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.

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.)

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

Better that than Comic Sans MS.

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.)

It's like how a real terrorist would not joke about a bomb at an airport. But someone who does is detained or arrested, and time is spent by TSA that could be better spent looking for real terrorists.

I studied and tutored experimental design and this use of inferential statistics. I even came up with a formula for 1/5 the calculator keystrokes when learning to calculate the p-value manually. Take the standard deviation and mean for each group, then calculate the standard deviation of these means (how different the groups are) divided by the mean of these standard deviations (how wide the groups of data are) and multiply by the square root of n (sample size for each group). But that's off the point. We had 5 papers in our class for psychology majors (I almost graduated in that instead of engineering) that discussed why controlled experiments (using the p-value) should not be published. In each case my knee-jerk reaction was that they didn't like math or didn't understand math and just wanted to 'suppose' answers. But each article attacked the math abuse, by proficient academics at universities who did this sort of research. I came around too. The math is established for random environments but the scientists control every bit of the environment, not to get better results but to detect thing so tiny that they really don't matter. The math lets them misuse the word 'significant' as though there is a strong connection between cause and effect. Yet every environmental restriction (same living arrangements, same diets, same genetic strain of rats, etc) invalidates the result. It's called intrinsic validity (finding it in the experiment) vs. extrinsic validity (applying in real life). You can also find things that are weaker (by the square root of n) by using larger groups. A study can be set up in a way so as to likely find 'something' tiny and get the research prestige, but another study can be set up with different controls that turn out an opposite result. And none apply to real life like reading the results of an entire population living normal lives. You have to study and think quite a while, as I did (even walking the streets around Berkeley to find books on the subject up to 40 years prior) to see that the words "99 percentage significance level" means not a strong effect but more likely one that is so tiny, maybe a part in a million, that you'd never see it in real life.

I spent days getting the wrong results until I realised the problem was pi. i had been using pi=3.1415926535

Why are you trying to represent an irrational number with a rational number of unnecessarily limited precision? If pi isn't defined as a constant in whatever language you're using, calculate it yourself and store it in a variable for future reference. 4*atan(1) is fairly common and simple for this purpose, and you'll get as many digits as the underlying datatype will support.

Cite some sources? Because my state sure does not exclude basic groceries. When I look at my grocery receipt, it clearly states the tax percentage and is applied after everything is totaled up. If there is a state that does not follow this method, let me know.

Wherever you are (you don't say), I suspect your sales tax on groceries is more the exception than the rule. For just one example, Nevada doesn't tax groceries. If you're paying tax on a grocery-store purchase, it's for (1) non-food items (such as cleaning supplies) and/or (2) prepared, ready-to-eat foods (such as fried or roast chicken from the deli counter, vs. a box of frozen breaded chicken strips or a package of fresh chicken that needs to be cooked first and isn't taxed).

1. Kleiner Perkins freed of all charges. This highlights just how male-dominated and sexist the tech industry is.
2. Kleiner Perkins guilty of all charges. This highlights just how male-dominated and sexist the tech industry is.

It's kinda like "global warming," where any change in the weather (or any lack of change in the weather) is cited as proof. A Venn diagram of SJWs vs. warmistas would, I suspect, have a very high degree of overlap.

I think BBC may take the opportunity to just clean house and bring in a new set of 3 hosts. The chemistry that those 3 had was great, so just lugging in a new replacement with the 2 remaining would be a disaster. But it could work with a set of 3 completely new hosts.

Not likely. Consider The Man Show as precedent; it pretty much jumped the shark when they tried to replace Adam Carolla & Jimmy Kimmel.

What if someone doesn't want to pay a fine for simply existing?

The Supreme Court has already mooted that question with its 0bama(Doesn't)Care decision. :-P

Besides which, an incandescent needs a bulb that can handle a hard vacuum, a machine to make a hard vacuum, and an entirely separate manufacturing line to all your other electrical bits and pieces.

Lightbulbs haven't used vacuum for decades. They're typically filled with an inert-gas mix (predominantly nitrogen or argon, possibly with small amounts of other gases) at atmospheric pressure. Not only does this allow use of a thinner, lighter envelope, it also makes the filament last longer.