Your interpretation is quaint, and incorrect, at least it didn't mean that until 2008, Columbia v. Heller

there is not a single word about an individual right to a gun for self-defense in the notes from the Constitutional Convention

Nor in the Constitution!

The public's understanding of the 2nd Amendment started to be distorted by the NRA early in the last century. The NRA has been filling the minds of gun owners with an interpretation that was never intended by the Founders for some time, so no one can blame you for your incorrect interpretation when a propaganda machine like the NRA has been bombarding you with selective truths and out-right lies.

Four times between 1876 and 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership outside the context of a militia.

Wow... THAT is OUT THERE. Of course, you are completely mistaken, and this bold statement of yours is wildly, dangerously inaccurate. Gun regulation is legal, and necessary.

Yes it can. [Gonzales v. Raich]

The issue was not in dispute in that case:

Respondents in this case do not dispute that passage of the CSA, as part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, was well within Congress' commerce power

In my opinion, by the way, Wickard v. Filburn, the New Deal era decision that says making something for yourself (i.e. growing wheat to feed your own chickens, or growing marijuana to use yourself) affects interstate commerce (because you otherwise might have bought it instead, affecting the price) and can thus be regulated, is a travesty that is long overdue for the Supremes to revisit and reverse, as they sometimes do when a previous court broke something substantial.

But even if you agree that feeding your own wheat to your own chickens is a suitable subject for federal regulation under the commerce clause, don't you think it's a stretch to say that affecting the price of a banned substance by NOT buying it on the illegal market is a legitimate reason for the Federal Government to ban your growing and consuming your own plants? Either way you don't buy in interstate commerce, so how can the difference in your behavior affect it? (Or was it Congress' intent for you to buy illegal drugs?)

Sometimes more than half the Supreme Court justices follow some argument to a point beyond sanity.

The Commerce Clause?

Nope. (The powers it DOES confer were already alluded to in my posting.)

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

"Regulating" = making regular, setting standards, etc. It does NOT include banning whole classes of trade entirely.

If they want to PROMOTE drug and gun sales, that's fine. B-)

Selling drugs and weapons are serious crimes and should be justly punished. Propz to GNAA

Let's devil's advocate a bit...

The Second Amendment clearly (to anyone who understands how English was used at the time) forbids the Federal Government from interfering, in any way, with obtaining and carrying weapons. (infringe ~ "even meddle with the fringes of") That includes gun trafficing, because stopping gun sales makes it harder to exercise the right.

The Tenth Amendment explicitly, and the Ninth Amendment implicitly, ban the Federal Government from use of any power not explicitly specified in the Constitution as amended. I don't see anything in there that explicitly gives the Federal Government to ban any drugs or traffic in them, or in any way regulate such traffic (beyond forbidding false advertising claims, setting standards for labeling, and the like). (Do YOU find any such power in there? If so, please point it out to us.)

So it could be argued that, by the Federal Government's own basic laws, these were NOT crimes and the "Dread Pirate" was a freedom fighter.

(I won't even get into the issue of the Anarchist claims that ANY government is necessarily illegitimate, coercively imposing its will on people who did not pre-approve this and are not attempting, themselves, to coerce others. The people who promulgated the Constitution were doing their best to get governments off people's backs.)

... and the authorities will question you.

The store doesn't need these people. Why not just fix the policies to ban them without affecting regular coupon users?

Because the coupons are legitimate offers of a reduced price on a limited number of purchases of an item. An "extreme couponer" just happens to be accepting a larger number of them than a more typical shopper.

To reject a person who uses "too many" of them (while not rejecting ALL coupon use by ALL customers) may constitute consumer fraud on the store's part and get them into serious hot water.

Isn't that just a workaround for "you can't kill people," by letting them kill themselves? I am as romantic as any nerd about space. I even spearheaded a "Get Off the Planet" campaign in college. At the time, I didn't realize the truth of the matter is, the hard cold reality is, there is no place to go, even if it was economically or physically feasable. The only "space" to rationally escape to is Earth's orbit, where its possible to be resupplied.

But the summary premise ignores the fact that there is still plenty of room, i.e. most of the Earth's hard surface is unihabited, and there is even more liquid surface and subsurface uninhabited, quite a bit more. Currently, a lot of those areas may be unihabitable, but terraforming Earth, irrigating deserts, draining swamps, that sort of thing, is going to be so much easier, so much cheaper, so much quicker, so much more successful than trying to terraform Mars or any moons of Jupiter or Saturn, where sunlight, the ultimate source of all our energy, is deficit and more deficit the further you get from the Sun.

Seriously, this is the worst planet ever, except for all the others.

Everything from your wall switches to your wires will cause you never ending problems.

