I agree sir. In every house I have lived in over the past 5 years I have replaced every bulb with compact fluorescent. I have found that if I hunt down every last incandesent bulb, but not until I hunt down every last one, then I see about a ruduction by a third. This last time it was 100 dollar savings in my bill. Maybe electricity is just more expensive here. I buy whichever bulbs the local power company has a discount on. This last time in a 2500 sq foot 5 bedroom house I replace them all for about 120 dollars. So lets see I save 100 dollars a month and it cost me about 120 dollars. I am no math wiz but that is some substantial savings. Even if I don't save that much every month due to other factors.

As I said I only see that savings after getting every last one out. Places that are often missed are the porch, the garage, or the refrigerator. I have been running CF bulbs in my fridge and there are still some in the back. But this last time a bulb went out I splurged on a LED bulb for the one above the door. The funny thing is my roomate broke the glass on it but the LED's still work and now it has a very low profile.

The color on the ones I have bought recently are not very different from Irridecent once they warm up. They do take a few seconds to fully light up. So I get a more expensive ones (usually LED) for places that need light right away. The bulbs now-a-days last a long time. I usually move before I have to replace the bulbs again. Since I shop around and buy good quality bulbs on sale (usually Costco where I live) so I just leave them for the next person.

I wish I had mod points. I applaud your response. I was about to say the same thing before I saw yours. Here's my two cents.

Many of the posters seem to be painting a picture of these evil religous types witholding the goods from their employees. That would be wrong but that is not what is happening. We should all have the freedom to follow our own beliefs (as long as they are not outright hurting other people).

It could be argued that not providing birth control would hurt people but it is not a valid argument. Since other options are available and they are not asking to prohibit their employees from anything. Although they don't want anyone to get an abortion etc. They really just don't want to contribute to something they don't believe in.

It sounds innocent enough but there is a problem with allowing exceptions. It opens the door to others asking for them and abusing them. That doesn't mean we should then sacrifice some groups for the sake of the others. We just need to work out how it would work. Rather than going around shouting how the mean religous people are witholding things from their employees.

I will concede one point. The reality is that getting a job can be hard especially for relativly unskilled positions. Then you are stuck with what they are willing to provide. It is not that easy to just leave. Weather you lack the self confidence or the skills to get a better job.The job market can sometimes just be unapprochable.

There are already solutions in place. If I am a protestant working in a catholic church office as a secratary I can buy suplimental insurance or just pay for those things with what little disposible income I do have. The problem is that the new law is forcing the church to pay for the things it doesn't believe in. This is not right however you try to justify it. Remember seperation of church and state oh right only when it is convenient for tearing down religon. On a more synical note this will also kill the suplimental insurance market.

Everyone seems a little confused we are talking about two different things. The original parent said

The unproductive majority he is referring to is the welfare class and for the sake of argument could include the 1% others have referred to as well. The productive minority they were referring to in this context would be people like the working class, productive professional class, lower merchant class(the old middle class), etc. The ones that actually produce not leach off everyone else. Whether the elite and poor together are the majority might be debatable but I couldn't stand everyone misunderstanding each other any more. There, clear as mud.

Correct. It was a Democratic Republic not a pure Democracy. The important distinction is that the we have a constitution that is designed to protect us from ourselves. You will often hear people say "We are a nation of laws" They are talking about the fact that we are governed by laws rather than mob rule or dictatorship. As an example I live in California, we are effectively a democracy now and keep voting down the new marriage laws even though we otherwise seem like a progressively liberal state. So the rule of law, in other words the courts, are trying to step in and save us from ourselves.

At that point I wasn't referring to political parties at all. Maybe I should of said the principals who control them or simple the people who control them. I see how I later went on to mention right leaning or left leaning groups so that might of seem implied. Many grass roots organizations put out their own newsletter/etc so your point is well taken. But most main stream news outlets have bigger backers.

Wish I had points to mod this comment up. The fact is that newspapers always have been and always will be a means for the parties that control them to tell people what to think. Any real news, not to mention comics, puzzles, and horoscopes have always been a secondary concern meant to make the rest seem more legit and sell papers. But for some reason most people really don't get it. News outlets aren't thinking how can we report better. They are thinking how can we sell our services to more people so we can spread our message.

There's this thing called the internet, it's new. You can go to a "website" and post videos of your own debates. You may not reach all the population but you could reach a good portion of it. A Youtube account and some quality production equipment could get you "underground" debates by the 3rd party's. They could even talk about real issues. Gasp! If people care about what they debate at some point they could not be ignored. Could you imagine a write in candidate winning the presidency. You can keep claiming the system is against you or try to do something about it. As other posters have said don't play by their rules.

