It's time that voters opened their mind and started voting for polymaths instead of someone they can identify with. The latter is invariably a recipe for failure. You want someone who can make informed decisions about things you don't know about, not just those you feel for and the candidate claims to agree with.

In principle, you may well be right. In practice, well, in my state that's not an option.

That's because here in my state, write-in votes are no longer tallied or counted in any way. And of course there's no way to know what people actually voted for anyway, since we were the first state in the nation to have completely non-auditable voting machines. I vote, and I even volunteer to staff a voting booth, but I am not convinced that any citizen's vote is ever really counted at all. I just do it out of pure cussedness.

if you try to search for something illegal, at least have the intelligence to do it from brand new (or stolen) computer, without any ID already entered, with just created email accounts, from any "Free" wireless spot, and once you are done, you better burn this computer.

It's traditional to use the PC on your dickweed boss or cow-orker's desk.

My boss and colleagues are excellent, so I would have to use the head of HR's computer.

Luckily there's a building master key in the computer room's DR box.

If he were genuinely interested in making the government more accessible, he would have told them to adhere to strict HTML standards without vendor extensions, and W3C accessibility guidelines, so they work with any browser, whether mobile or not, or not even existing yet, instead of tailoring it to specific clients or types of clients.

Did it occur to you that a career politician is unlikely to know any of that?

It's really good advice, though. A website that is minimally styled and standards compliant lets the endpoint device determine optimal format, which means that end users can judge the quality and personal applicability of their devices by how well they render your content. Everybody wins - except crap vendors who can't deliver a good web experience without special coding on the server side, and crap web designers who over-specify their presentation layer or drive navigation through nontextual blobs. And frankly, we want the crap vendors and designers to lose, it's part of how the web is supposed to work.

or shootsnap

I like that idea. Enslave your people, fire them when they're worn and hire new slaves. What can possibly go wrong?

Auctionem uti faciat: vendat oleum, si pretium habeat, vinum, frumentum quod supersit vendat; boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliut supersit, vendat. Patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet. -- De Agricultura, Marcus Porcius Cato, ~160 BC

"Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit." -- Hooper & Ash public domain translation.

Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.

Randall's estimated cost of buying enough solar panels to power US homes for one year (based on extrapolating from 2005 data and California usage) doesn't really address the issue I thought we were talking about, which is that the original poster thinks solar panels can't produce a useful amount of power because they take up too much space.

However, I love XKCD and welcome any chance to link to Randall's work! So good job there.

PS: Bio-generated natural gas is the fuel of the future. It's carbon-neutral, it scales with population, it's possible to create it anywhere on Earth, and we already have all the infrastructure we need to distribute and use it. It's the cheapest, safest, least-polluting option, and it doesn't require militarized central facilities or poisoning the water table.

Solar currently requires a good bit of acreage before you even begin to reap enough energy to power a single, 1 story building.

You might be interested in this infographic.

http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

As it turns out, the world is remarkably large.

Only stupid people think a device that stores useful amounts of energy can be inherently "safe". Stupid people are dangerous! If you understand that energy storage has hazards, and take steps to understand and control those hazards, you can be perfectly safe.

Lithium Ion cells can burn or explode during the charging cycle or when shorted. This is simple fact, easily verified (don't breath the smoke!).

This is not normally a problem. In your laptop, the individual cells that make up the battery pack are connected with fusible links. These are basically very thin pieces of wire, that will melt at fairly low temperatures, that are glued to each Li-Ion cell.

When you are charging your battery pack, or if you foolishly short it out, the fusible links will melt before the Li-Ion cells have reached a high enough temperature to explode or burn. This will disconnect the cells from the power supply and/or short, so the battery pack will become instantly useless (instead of becoming a grenade or campfire).

If your lithium Ion battery pack in your laptop gets worse and worse for months or years and finally just won't hold a charge, it wore out normally. If one day it's just dead, with no warning at all, well your friend the fusible link probably saved your genitalia from laptop-induced cauterization.

The basic problem with this is that fusible links are not testable. You could test 99% of every batch, but you can't test the one in your laptop, because it's a one-use device like an explosive bolt.

But computer vendors have been very good about enforcing quality control on the Li-Ion packs they buy from battery vendors. If anyone's been hurt they've apparently been paid off handsomely, "Fight Club" style, and you can only see a few videos of spontaneously combusting laptops on the Intertubes. You're very unlikely to have your own mass-market laptop ever hurt you, basically because that's bad for business.

USPS has a different problem. Greedy bureaucrats cutting costs by hiring unskilled, ignorant monkeys to ship things. Gormless politicians creating workplaces that are dehumanizing and soul-destroying. The monkeys and dispirited humans who work in such places are quite likely to accidentally drive a metal object (think, forklift prong) deep into a pallet of Lithium Ion cells... and fusible links won't stop that short. And since it takes a while for a pallet of batteries to get into full blazing inferno mode, it could go unnoticed until well after the plane is off the runway.

Cast iron bathtubs, particularly antique ones, are very desirable and command high prices if they are in good condition.

I'm refitting a bathroom in a 160+ year old house. The bathroom was originally installed in the late 1930s. The prices for original-quality parts are jaw dropping - you can easily pay $1200 for a faucet set (although I don't).

In the trades, the old stuff that has survived is incredibly high quality, for the most part. Victorian machined brass plumbing, for example, is awesome! I have replaced worn out ABS, bristol and polybutalene that was attached to 90 year old figured and threaded brass in perfect condition. PEX is nice but it will never match hand-cut victorian red brass.

Something similar is true in computing; you see old VMS and PDP systems running all over the place, because of their extreme cost effectiveness. Unix derived OSes dominate cutting edge hardware, despite Unix's age and shortcomings. It's survival of the fittest - DECnet IV was better than DECnet/OSI, so almost nobody upgraded, even though DECnet IV was not perfect.

I just wanted to say that your comment was by far the most intelligent reply to my own. And I'm totally not kidding.