You could always use a portable microwave. The cooking area is both a faraday cage AND an automatic bug destroyer.

Fuck fuck fuck. I accidentally modded this funny. Undoing now.

I believe that's argument from incredulity. It's usual form is something like, "This guy's ideas are wrong because he can't properly format a hyperlink and is therefore retarded and because of his idiocy his ideas are also wrong." While it's true the GGP can't properly format hyperlinks, that doesn't make his conclusions wrong; it just makes him either stupid, ignorant or lazy.

Generally that problem can be solved with 36 inch flexible drill bits (they exist and are awesome and not too expensive), maybe some flexible drill bit extenders (you may need the equivalent of a 100 inch drill bit), and some fishtape. Usually, you just drill down until you hit the unfinished part of your basement, or you drill over until you hit an air duct and run plenum rated through that with the fishtape.

A chocobo is a giant chicken that you can ride.

I think the formula is more like Satisfaction = 2 * Reality / ( Expectations + Hopes). Even if a product performs exactly as you expected, you won't be 100% satisfied if you hoped for better, thus Satisfaction is Reality divided by the average of your expectations and hopes.

Of course since some people like geometry more than arithmetic, maybe for them it's really Satisfaction = Reality / sqrt(Expectations*Hopes).

Ironically, I knew that and meant to put that in my asterisk as well, but submitted too quickly.

Nope, not quite right (except the part about higher voltages needing less thick wires.). How thick a wire must be to handle a given load depends mainly on amperage. Since this is a heat dissipation issue, where you put the wire also matters: in a wall means less heat dissipation than outdoor use which means a thicker gauge. Voltage means nothing. The only thing that voltage matters for is insulation. The higher the voltage, the better able electricity is at jumping gaps in the circuit, and so you need thicker insulation to prevent this. To give you an example, in my brother's car, one of his amplifiers uses 6AWG wiring, and runs at 60A at 12V. An overhead transmission line that uses 6AWG aluminum wire will typically carry 69kV with a maximum capacity of something like 300A. The reason it can use higher amps is because of the cooling effect of having the wire exposed to air and not near anything, and that we have increased safety tolerances for wires in areas where humans are likely to be present (buildings, cars, etc.). The insulation difference is massive. The car wiring's insulation is like 1mm plastic, whereas the transmission line uses literally meters of air between the wires and ceramic insulating suspenders that are several feet tall.

To give another example, let's take house wiring. If I have a 20A 120V circuit, I'll need to use 12AWG wire. If I have a 20A 208V circuit, I'll need to use 12AWG wire. If I have a 20A 240V circuit, again, I'll need to use 12AWG. Now you might be tempted to say, "But, there are three wire in the 208V and 240V circuits." But then I'll remind you that all the electricity, no matter the configuration*, flows back through the neutral.

* Yes, I know that's simplistic and 3-phase is even weirder and 208V is the potential between the hots and we don't touch the neutral with 208V, but it doesn't really affect my point, so fuck it.

If you were truly cheap you would have already replaced your incandescent bulbs with CFLs. The payback for the switch is amazingly fast. At five hours of use per day, $1 per bulb and $.09/kWh, it takes one month for the savings in electricity to pay for the new CFL, five weeks if add in the cost of the old incandescent.

This argument is bullshit. Pure bullshit. If any "Big Pharma" company invented a cure for cancer tomorrow, you can bet your ass that they'd be all over it in a heartbeat. Why? Because, then that company would forever be known as the company that cured cancer. Every new product they make would be a pot of gold. Every ad they put out would be "Muhdikard, a new treatment for erectile dysfunction, from Drugco. We cured cancer.". Every drug company on the face of the planet would kill for that kind of marketing, not to mention the money from selling the cancer cure.

Now, of course, "cure for cancer" is a worthless phrase as well, since cancer is a type of disease, and not a single disease, and therefore, it's extremely unlikely that one cure will work for more than one cancer let alone all of them.