Your passport number is a secret? No.

You do realize you have to write it on entry and exit forms, and hand it over for scanning at border crossings, right?

Sometimes, you're even required to surrender your passport to a foreign embassy for a few days so that they can wipe their noses with it before they return it to you with a visa affixed, and god knows what RFIDs or chemical tracers embedded.

Your passport number is essentially public. Get over it.

Finally, a reason to love the conservative vilification of Hollywood! (Brought to you by... Hollywood! but I digress.)

The business model for cable television relies on bundling, where a portion of your monthly cable bill goes to all those channels that you have access to but don't watch. If this bill passes (FAT CHANCE) it will utterly change what cable looks like.

Fictional example: The Dogfood Channel gets 1 cent per month for every subscriber. But because Dogfood's parent company Viacom requires any cable operator that carries MTV to also carry Dogfood, the 200 million cable subscribers with access to MTV mean a revenue stream of $2,000,000 *monthly* for Dogfood. Most of which is shared back to Viacom, which spends maybe $10,000,000 *annually* to produce the warmed-over reality advertorials on the channel. That's $14 million in profit for Viacom on just one channel.

The big TV producers have a huge incentive to invent new channels full of cheap fluff, and force cable operators to carry them.

Cable companies, by the way, will likely be in favor of this legislation, because if subscribers only pay for what they want, and the operators charge overhead on each selection, then they stand to make more money then they currently do. At any rate, a larger percentage of what subscribers pay will stay with the cable company, rather than going to access fees on all those channels they didn't want to carry in the first place because nobody watches them.

It will also make the local advertising that they sell worth more because there will be way less inventory, and the ads will reach a much more targeted demographic.

On the other hand, if I can get a la carte channel service via the cable company, why not just skip the middleman and order my channels directly from the producer, via internet streaming?

This bill will never pass, but only because it destroys the business model of a handful of big, powerful TV production companies. Consumers and cable companies would both benefit, at least in the short run.

Seen widespread manufacturing defects with LED crosswalk signals in New York City, too. The most common mode of failure is that the walk signal would stay lit when the don't walk signal turned on. Some would flicker, instead.

I just assumed the city ordered RoHS-compliant gear that ended up suffering from tin whiskers, but since they all failed in similar ways it was probably something much more banal.

Okay, but then why the hell was he still standing there?

If some guy dropped a backpack near me and walked away, I would call as much attention to it as possible and get the hell out of there.

"Hey dude! You left your backpack here!" -- and if he doesn't respond, you start telling everyone else around you. 'That guy just dropped his bag here and walked away."

I get not wanting to make waves or cause confrontation. But you ignore hinky shit at your own peril.

Yes. LEDs work just as well as CFLs. Better in some ways, because the low heat of LEDs means you can get them much closer to the plants. You can effectively surround a plant with flexible LED strips for maximum coverage. And of course they are more efficient, lumens per watt.

They are also wickedly expensive. I've grown lettuce, tomatoes, quinoa, and peppers under LED as supplemental light in a sunny window, and the setup I used was close to $150. Roughly the equivalent of 60W CFL, but running at 20W. Cost-wise, you're still better off with CFL unless heat is an issue.

CRI doesn't measure color temperature; it's an indirect measure of the fullness of the spectrum given off by the bulb.

Color temperature tells you how reddish or bluish the light is -- does it look more like incandescent light (reddish) or daylight (bluish)?

CRI tells you how well the light given off by the bulb will allow you to see a range of colors. A CRI of 100 means perfect color fidelity. A CRI of under 90 or so and you will notice that some colors don't look right, because the bulb has dark bands in its spectrum. The CRI measuring process takes color temperature into account -- both warm white and cool white bulbs can have similarly high CRI scores.

For an example of extremely poor CRI, see low pressure sodium bulbs that used to be used a security and parking lot lights. Everything illuminated by them -- cars, clothing, faces -- looks either yellow, black, or dark purple.

The judge said that the viewers were members of the public, therefore when Zediva played a DVD for a subscriber it was a "public performance". Ridiculous.

So if my apartment building (a private residence) wanted to do the same thing - shared DVD jukebox in the basement - it would be just fine. Woo hoo!

They would need bigger antennas, wouldn't they?

Though I guess they could put a boat in international waters off the coast of NYC and stream whatever signal they could pick up.

Show your work.

Fried chicken cutlet with cheese is pictured next to some stories about the Spicy With, but where do you see the sandwich described in detail? What condiments are on it? Etc.

Okay, but what's on the sandwich?

If it was truly pointless and wasteful, as an American I'm pretty sure I would have heard of it before now.

Actually, I think most health insurance companies would consider someone who is set to develop Alzheimer's in six years a pretty good risk. They are likely to be dead within 10 years. There aren't any particularly effective medications, and no expensive medical procedures associated with the disease. There is the cost of placement in a nursing home during the final stages, but that's about it.

Dang! I'd forgotten all about that -- they used to sell color TV antennas at a higher price, and with fancier packaging. And of course there was no difference between those and the "normal" rooftop antennas that everyone had been using for decades.

This explains why reception on my grandparent's TV was still poor, despite the new color antenna they put up. It was the same as the old one!

And that policy is bullshit, because that not always how the real world works. Shouldn't your mass-market social software try to appeal to the broadest range of use cases, rather than forcing a narrow view of the world?

Organizations, people, and things--collectively: entities--should be able to create both pages and profiles as they see fit. An organization or thing has just as much right to an identity as a person does, if they choose to express their identity in that way. Sometimes an organization wants to be represented as having a voice, a la the OP's info@org email address. If they send email to their followers as info@, then why can't they Google+ post to their followers in the same voice?

The classic example of this is a celebrity account. Do you really think that Jessica Simpson's profile is written by an individual? It is almost certainly a collective endeavor, and yet she gets a profile not a page.

It's their service, they can make whatever policies they want. But if they aren't liberal about identities then people are going to complain, and rightly so.

Political suicide is trying to change, on anything shorter than a generational scale, the main problem:

Cheap land plus cheap oil plus a service-oriented economy made it a no-brainer (literally!) for Americans to develop, build, and purchase homes and offices in suburbs and exurbs.

Factories need to be next to rivers and railroads; cubicle farms and big-box retail do not. Universal automobile ownership allowed us to trade the immediate problems of population density for the deferred problems of decentralization and infrastructure maintenance. Who wouldn't want to leave a crowded apartment building for a single-family home with room for a dog and a garden, all other things being equal?

Two or more generations of Americans now see the car and the suburban experience as their birthright. You're not going to change that with a tax on gas, you're just going to piss them all off and lose the next election. Better to create incentives for housing and business development that is near reliable mass transit or, better yet, doesn't require any use of transit to get between home, work, and local businesses.