The EPA guidelines are in line with the level of risk: very, very little. If you want to cut your mercury exposure, don't stop using CFLs, stop eating seafood.

As for the Bridges case, you should read the Maine EPA's account. CFLs were new back then, and they had decided to use her case to learn more about what sort of advice they should give for dealing with broken bulbs. So they sent someone with a meter because they wanted to learn more, not because that's standard practice. The carpet was already intended for removal as part of a rennovation. They took readings all over the room. The only place with "high" levels was right where the bulb broke - not in the ambient air, not anywhere else on the carpet, not on the toys, not even under the carpet where it broke. I say "high" because even the levels right where it broke weren't actually high, just over Maine's long-term exposure guidelines (which is obviously not applicable to a temporary event). Moving the meter even six to eight inches away rom the breakage point dropped the levels way down. She was told that the bulb breakage was "of negligible health concern". However "the homeowner expressed particular nervousness about exposures to mercury even in low numbers", so they told her what she could do if it bothered her, one of which was calling a cleanup contractor. And of course any private cleanup contractor will charge you an utter fortune. The Maine EPA came back two days later after the story hit the news, before anything had been done in the house. The area where the bulb broke had dropped down below Maine's limit.

The case was ridiculously blown out of proportion.

Are you reading the same webpage I am? Where does that say you're supposed to bag up your bedding and pillow and toss them into the garbage - "EPA's words"? It says no such thing. It basically says open the windows for 5-10 minutes and shut off your HVAC, scoop up the fragments, use tape to get the little bits, wipe it, put all the waste in a sealed glass jar or plastic bag, and properly dispose of it. Ooooh, terrifying! And at the bottom of the page it says:

What if I can't follow all the recommended steps? or I cleaned up a CFL but didn't do it properly?

Don't be alarmed; these steps are only precautions that reflect best practices for cleaning up a broken CFL. Keep in mind that CFLs contain a very small amount of mercury -- less than 1/100th of the amount in a mercury thermometer.

Clearly you're reading that page from a bizzarro universe where it says something like "If you break a CFL and don't move out of your house and entomb it in a concrete shell then you'll get electro-cancer that will kill you and all of your descendants."

Link.

I know the guy who runs the company - they're serious about good making good products and being honest with people. Compare with the sort of chinese stuff you see cheaper on Ebay. First off, the stuff you see on Ebay usually lies about the output - they give "nominal watts" instead of actual watts, the nominal watts usually being double that of the actual. And then compare the weight - the Black Dog ones are twice as heavy. Which may not seem like a good thing, but it's because they have such a vastly larger cooling system, which means much greater expected longevity. Also Black Dog goes all out on their spectrum, they use a lot of different bands, including UV.

I'm probably one of the few people in the world using the lights legitimately, lol ;) I grow tropicals in my apartment in Iceland.

Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you - are you saying that there's something extraordinary about the concept of thermal spraying to lay down material? Perhaps you should look it up. Usually it's only used for high performance coatings, but there's no reason that with computer control you couldn't lay down whole objects, rate is (mainly) only limited by nozzle size, so you can trade off between speed and precision.

What "extraordinary claim" is being made?

What praytell is so unreasonable about discussing technological possibilities? Is this not Slashdot? If there's something ridiculous about technological speculations on something that they do not currently have the time or resources to work more on, then almost all all of modern technology was at some point ridiculous.

Why exactly do you think that 3d printers must inherently always be glorified hot glue guns? Wht is so unreasonable about the concept that there could be alternative methods to lay down material in alternative shapes?

And a home injection moulder is impossible why? Bed of pistons on one side (doesn't' need to be high res), attached to a stretchy surface (even a high temperature stretchy surface if you need one - graphite felt can tolerate most molten metals). Exact same thing on the other side. Thus they can make a mold shaped like any object. Your system can spray release agent or whatever else is needed. Hollows can be made either by inflation of an air bag inside the mold; casting and releasing an inner, re-applying release agent, then recasting; or a combination of the two. If the bed of the moulder was openable, you could use the mould as a layup for composites.

I think people's conceptions of the potential of garage/small business solid printing is way too constrained, people envisioning only half-arsed extruders. Personally I'd love to see an attempt to 3d print with thermal spraying; your material could be anything you can have as a sufficiently fine power or fibers, and you can have it impact the target at whatever temperature (cold to thousands of degree) and speed (slow to over 1000 m/s) you want, depending on the type of material, by varying the partial pressures of the fuel and air you feed into the chamber. You have the potential to print out materials that are even stronger than cast objects (high velocity compaction). You can use the same system to do finishing work (finishing the main purpose of thermal spraying today) - sanding, polishing, coating, painting, etc. It could build support structures and then later sandblast them away. The potential seems tremendous. Not super fast (although you can vary your nozzle size, bigger for greater flow rate at the cost of less precision), but still, I find the concept very interesting.

