I don't know if you intentionally missed the point of my post or reading comprehension is not your strong suit. Companies often offer "free" things as an incentive. "Free" heating and air conditioning so that workers are comfortable. "Free" food and beverages so that workers think they work in a great environment. "Free" shuttles so that people who don't have onsite parking don't complain as much or perhaps giving an option for people who don't want to drive. My point is not that they have "free" lunches and shuttles but rather the inequality gap that is fueling the anger and resentment of the people outside the bus toward the people inside.

There is an ever widen inequality gap in America. Gaps in wealth, income, education, access to healthcare, life expectancy, etc. Much attention has been paid to the life of the top 1% but not so much to the bottom 20%. Real incomes for them have stagnated or gone down over the last decade. The urine poor public education system gives little opportunity for upward mobility. Hunger, cold, and loss of housing are constant worries.

Meanwhile in congress, politicians want to cut social welfare programs, keep taxes on the wealthy at record low rates, give tax breaks for corporate jets, cut unemployment benefits, send the poor to fight stupid wars (how many of the Apple and Google employees have friends and family serving in the Middle East?). The list goes on and on. I am fighting the urge to blame this all on the Republicans because the Democrats don't really seem to want to fix the problem.

So the situation has devolved into this-- where the poor, disaffected, resentful masses with little hope of improving their lot see the gleaming buses give free rides to the Apple and Google employees with their free lunches. To be fair to the employees in the buses, they are probably not the really rich because they have onsite parking. First the spray cans. Next the torches, rocks and sickles. Meanwhile the politicians in Washington cry "Let them eat cake."

Two words: BIOS backdoor!

More importantly, they need to show that the massive dragnet of surveillance of all Americans was essential to find out about this.

Another thing, ironic that the US worries about other people doing things that it has already done. For example, the US created Stuxnet and is worried someone else will follow our lead. The US dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians and we are worried someone else will follow our lead.

If the government had not stepped in to save GM, how would the bond holders be doing now? I imagine that if GM were liquidated, they would have gotten a few cents on the dollar. So yes, the bond holders got a raw deal, but lots of people got a raw deal during the meltdown of 2008. As the summary points out, the bailout prevented the loss of ~1M jobs and 0.6M people losing their pensions. If the government had not stepped in, most of the rust belt would be in bankruptcy. So all in all, money well spent.

A fuel efficiency numbers on the first link were shockingly bad. I had always thought that because of the 5x difference in weight that they would get a lot higher MPGs. A lot of the numbers on there were in the 30s and 40s. Shockingly bad given they have a ~1/5th of the weight to move around as a car.

So according to the links you provide, a Prius does put a lot of motorcycles to shame.

I agree with you on the 1Hz sound being extremely unlikely to harm humans a mile away. BUT, bats flying close to the blades can die from internal injuries WITHOUT being hit by the blades-- apparently flying into the low pressure bubble just behind the turbine blade can cause blood vessels to pop in the bat's lungs.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=wind-turbines-kill-bats

Brian Schmalz has a USB controlled "bit-banging" dev board called the Bit-Whacker. It has 78 IO pins! You can pick one up for $40 at Sparkfun (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9713).

I was thinking pretty much the same. This is a computer controlled, USB RGB LED (triplet of TLAs!). You can get a Tiva Launchpad from TI preassembled with RGB LED (surprisingly bright BTW) for $13 including shipping. The 15 GBP is about $25 and 10 GBP is $16 in comparison-- I don't know if shipping included in price. Granted the Blinkstick is in a smaller form factor that plugs in directly but the Launchpad has a ARM Cortex processor, GPIO, ADC, UART, USB, etc on it which you can use for other things should you tire of the notification light thing.

Yes, if done by a computer it must be OK. Alternatively, if not OK, they should agree to a 80,000x multiplier for cost vs penalty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas was initially $1.92M for 24 songs or $80K/song which is a $1 on iTunes). Lets say IT and legal fees for a single request are $1000. So a single bogus take-down request should cost the label $80M. Sounds about right using RIAA math.

This one just can be flexed more than once-- and still function.

I don't know this for a fact but I am dubious that adaptive optics can or are used for telescopes looking down at earth. From my lay understand of adaptive optics, a "guide star" or artificial star (artificial spot in the sky lit up with a frickin laser!) is used to correct for the atmospheric disturbances. I am having a hard time thinking of what could be used as a point source when looking at the ground from space. Maybe a point light source near the area of interest?

The government's hypocrisy is being shown in all its glory. It was only a few months ago when so many politicians were supporting the widespread surveillance of Americans as an essential part of Homeland Security (tm). When the NSA's surveillance of heads of state was revealed, many (not all) politicians denounced the practice. I would argue that there is more information germane to our national interests to be gained by bugging Merkel and other heads of state than the average American citizen. Do I think we should routinely tap the communications of the heads of state of allies? No. When we have a VALID reason? OK, but the reason better be good enough that the person being spied upon would rather keep quiet about the whole affair than having to explain why he/she was under surveillance.

Sometimes there are good reasons to spy on some Americans. We have processes in place for those. But the secret and indiscriminate surveillance we have now have no place in a free and democratic society. How would Senators, supreme court justices, or even the POTUS feel about having their communications spied upon? Do they have an expectation and right of privacy that mere mortals don't?

Oblig joke: Grandpa died quietly in his sleep. Everyone else in plane was screaming.

$200 is low cost. For appropriately large values of "low."

I stand corrected. So the press releases are in machine readable format-- I take that to mean in ASCII, html, pdf or whatever. But this does not mean they are in a machine understandable format. I can understand 4 seconds to react because a person is poised to click the correct sell/buy button after reading, understanding, and then executing the order. If the press releases are in such a format that a computer can make billion dollar decisions without human intervention, then that is yet another thing that is very wrong with Wall Street.