"Does that chart not already show it flatten out and drop a bit in the last decade?"
You're obviously doing it wrong. You have to be a climate scientist to read that chart properly. Believe the scientist don't believe what you see ignore that man behind the curtain. lol

"...one party full of fundamentalist Christians wanting to control how other people live their lives. On the other side you've got a bunch of pretend-Christians, who'll let media companies get whatever they want..."

And that's just the Democrats you never even mentioned the Republicans. All kidding aside you seem to be buying into a lot of the hype the parties here spew out. I would say it is more like The Republican party members are looking out for personal interest and the Democrats are looking out for personal interest. Then the party leadership and candidates of both parties are looking out for personal interest which just so happens to mean corporate interests since that pays best. The great experiment in the United States was to limit government so people could live their lives without harassment. What we are seeing is the inevitable failure of said experiment. The question we have to ask ourselves is was it any better than other forms of government. So when we rebuild will we keep certain aspects of it or not.

But does it run Linux...?

I like your post Dog +1 Insightful. Sorry I don't have mod points. What everyone on here seems to be missing is that the debate is not scientific it is political or perhaps sociopolitical in nature. High IQ thinkers are often frustrated by those with high social IQ's. Because their arguments make no sense to us and are almost always full of logical fallacies. Then everyone follows them. Unfortunately they still outnumber us and for various reasons likely always will. Until we perfect space travel/living in space or other planets we have to live with them. They will most likely try to follow us even then. Hopefully someone will have the foresight to set that ship on autopilot to the sun. I kid :0) all in fun.

Use Google to search for torrent files. Thanks for the heads up. :) Honestly though Torrentz have jumped the shark so to speak. Most people I know have moved on to other means of file sharing. Anytime I download a torrent file I get a nasty email from my ISP stating that I was flagged for copyright infringement by a third party.
[rant]As for the people at isoHunt I wish them well and hope they aren't treated to badly. I say that because the powers that be seem to really over react to what they were doing. I think a lot of it is that they don't understand what it is so they fear it. On the other side of the coin technicalities aside they had to know that they were doing something that was not completely legit. Should they be publicly executed hell no. Should they be put out of business perhaps. That should be determined on the merits of sharing other peoples work without monetary compensation.
We may justify downloading some things that we haven't paid the asking price for by saying I can't afford it anyway so I am not hurting them. But if it is free what motivation do we have as a society on a whole to get out there and earn the asking price so we can afford it. I really think the music industry especially shot themselves in the foot by gouging in the 90's for CD's. If they had lowered prices instead of raising them I doubt the majority of their customers would have even given file sharing a second thought. Except for the occasional sneaker net sharing it would have been something that only happened on college campuses. They could have kept customers by innovating like including collectible coins or 3d album art that could not be easily scanned. But no they raised the prices even more and then start litigating. [/rant]
I agree the fines they charge file sharers are ridiculous and I realize isoHunt is not even actually sharing the files just pointers. I think their argument is meant to point out that what they are doing is not that different from Google. Honestly if they can implicate Google then some really good lawyers are most likely going to be coming to bat. The name does not imply illegal torrents ISO's are disk images that could be anything. Many Linux distributions are legitimately available through torrent as ISO files.

No... you shouldn't get the flu shot for many reasons of which that is only one. But since you brought it up that is an excellent example of a special interest group creating a non existent problem and then selling it successfully to all the sheeple. Much like net neutrality this was created by people who don't even know how the science/technology works.

So your saying that we could use them to track a persons age. That would be fine at first. No more wondering if that special someone you pick up for the night is really of age or not. Don't worry about remembering your ID when going on a beer run. We'll all know if your eligible to be president. Until the mandatory "retirement" age is lowered to 30 and anyone not reporting for recycling is labeled a runner.

You make a very good point. I was worried that I came across a little snarky. But that wasn't my intention. They rarely include us in decisions.
As far as respecting our input we got lucky. Being easier to give them an excuse to do nothing we already spent long meetings bashing Vista to keep them away from it. The only reason we are moving to 7 so "fast" is because we made the decision while 7 was in beta. The decision was mostly based on fear of losing support for XP. Now that that is extended we are once again taking our time even though we have purchased all the licensing we need. There is also an enterprise app that has no vista/win7 support holding us up. We don't have any "production" 7 boxes. "Testing" win7 is one of the perks of being in IT.
Having said that I agree that Vista will probably be a thorn in the side of many an IT admin for years to come.

...if Win8 won't have a build-in app store ;)

Will it be cloud based? Will we "rent" a virtual session every time we boot into the cloud on our thin device? Haha! Can we access our app store from any connected terminal? Oh please oh please oh please! There were rumors that office 10 would be like this or was it office 11? I'll join you for lunch I'll be having shoe.