In the US unionism as settled on "craft" or "trade" unions that are organized by specialty. The alternative is industrial unions that represent workers by industry. Before world war I industrial unions drifted more into social movements and lost ground to trade unions in the work place.

There is an interesting talk by Arther Benjamin arguing that for most students stats are for more valuable than calculus as an end point as they are more relevant to everyday life.

I guess Chris Issac will not be flying in his Mirror Suit anytime soon.

The era leading up to and during WWII generated some amazing leaps in technology. Mostly led by two people. If you really want to see an amazing computer visionary take a look at Vannevar Bush. He is the grandfather of digital computing, information theory (Shannon was his grad student), hyper text/web, nuclear bombs and so much more. Douglas Engelbart was directly inspired by Bush.

The godfather of hardware was Frederick Terman at Stanford. Steve Blank has a great talk of the founding of silicon valley and Terman role in driving innovation (hint, radar's needs created the valley). These two people did not do the heads down work, but were really the two greatest product managers in history who had the resources of a nation as their development teams. For example Bush was the champion of the Manhattan Project so pretty cool having Oppenheimer as your technical lead on a project.

Good to hear. I'm sure you can thank Tim Calland at Microsoft for that good news. Do games auto drop down to sleep mode after X minutes of in activity? How do games handle book marking (soft save)?

There fixed it for you. Congresscritters are at the federal level. Therefore it would seem that Legicritter would be the matching honorific at the state legislature level. This a California state bill. Although asking for it in other states seems to be a good idea.

Anytime energy, climate, guns, oil, taxes, nuclear, smoking, pesticides, pharmaceuticals or evolution gets mentioned you can expect to see the sock puppets come out. I would welcome a corporate flack who shows up and articulately say, "I'm VP at company X and here is what I want to tell you about our product..." Instead all we get is 3rd rate sub-contractor who just copies and paste, perhaps with bad edits, some anti-science drivel. I guess if you have a loosing argument the only choice is to give up on making your case and muddy the waters. Now that I've entered all those keywords, just watch how many sock puppets come out and respond out of context. So welcome shills, but just for kicks please list your employer this time. Any ex-shills out there?

Correct. There are several modes in the EnergyStar spec. They boil down to active play, idle (think mario tapping his toe waiting for you to wiggle the control, but you've not pressed pause. same power as active play), paused (usually close to active power levels), at the home menu (also close to active levels), background network activity and sleep. Any reasonable bit of modern electrics should be able to listen to an IR/Bluetooth signal under 1/2W. Also, game developers really need to cooperate, do some book marking and drop into sleep if the user has not been playing for a few minutes and have a quick restore capability.

The NRDC has an excellent and easy to read study on console power demand. Some x-box models average draw more than two fridges. Video consoles have long been mentioned under the EnergyStar specification , but the game industry has done an excellent jog of foot dragging such that their are zero EnergyStar consoles out there. The console makers are betting that you'll not notice that you are spending more on electricity than games every year. The heart of the problem is the lack of a real sleep mode. Until they come out with hardware that can sleep like a '90s era laptop the solution is simple, just add a smart power strip that tuns on/off associated electronics for you when you turn on/off your TV. Or you can simply enable auto sleep mode by following the instructions on the NRDC site for x-box & ps3 or turn off WC24 on the wii.

A very simple thing you can do to get the attention of the console makers is to call them and ask them how much power your particular system draws when playing and when sleeping, how this will cost you where you live, what you can do reduce the power usage, how to enable deep sleep mode and when they will come out with a reduced power model. Also let the game makers know that you want them to support auto power down.

BTW, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is really an amazing environmental group. They are just the environmental group that shows up at those deadly dull EnergyStar standards meetings and they do it with a full time electrical engineers. The NRDC engineering team is very bright and well informed. Very much worthy of your support.

Typical consumer preference is really driven by their environment, i.e., how big are their homes. Americans hate multifunction devices. The only really successful one is the clock radio. If we want more stuff we just build homes with more rooms to house it, even if it does not make our life better. Europe has smaller homes so they are more receptive. After all, its called the Swiss army knife, not the Bowie knife. Asia has the smallest homes so you see the greatest acceptance of multifunction devices. There are of course broad variation to this generalization and computers being the universal device are blurring this generality further.

What is driving Honeywell and what are their goals? Is this to shut down Nest? Is this to keep other from entering the field? Is this to scare away VCs? Is this to make their dealers/Honewell marketing dept/stockholder feel like they are "doing something" because Nest has gotten so much press? Do they really expect to win? Is winning shutting Nest or just making them make minor changes to work around the patent claims? At a big corporation a lot goes into decision like this - Much like how laws get passed with support/pressure from many sectors.

While we take dentistry for granted, an infection driven by a bad tooth used to be a common cause of death. Bad teeth are still a common driver to the ER for many uninsured. Remember Tom Hanks knocking his bad tooth out with an ice skate and a rock on the island? Not going to the dentist for your lifetime has a greater chance of killing you than a rare cancer from a few low dose x-rays. That said, it never hurts to make sure you dentist is using modern low dose digital equipment and not taking any unnecessary images.

Holy X-Ray batman. I live in a ski area!!!!! I'm a goner. Nice knowing you all.

Sexual orientation is only one example. As this sort of technology becomes more broadly available, others will use it. Complain to your senator or city official about spending on a defense program or pot holes. Do you think their staffer might look up who you contributed (or failed to contribute) to in the last campaign? You bet they do and those data bases are now all over the web just type in your neighbors name and address to see how they spent their political dollars. Did the official give you the results you wanted or just a thanks for your concern letter?

Apply for a job: Think the the hiring manager doesn't google you to see if you are "their kind of people?" Think what religious affiliation you do or do not have fails to influence if you get the job? Think your membership (or lack) in the NRA might make the difference?

As these personal information aggregaters are able to provide more and more details about your most personal and private life and these conclusions become more and more available to those who have significant impact on your life what happens if that information is wrong? How do you continue to have a private, thoughtful and reflective life if you can not even explore ideas without consequences. What happens when a "friend" of a "friend" of a "friend" gets labeled as a Nazi or a child molester? Are you now tared? How much time, fear and money will we scrubbing our e-reputation like we now have to do our credit reports for fraud and false reports? Will companies sell me their product or provide cell service if I am likely to give them a bad review? Why should it matter to an employer or the government what books I read at night?

Scarred Intellect, fair enough on all points. Hydro was taken off the the table for counting as a renewable for two reasons. 1) They wanted to encourage new renewables to be built and not just count the old renewables and at the time that meant big hydro damns. Including old hydro in the accounting would have resulted in zero new renewables. 2) At the time the rules were codified, hydro was assumed to mean big damns and a certain end to northwest salmon runs. Technology and understanding evolves and there is always room for reevaluation. That said we have also had some near/true extinctions of a number of salmon runs. Even with hatcheries, the genetic diversity of salmon is not what it should be.