Mechanical wall switches are still rated for DC. Houses USED to be wired for DC a lot. You only have to replace the stuff that was designed after AC was pervasive and wasn't engineered to handle DC.

(I forgot to mention that you'll also have to replace the light dimmers, too, along with most other electronic, rather than mechanical, switches. They usually use a current-zero-crossing turnoff device, and DC won't cross zero unless you force it to do so.)

Even if you replace your wall switches and outlets, your wires will degrade over time and develop holes and other blemishes that will cause a fire.

No they won't - unless they're wet (in which case you have bigger problems than galvanic corrosion). Electromigration at the current densities involved in house wiring is not an issue, nor is insulation breakdown. The wires and fittings will be just fine.

(DANG this stupid touchpad... )

An "inverter", by definition, actually has alternating voltage as a substantial output, or at least somewhere in the circuitry. A switching regulator has a cycling voltage, but it isn't an AC output, or even an AC intermediate.

But they're very similar.

(Also: I was going to mention, above, that the current supplied through the pull-down (or clamp-at-ground) switch is where the extra output current comes from, compensating for the lowered voltage with higher current for similar amounts of power. If the switches, inductors, capacitors, and wiring were all ideal, the driver and sensor circuitry didn't eat any power, and no energy was radiated away as radio noise, efficiency would be 100%.)

A down-stepping DC-DC converter is not an inverter?

Nope. But the pieces of the implementations are similar enough in function that it's close.

A typical DC/DC down converter involves two switches, an inductor, and both input and output filter capacitors, plus control circuitry to sense the output voltage and time the switches. (There may also be a VERY small resistor in series with the inductor to sample the output current if current regulation is necessary, but it's omitted for high efficiency if that's not an issue.) One end of the inductor is hooked to the output cap, the other through the switches to the input cap and to ground.

The pull-up switch is always active (typically a transistor). The control circuitry turns it on and the current in the inductor ramps up, charging the output capacitor at an increasing rate. After a while the pull-up switch is turned off and the pull down switch is turned on. The current through the inductor ramps down, but before it goes through a stop and reverses the pull-up switch is turned back on and the pull-down turned off. The pull-down switch may be a diode, which switches on as needed automatically, but for high efficiency it's usually another transistor, because it has a lower voltage drop and thus is more efficient.

The control circuitry varies the percent of pull-up versus pull-down time to keep the average output voltage at the desired level. The frequency may be controlled or may be allowed to vary somewhat.

So the waveform in the inductor is a sawtooth, and the current never reverses. An "inverter" by definition,

You can try tuning middle A to 480Hz, which is a harmonic of 60Hz... but in practice this does not lower the noise floor when multitracking, and sounds like poop.

(Continuing after brushing the touchpad posted it for me. B-b) ... equipment at that voltage. (Small systems are often 12V due to the availability of 12V appliances.)

But back to inverters:

Current inverter and switching regulator (they're pretty much the same stuff) technology is SO efficient that large PC boards in computing and networking equipment may run the power through as many as THREE DC-DC converters, because you lose less power to heat as losses in the inverters than you would to resistance running it a few inches through a printed circuit board power plane.

So the '"20-40% loss" number seems to me to be utterly bogus.

(Consider this: A Tesla automobile IS AC motors driven by inverters from batteries. A horsepower is almost exactly 750 watts. If they had 20-40% losses in the inverters, how do you keep the car from being on fire after a jackrabbit start? Let alone recover enough power on braking to reuse on acceleration to make a substantial difference?) If ANYBODY knows how to handle inverters it's Tesla. B-) )

This is strange. "20 to 40% power loss" seems to be an awfully poor inverter; existing inverters are 4-8 % loss.

Rather than rewire every house in America, wouldn't it make more sense to just design better inverters?

Or just run at 120V DC, as renewable energy systems did (and occasionally still do) before so many appliances were AC-only that it made sense to use an inverter.

Dropping voltage means you have to replace the copper wiring with MUCH HEAVIER wiring - by a square law - to carry a given amount of power with the same loss - and thus wiring heating inside the walls, where it can set the house of fire.

Switching to 120V just means using DC-capable appliances and replacing the breakers (DC is harder to interrupt) and must-be-GFCI outlets (normal GFCI devices use a transformer to sense unbalanced load).

The 48V standard was about having a voltage that was low enough that touching it was typically survivable, so working on or near it is (relatively) safe. The boundary between the hard part and the easy, "low-voltage", part of the electrical code is 50V (BECAUSE of phone companies B-) ). Medium power (>1KW) home Renewable Energy systems tend to be at 48V so much of the wiring falls under the easier part of the code, and because of the availability of