interesting is their effort to "encapsulate" the workstation the same way they did with the laptop and the desktop. I am really curios how the so called "professional" users will react to not being allowed to upgrade the internals. Making upgrades possible only using external attachments is pretty transparent effort to create a market for expensive accessories. I am curios how this will turn out.

LEDs and halogens would do the job you describe just fine

Forgot about the dimmable halogen bulbs, which may be a better fit for you than LEDs.

Go to lowes or home depot and look for dimmable LED bulbs. I have had better lick with those than with dimmable CFLs, which indeed require you to upgrade the dimmer switch. Having said this unless you insist of having dimmable light in your bath, I would suggest just to get a 70 cent light switch and replace the dimmer.

They will happily swap the burned out bulbs with whatever is available in the store and most of them wouldn't notice much difference. Couple will find that some of the stuff they bought does not work with dimmer switches or some bulbs tend to be a bit bulky and don't fit in certain very tight enclosures. All of those will be swapped for free back in the store with suitable replacements. So what's the point of preparing in advance for the switch or knowing about it?

Now, the people hoarding incandescent bulbs are a bit more puzzling. Some of them probably have a get-rich-quick plan kicking into action and all I can say is good for them. The ones that are actively trying to avoid switching away from incandescent bulbs are completely different story. WTF people? What's the point of massively inconveniencing yourself with the storage of fragile items only to pay higher electric bills.

Can somebody point to a website with information regarding the study? If it is federally funded it must be publicly posted somewhere. Such studies typically require "informed consent" from the subjects. I would really like to see how do they obtain consent from the people being pulled over and how they justify instructing the police to pull over random drivers without probable cause. It would have been a different story if they sit in a parking lot and ask for samples drivers already stopped at the parking. The whole thing with the police pulling people over seems a bit too coercive for my taste.

The only number that i need to count in binary on my fingers is 4: oo1oo

Soap will actually kill Gram-negative bacteria, by dissolving their cell membranes. Gram-positive bacteria, yeast, fungi, etc are going to be harder to kill by soap. Any spores will be completely resistant. This however is not the point. You use the soap not to kill the bugs, but to wash them away.

The fact that soap kills bacteria is largely irrelevant. Soap's mode of action, as for any other detergent, is to remove the impurities from the surface. Whether the said impurities are dead or alive makes no difference to the persons washing their hands as long as their are washed away. What is relevant is that the wide use anti-bactericidal additives has two unintended consequences:

1. Creates resistance, which will become a problem in cases were you don't have the option to wash a surface but have to rely on killing the buggers.

2. Creates false sense of security, because they kill only live bacteria. These compounds will have absolutely no effect on spores. This is probably more relevant to the hand sanitizers which have become exceedingly popular.

Why have nuclear weapons in the first place?

Wasn't this argument made kind of obsolete with the advent of boomer submarines, and other mobile launching systems. The Russians even had ballistic missile trains. It is mostly irrelevant if couple bunker get blown before they can launch their missiles.

Nah, the way it looks the C.I.A. and other American spy agencies, as well as the Pentagon have gone like:

Now here is the scary part: Dr Strangelove is still as relevant as it was when it was made. You would think by now it would just be funny, and not scarily funny.