All of my lights in my apartment are either fluorescent or LED, mainly LED, yet I still consume about 2k kilowatt hours per month / 65 kWh per day / 2.7 kW average.

Hmm, I should probably mention that my brightest LED light is 570 watts (real consumption, not incandescent equivalent) and is on 24/7 ;)

Where's your controlled, statistically significant comparative study data? Or are we supposed to go on an anecdote? Because we do have lots of data - for example, here Consumer Reports talks about their testing results.

Mercury? Every bulb CF tested contained less than 5mg. Let's go with 4mg as our figure (even though some are under 2%). 17-44% of said mercury will vaporize if you leave it sitting around for 8 hours. Let's say you clean it up and 10% gets into your air, which is probably a gross overestimate. What percent of that will you breathe and have actually get incorporated into your body? Probably in the low single digits, but lets be pessimistic and say 20%. So 80 micrograms. The mercury of a mere 1 1/2 cans of tuna.

But wait, there's more. The mercury in CFLs is "inorganic" (metallic, unbound) mercury, while mercury found in food is almost exclusively "organic" (methyl and dimethyl mercury). "Organic" mercury, being much more bioavailable, has many times worse health consequences per microgram.

The short of it? Don't stand in a closet and smash dozens of CFLs and then fan them while hovering over them and breathing deeply for a day or so. Otherwise, you're fine.

Ignoring how easy a device should be to disable. Even if it's not simple to physically disconnect the device for some reason, imagine how easy it'd be to clip the antenna or shield it whatnot. No signal, no disabling. What are they going to do, send a repo man after the car? Well, then the device was useless because that's what they'd have done anyway.

Plus, given that I bet a lot of people with such devices live in bad neighborhoods, I bet there's no shortage of people in the area who could offer hotwiring services for a lot cheaper than a late car payment ;)

Or they could make it a crystal that gets implanted in poor people's hands that could change color based on their payment standing, from white to yellow to green to red and then flashing red on Lastday.

Just amazing, such an incredible two-faced attitude toward whistleblowers. Alexander Litvinenko was about as clear cut example of a whistleblower as you can get. He was an FSB officer who leaked the reports that the FSB had ordered the assassination of Boris Berezovsky. He was was arrested for his leaks, but acquitted - but the government continued going after him after his acquittal, so he fled to the UK and was granted asylum. In the UK, out of reach of the Russian government, he continued writing books and giving interviews leaking more information, including claims of the Russian government's involvement in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the Russian apartment bombings that both solidified public resolve for Russia to re-invade Chechnya and helped bring Putin to power.

And he was killed for that. By polonium. Traced straight back to a nuclear power plant in Russia via a British Airwaves jet from Moscow.

Now, let's just say that Litvinenko was just speculating wildly or BSing about everything he said about Russia. That doesn't change the fact that for whatever reason, he was asssinated by polonium traced straight back to nuclear power plant in Russia via a British Airwaves jet from Moscow.

But to you, a guy writing negative things about Putin makes him terrorist recruiter and that was justified? Seriously?

As it happens, Russia is crafting whistleblower protections right now:

Hahahaha!
Stop it, you're killing me!
All too funny.

Russia hardly even tries any more to pretend that their media isn't a bunch of scripted reports with paid actors or that they're remotely a free, fair democracy. Heck, in the last election, Chechnya had 99.59% turnout with 99.82% voting for the "Butcher of Grozny". Some precincts were apparently so eager to vote for him that they had 107% turnout. Really impressive on Putin's part! ;) It's amazing that they can still find useful idiots like you to defend them.

Except that sort -R isn't available on older versions of coreutils.

No, no, I think you simply misread his campaign literature.

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

I dunno, it seems to have worked pretty well for Putin. I mean, wake me up when Obama starts going around assassinating dissenters with polonium and forcing all popular blogs to register with national media censors.

I of course think that the US has stepped way out of bounds with a lot of stuff it's done. But I do find there's this rather curious American Exceptionalism often in play where only the US is deemed capable of moral or relevant behavior, and it's just taken as both a given and irrelevant that others take it to far worse extremes.